CPU Usage Differences after Applying Meltdown Patch at Epic Games

Megalith

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The Fortnite team at Epic has published a new announcement that offers insight into what effect the Meltdown patch could have on multiplayer gaming. Judging by the chart, the impact on CPU usage is rather significant. The company warns that “unexpected issues” may occur as its cloud services continue to be updated.

We wanted to provide a bit more context for the most recent login issues and service instability. All of our cloud services are affected by updates required to mitigate the Meltdown vulnerability. We heavily rely on cloud services to run our back-end, and we may experience further service issues due to ongoing updates.
 
This is impact on back-end. I am sure they will figure it out. I am more concern what is the impact on my gaming machine?
 
Almost twice? This is much more than I expected
Too small to be for sure but the valley and peak shown on the far right allude to it being scarier than just x2 performance hit, it looks like a non-linear impact....meaning as the load increases the performance hit increases. We go from about 18% difference in the valley to about 36% difference at the peak.
 
This is impact on back-end. I am sure they will figure it out. I am more concern what is the impact on my gaming machine?

I'm no expert, but reading through the Epic post, there was a decent explanation here:
https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/...services-stability-update?p=132713#post132713

I'm no expert, but in my caveman layman understanding it sounds like typical day to day data isn't really going to be affected at all. If you run an encrypted connection (SSH tunnel, VPN, etc), you may see some impact. The Epic servers are seeing a large impact because a server runs many multiple encrypted streams simultaneously.
 
I did the meltdown patch on my Asus GL502VMK VR laptop. I7 7700, 1060, 500 Nvme, samsung 960 1TB 850, 24 GB ram, Win 10,. I Used 3dmark Firestrike, Crystaldiskmark, and Heaven benchmarks. Performance hit was negligible not even in the 1 percent range. I then installed it on my ACER 820 Atom Z3740 win 8.1 tablet and still no noticeable difference....
 
I did the meltdown patch on my Asus GL502VMK VR laptop. I7 7700, 1060, 500 Nvme, samsung 960 1TB 850, 24 GB ram, Win 10,. I Used 3dmark Firestrike, Crystaldiskmark, and Heaven benchmarks. Performance hit was negligible not even in the 1 percent range. I then installed it on my ACER 820 Atom Z3740 win 8.1 tablet and still no noticeable difference....
GPU benchmarks aren't a good test. Multiplayer games are more likely to be affected.
 
GPU benchmarks aren't a good test. Multiplayer games are more likely to be affected.

I was wondering about this. It affects io which is basically anything that goes over the bus. Networking, USB, drives. Why are GPU lanes not affected? We know every time the kernel space swaps in the l1 cache is empty on the page tables forcing a reload. The more you swap in the kernel space the more you get hit.

So is DX bypassing the kernel with it's own io code space? You really can't poison and dump vital information from DX so this seems like a logical approach.
 
I was wondering about this. It affects io which is basically anything that goes over the bus. Networking, USB, drives. Why are GPU lanes not affected? We know every time the kernel space swaps in the l1 cache is empty on the page tables forcing a reload. The more you swap in the kernel space the more you get hit.

So is DX bypassing the kernel with it's own io code space? You really can't poison and dump vital information from DX so this seems like a logical approach.
Don't gaming GPUs do most of their work from local memory?
 
Yep this is going to hit multi player game servers hard. If your playing on a game that is instancing games with 20-100 players per instance and 1000s of players on at once... that is a metric ton of effected I/O. For a lot of smaller MMOs this is going to be possibly game shuttering bad if performance tanks hard on older servers companies simply can't justify upgrading. For the bigger companies I imagine over the next 5-6 months you will see many of them upgrading their servers to AMD.
 
Yep this is going to hit multi player game servers hard. If your playing on a game that is instancing games with 20-100 players per instance and 1000s of players on at once... that is a metric ton of effected I/O. For a lot of smaller MMOs this is going to be possibly game shuttering bad if performance tanks hard on older servers companies simply can't justify upgrading. For the bigger companies I imagine over the next 5-6 months you will see many of them upgrading their servers to AMD.

This is going to hit EVERY datacenter hard. Disaster recovery plans? Wipe your ass with them. Think you have the resources to lose a VM host? You did, but not now.

You have to understand that most of these systems are virtual. You'll take a hit at the host level (bios), at the hypervisor level (ESXi / Hyper-V) and then again at the VM OS level.

This is going to cost billions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades.
 
I wonder how long Intel knew about this "feature".


Supposedly they knew about the bug for about 6 months.

I hope the ceo gets bum raped for selling shares knowing full well intel was about to take a big hit.
 
This is going to hit EVERY datacenter hard. Disaster recovery plans? Wipe your ass with them. Think you have the resources to lose a VM host? You did, but not now.

This is going to cost billions of dollars in infrastructure upgrades.

I play a few older smaller MMOs... and I know they have been getting by with some surprising old server hardware. Star Trek online from Cryptic is one of them. They have a very clever instancing tech running the entire game on fairly low end servers. I am not sure they get enough cash flow from that game to justify building brand new EPIC... or whatever new fixed chips Intel pushes out the door. Its entirely possible games like that simply run into horrid performance issues that bleed players and lead to games shutting down. The next few months should be interesting to watch just the game side of things shake out.... of course this is going to effect a lot of smaller non game online services as well. I'm sure the big cloud providers are going to get some help from Intel in one form or another... but all the small fish are likely going to have to eat higher server costs.
 
Or just...don't install the patch right away, I mean it's not like every Tom Dick and Harry know how to do the exploit. I'm usually a few days or more behind on definitions on my PC and I have yet to have my life ruined by a hacker or virus.
 
Or just...don't install the patch right away, I mean it's not like every Tom Dick and Harry know how to do the exploit. I'm usually a few days or more behind on definitions on my PC and I have yet to have my life ruined by a hacker or virus.

Not an option for companies that would be opening themselves to suits if customer data happens to get lifted.... because they choose to not patch to save 20% on their electric bill. :)
 
I did the meltdown patch on my Asus GL502VMK VR laptop. I7 7700, 1060, 500 Nvme, samsung 960 1TB 850, 24 GB ram, Win 10,. I Used 3dmark Firestrike, Crystaldiskmark, and Heaven benchmarks. Performance hit was negligible not even in the 1 percent range. I then installed it on my ACER 820 Atom Z3740 win 8.1 tablet and still no noticeable difference....
did you install the cpu microcode ? because the OS fixe isn't enabled without it.
 
AMD is looking really good now. Get them Ryzen chips before the prices skyrocket.

1499934543_screen_shot_2017_07_12_at_13.55.11.0.jpg
 
anybody that doesn't think this was by design is deluding themselves

Why? This is literally one of the worst things that can happen to Intel at the worst time, they basically pulled down their pants and bent over for AMD.
 
So happy we literally just switched to Epyc for our personal VMs but we still have plenty of things using Intel chips. Let the exodus begin!
 
Why? This is literally one of the worst things that can happen to Intel at the worst time, they basically pulled down their pants and bent over for AMD.

Private researchers just haven't discovered the analogous AMD vulnerability yet. General purpose computing devices without backdoors are not going to be allowed.

Always one conspiracy theorist.

Funny how it is always a wild "conspiracy theory" until later proven true, at which point it somehow magically morphs into "no big deal". That which yesterday was so outlandish as to discredit anyone espousing it is somehow tomorrow not even newsworthy when demonstrated as fact...most curious.
 
GPU benchmarks aren't a good test. Multiplayer games are more likely to be affected.
I'd like to see how Pentium and Core i3's are effected. I'm willing to be more so than quad cores and higher.
 
Probably, but who is buying Pentium and i3's for IO heavy tasks?
The idea is that people say the typical consumer has nothing to worry about this, but the typical consumer buys i3's and Pentiums. Meanwhile the gaming benchmarks I've seen are with 6 core 12 threads. Bring out the Core i3's and Pentium's.
 
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