Let us assume 8 core processors become mainstream. How this will transform games? More densely populated open worlds...

Let us assume 8 core processors become mainstream. How this will transform games? More densely populated open worlds? Complex scripts? Smarter AI?

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youtube.com/watch?v=LjjRdrVAHCQ
youtu.be/PKX9Bcxnd7U?t=450
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law
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Nothing
Majority of games conform to the lowest common denominators - the original PS4 and X1
They have 6 cores, 2 dedicated to the OS and background apps. quad cores will be the norm for a while. PS4 Pro is the same, scorpio is the only one with more cores, but PS4 is still the best-selling console of the two.

4 jaguar cores equal one 7770k core in terms of performance
yet you can leverage the full power of 7700k in games like gta 5, cities skylines or UEBS

It won't matter because consoles will still be using netbook-tier processors for the foreseeable future.

>More densely populated open worlds? Complex scripts? Smarter AI?
All of the above

Next gen consoles are likely to have Ryzen/Vega APUs

>They have 6 cores, 2 dedicated to the OS and background apps.

They actually have 8. A 4+4 core / 8 thread configuration with very low single thread performance requiring more thought to threading than in the past where you could just dump 2-3 threads on a high performance i5.
The Pro and the X1's SOC basically just pair the same CPU with more powerful onboard graphics hardware.

Even if as you say the PS4 disables two cores for a 3+3 (6 thread) situation, that would make a Ryzen 5 3+3 12 thread chip the ideal choice today. Which really it is anyway since its the best price/performance/longevity situation around right now. If you're buying a 4 core / 4 thread chip today you're wasting your money.

Yes but game resources must be decicated to individual cores (threads), that's why you can't boot up the original half-life and have it make full use of a 16 core Threadripper. It's up to the devs to support higher-end CPUs, but a lot of the time it's seen by publishers as more work and bugtesting with no financial return.
It's no secret that in the vast majority of cases, multiplat games sell better on consoles, which is why games are made with them in mind, and PC is often an afterthought, especially with AAA titles.

The next gen consoles are always likely to have great specs.

It's up to the engine actually, some modern engines can parallel loads quite well, frostbite for instance.

I'm not arguing that Ryzen is a good buy. I recently bought a 1600 myself. I'm just saying that they aren't necessarily going to result in games suddenly supporting more than 4 threads overnight. There have been CPUs with more than 4 threads for like a decade now, most last gen games could only use 1 or 2 cores. Now 4 is the standard, with only a handful of games starting to use more.

DF talked about that
youtube.com/watch?v=LjjRdrVAHCQ

I wouldn't be so optimistic though.

Most new engines already are. Battlefield 1 uses 8 threads for example.

DICE games are not the norm at all

First of all, as has already been stated, nothing's going to change until we get some new console hardware and then some time for the market to move over to them, so a while.
But really you're only going to be seeing the cutting edge move forward in a few games, what will be more noticeable is the average game will increase in complexity.
I'm more interested in that since the AAA market hasn't really been interesting to me for a while. I'm ashamed to say i thought at one point that the critics were being prudes when they were complaining about too much open world a couple years back but by god have i come around.

Yeah but 8 core processors have 16 threads.

8 threads is nothing new, you mean 16? IF it indeed were true, why wouldn't 7800x decimate the 7700k here?
youtu.be/PKX9Bcxnd7U?t=450

core count is independent of thread count
There's plenty of older AMD CPUs with 8 cores, 8 threads.

>The Pro and the X1's SOC basically just pair the same CPU
The PS4 Pro and the One X use a shrink of Jaguar (16nm instead of 28nm), which reduces power consumption, which allows for higher clockspeeds
But yes, they are basically the same

DICE games aren't the only ones that use Frostbite.

Not all of them. I said threads, not cores.

No, I mean 8 threads.

Plenty of games use 8 threads, we had this amount of processing power for quite a while now.

Why aren't games made in such a way that their parallelization is freely scalable? As in, a game may use 2 threads if there's 2 threads, but can scale all the way up to say 24 threads if the system has that many. Is this so difficult to do?
With the Infinity Fabric shit the hardware is already able to scale like that by just slapping more chips on a die, would be nice if the software would be able to as well.

And there are many, many, many games that do not use Frostbite.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

I hope you didn't mean to quote me because that article isn't very relevant.

It is though. You can't efficiently parallelize complex tasks such as video games

unfortunatly ryzen is the exception to software scaling. the issue in multithreading is communication. many cpus cant actually effectivly talk to each other in heavily threaded loads which can have an adverse effect actually.
take for example server clusters. that expose like hundreds of cpu cores and thousands of gigs of ram to you to do work with.
what is actually happening is that even on individual servers the workload is divied up in clusters of threads rather than taking advantage of the entire cpu it cuts up the workload onto lets say the first 4 cpus and the second 4 because those can more effectivly talk to each other and would work that load faster than having the workload spread onto the first 8 cpus.
ryzen with its infinity fabric has changed the rules a bit and has actually near linear scaling which is an impressive feat but not surprising since jim keller was responsible for ryzen.

tl:dr; cpu scaling can be detremental since cpu cores might not talk efficiently with each other, recent intel cpus and ryzen in particular changed that so we probably will see much more multi threaded or atelast adaptive software in the future.