The first talk of using the ability of Quad CPU's in gaming

[SUBMAN1]

I wondered what they would use quad core for. The only problem is, CPU's are not very good for floating point math (MFLOP scores are low). They mostly like integer work. (GPU's however love floating point and generate MLOP's like there is no tomorrow!) Anyway, it seems they are going to try and dump physics on one of the third or forth cores for the new UT.

-S

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=39930

"There is a primary thread for the gameplay and a second one for rendering. On systems with more than two cores we run additional threads to speed up various calculation tasks, including physics and data decompression. So the overall performance benefits greatly from a quad-core processor."

[Bort]

IIRC the new game Alan Wake when it comes out will run physics on one of four cores. At least that's what they said in the video that they made with the tornado. I sure hope they're telling the truth! :rock:

Alan Wake Video - the tornado is near the end. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j6rR-Xv2Ro)

[SUBMAN1]

IIRC the new game Alan Wake when it comes out will run physics on one of four cores. At least that's what they said in the video that they made with the tornado. I sure hope they're telling the truth! :rock:

Alan Wake Video - the tornado is near the end. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3j6rR-Xv2Ro)

The PNW looks better than that in Autumn on a sunny day! I hope they make the sky less dreary!

-S

[tycho102]

Supreme Commander (http://images.google.com/images?q=supreme+commander&hl=en&um=1&sa=X&oi=images&ct=title&gbv=1&ei=O1xgRu6mEIvMiQG9wI28BA) is a fairly multithreaded game -- fully capable of using 4 processors. I'm not sure how *well* it's multithreaded, but I can tell a massive difference between one and two processors. It will also span monitors, so you can be an idiot with two 24" 1920x1200 monitors stacked on top of each other, and you'll either see 1920x2400 or you'll have one monitor for the game board and the other for the "mini" map.

Half-Life 2 is also multithreaded, and as far as I know, it's "finely" multithreaded. Valve broke up the physics, game, and graphics engines to allow each to utilize more than one processor at a time. Definitely a game that you can just keep throwing money at to get higher resolutions and framerates


I expect UT2007 to be finely multithreaded. The physics and grahpics look to the point where it will be absolutely required, and they're libel to make a shtload of money just selling the engine to other developers.