Why can't games use more than 4 cores?

[@bloodfilledpenis]

All Game Developers should have a system where it can automatically detect how many cores your CPU has and will utilize either 6 cores, 8 cores or even higher.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

They do, just not very effective.

Still helps to have above 4 cores, so your OS, apps, mutli-tasking has something to use.

[Omega]

Its very hard to optimize a game for multiple cores. Some games like Battlefield 4 can actually use up to 8 cores.

[Air]

There are definitely games that can use more than four cores, I believe that The Witcher 3 does.

[smallcat]

The multi-threaded applications are a difficult thing . The main thread waits the child threads to finish and etc .

[Washell]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_computing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law

TL;DR: Graphics and physics are computing jobs that can be split up really well, which is why we now have GPU's with thousands of cores.

The rest of what involves a game doesn't split up at all, and the overhead of forcing it split up rapidly approaches the same amount of work you gain by splitting it up, leading to a no-win situation.