Do you think Empire total war will use 4 cores ?
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Man of Honour
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Any reason why you think it would? I can't imagine they are optimizing games for quad core when there are still so many single and dual cores around.
Soldato
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I would hope it would detect the amount of cores you had, and off loaded some of its threads to them, you could then perhaps have more units active at once and such, you never know.
I would imagine datamonkey is correct. From a design point of view the graphical aspects of the game aren't the most important of things. They'll probably be looking at boosting the amount of units you can have, their individual animations and most importantly their AI. With multiple cores you can run through such parallel calculations much more quickly. That means more intelligent units and greater amounts of them.
'some of its threads' ?
What makes you think it would be multi-threaded? You either write a program from the ground-up to run on parallel threads (which is very difficult), or you don't. If you write it as multi-threaded you can pass differring threads to different CPUs (and you may or may not see a performance improvement by doing so - depends on the amount of communication required between threadds). If you do not, you cannot.
If you were to build a car to use two or four engines, you would have to design it as such from the ground up. You can't just lug in a second engine, drop it in the boot, and expect the car to go twice as fast.
Soldato
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Duff-Man,
In an ideal world, (i would think) they would code certain parts of the game in seperate threads, anything that was needed to be tied together in one set, things that could be split into others. I know it would be nice. but like you say, its seldom it works that way.
We have had multi core cpus around for some time now, and i know its a lot more effort programming multi-threaded apps. Cant say i speak from experiance as i am not a programmer.
Car comparison is a bit ott, i would never expect a multi threaded app to run twice as fast as a single threaded app. As a thread could be held up waiting on another thread to complete what its doing.
It has the "potential" to be faster, or allow additional content though. Ai could be written as a seperate thread, on a multi processor based machine that would see a good boost. But then it comes back to the argument of what if something is held up waiting on the "ai thread" for example to finish its routine.
Meh i dunno lol
In an ideal world, (i would think) they would code certain parts of the game in seperate threads, anything that was needed to be tied together in one set, things that could be split into others. I know it would be nice. but like you say, its seldom it works that way.
We have had multi core cpus around for some time now, and i know its a lot more effort programming multi-threaded apps. Cant say i speak from experiance as i am not a programmer.
Car comparison is a bit ott, i would never expect a multi threaded app to run twice as fast as a single threaded app. As a thread could be held up waiting on another thread to complete what its doing.
It has the "potential" to be faster, or allow additional content though. Ai could be written as a seperate thread, on a multi processor based machine that would see a good boost. But then it comes back to the argument of what if something is held up waiting on the "ai thread" for example to finish its routine.
Meh i dunno lol