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I hate monster infested games
humans are much better
this is in relation to farcry
humans are much better
this is in relation to farcry
Crysis delayed again. Possible 2008 release
- Thread starter regulus
- Start date
ArmyofHarmony said:
Yes, FarCry took Monsters to the extreme, in the end I used cheats, just to play it until the end and enjoy the excellent graphics.
But in moderation, a smattering of monsters can be OK, they got the balance right in the Thief games and also SS2.
Caporegime
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Steedie said:
Yup, good job they cut through Dx9.
Last edited:
Caporegime
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Yeah we know, but i bet theres a fair amount of ppl who rushed out for a G80 just for it though.
lol
Pitspawn said:Working on CMR6 for the X360/PS3/PC, not doing Wii yet though ^_^ It was quite a privillage to be in contact with the PS3 before it was released commercially anywhere in the world. The wireless SIXAXIS controller was quite fun although I still prefer the feel of the x360's controller
To answer your question, there are still large improvements to be made. Nextgen consoles all have multiple cores and HT technology, and parallel programming is something even the most experienced game programmers are having to learn from scratch. Problems involve having to break problems into smaller tasks and most importantly staying thread safe (need to lock+unlock write privilages to resources to stop a read being corrupted by another threads write)
Right now most developers are utilising parallel processing by dedicating entire threads to whole subsystems like Physics/AI/Audio, this is quite wasteful. But with time comes experience, and so improved engineering skills
I really do feel sorry for games programmers. I have recently been reading about multi-threading and basically games just don't suit it all that well. There is only so much you can break it down and sometimes even if you can split a problem up between threads you lose any advantage through having extra code in order to determine when to split something up.
Also as said splitting sub-systems up is not a great idea as it is very coarse grained [ooo technical term] and basically is hard coded for x-number of cores. So as soon as you get your quad/oct/hex-core CPU any extra cores will be sat there doing nowt.
For the time being multi-core CPUs are only showing their usefulness in multi-tasking and also applications that suit multi-threading such as movie and image editing software.
SiriusB
SiriusB said:
Yeah and don't forget that some of the best coders in the business (Carmack) have been trying to make a good fist of multithreaded games since the last millenium. He first tried it in Quake3 which supported SMP but only gave around a 10% performance gain.
Single core processors are of course by far the most efficient (in terms of performance per potential calculations) but the problem is that other considerations are now starting to become limiting factors, such as cost/power consumption/heat production and indeed the limits of the engineering process.
Rather than having a quad-core system running around the 2.5ghz mark I'd much rather have a dual-core one running at 4ghz for gaming. I've got a nasty feeling that now the jump to Conroe has been made (very good performance even in single threaded applications), we are going to see a slowdown in the performance improvements. i.e. over the next year or two Intel will be focussing on pushing forward to quad-core as opposed to ramping up clock speeds or indeed drastically increasing cache or coming up with a more efficient architecture.
Heck one could argue that that has been happening for some time, I mean the P4 kinda ground to a halt shortly after the 3ghz barrier, and ignoring the ultra-highend (expensive) FX series AMD never really got much beyond the 2.5ghz (4000+) level. So until Conroe turned up we'd been pretty static for the previous year or two.