Thanks for that tidbit about the threading. I had not thought about that being the restriction at all. Sure enough looking around the net on that topic it seems as if other users have provided back feedback on physics simulations being highly serial in nature and not lending itself well to parallel computation.
I did some experiments with a simple high polygon count plane over a cube for a cloth simulation. I set Blender to operate on only on only a single core or allowed multiple cores. I can clearly see system utilization spiking due to the calculations across multiple cores happening in tandem or simply being throttled due to a single core when Blender was set to work with only 1 core.
It seems like Blender will take advantage of a multiple cores if possible (being even more efficient than a single core) (at least for cloth simulation), but it seems like in the end you can only split so much in parallel before its all simply stopped by the sheer number of calculations needed to be done serially.
I’ll have to play around with the subsurf more in future then. I remember doing it a bit and a subsurf applied before certainly looked more realistic than one after wards.
