Dual/multi core games.

[snowdog]

I searched this forums and couldn't find a relevant thread with a list of games that support multithreading, so I've made one.
Post any game you know has multicore support here, even if its still being made, the game must actually utilize the 2nd core, not just be able to use dualcore without stuttering...

this list is still under construction, it may have errors, it may be edited every day, I'm trying to keep it as correct as possible, but its hard if some of the sources are only posts in another forum...

Also please Note I'm mainly looking for dualcore not quadcore support, i will try to add info about the games that most certainly do support quad core, behind their names, but the list is generally for dualcore/dual threads

Also post the ones that don't support it.

Please only post the games you are sure about....
Ill start with the ones i know for sure.
I'll try to edit the list in the 1st post as much as possible...

Category's:


1) No support for multi core. This means there is no claimed support and no benefit found from running on a dual core setup. CPU usage on a dual core PC, will top out at 50%.

2) Claimed support. This is where the game, or the game after patching, is claimed to have SMP support but yet the end result is not all that noticeable or known. Games in this category you would not buy a multi core CPU for. CPU usage might be just over 50% and up all the way to 100%, but alas the key is no real boost in FPS is noticed or the results in performance are unknown.

3) Full SMP support. Games in this category, make you want to rush out and buy an X2 or C2D CPU (or quad versions!). Games make use of at least 2 cores and the result is a significant performance increase, more as 10%.

1):


vanguard 1?
All Battlefield engines (bf2 engine supports dualcore cpu's as in works ok, without stutter, but it doesn't utilize both cores)
Any game using Unreal Engine 2.x E.g. Unreal Tournament 2k4
AOE3


2)


American McGee's Alice (2000)
Black and White 2
Call of Duty (2003)
Call of Duty 2
Call of Duty: United Offensive (2004)
City of Heroes (see wiki page)
City of Villains (see wiki page)
Company of Heroes
CS:Source soon with patch: See ''Source'' a little bit down the list
Dark age of camelot version 1.8 & onwards
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (see wiki page)
F.E.A.R. only with 1.08 patch (see bottom of this link)
Falcon 4: Allied Force (see wiki page)
Football Manager 2006 and 2007
Half Life 2 with future patch, see ''Source'' a bit down the list
Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.² (2000)
Juiced (with multithreading option enabled)
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Breakthrough (2003)
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Spearhead (2003)
Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002)
NFS:Carbon
Peter Jackson’s King Kong
Quake 5 (promised when released)
Quake III Arena (1999), see team arena links...
Quake III: Team Arena (2000) & all games on this engine, link1, link2, link 3
Rainbow Six: Vegas
Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001)
Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix (2002)
Source engined games like CS: source and Half life 2, after a patch, link ?
Star Trek: Elite Force II (2003)
Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force (2000)
Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (2002)
Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (2003)
Test Drive Unlimited
The Movies
Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3
Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland
Unreal Engine 3. E.g. Unreal Tournament 2k7
vanguard 2 :Vangauard Saga of Heros
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (2003)
World of Warcraft (see wiki page)


3)

Flight Simulator X ( MultiCore Support, only with sp1 update ! )
Supreme commander (upto 16 cores)
Alan Wake (see wiki page) (quad core support)
Crysis (quad core support) See here
Serious Sam 2 - 25% speed boost. See here
Quake 4 - 15% speed boost. See here and here

 

[snowdog]

I thought the latest F.E.A.R. patch added multithreading support.

Do you have any sources? In the tomshardware cpu benchy the singlecored score better as dualcore @ same clock in fear...




Keep em coming people, also games that dont utilize/support more than 1 core/thread, trying to get a complete list of games ...

 

[snowdog]

Have no sources, I could be quite easily talking out of my bum.

Just heard it somewhere, lol. Might have dreamed it.

You were correct, sorry but generally before i add any games i try to check sources.

Thx people and keep it up .

 

[snowdog]

Need for speed : Carbon is multithreaded

will test a few others as well

Are you sure, carbon is lagging as hell when i turn my hyper threading on, while without HT its ultra smooth pretty much maxed out....

 

[snowdog]

Keep your fake core's to yourself

Uses both core's on my desktop and laptop.

Doesnt matter if fake or not, if it keeps cpu usage at 50% it doenst use both threads...
Do you have any sources (or perhaps a pic of the single process using 100% of the cpu), for now ill put carbon on unknown...
When i google i come a lot of forums telling dualcore users to turn off 1 core for nfs most wanted and carbon...

 

[snowdog]

Any more games that do/ dont support dualcore? Come on i know there are .

 

[snowdog]

Here we are, some shots of me racing a gt3 rs in downtown, with meh new g15 using the cpu load meter

Ok, although it may be another app using rest of the cpu, ill place carbon for supported now, but personally i cant believe EA actually bothered with dualcore...

 

[snowdog]

I have checked a few times over and im 100% sure i dont have any background apps hogging any cpu time.

Seems Ea has actually got into dualcore, black&white 2 has it, and old games based on the quake 3 engine support it (due to being made to support hyperthreading at that time...), updated list...


Actually amazed how many games have the support...

 

[snowdog]

Would be nice for some proof but I got a feeling we wont see any boost with dual cores even with Alan wake and Crysis......

Crysis prolly wont need it, but crytek 2 engine is just made as advanced as it can be, in the future most pc's will be multicore, crytek are just making it futureproof.

As for alanwake, i doubt it'll work smoothly on a single core, as it was demo-ed by microsoft on a core 2 duo or quaddro @ 3.67 ghz wich prolly means it needs a lot of cpu power....

 

[snowdog]

i am very suprised to see games like "alice" in that list, i have that game, as u say 2000 game, so 7 years old and supports dual core? that must be with a new patch? (and no u dont need a powerful processor anyway, im just curious)

Various googlings say all quake III engined games support dualcore, i dont know how it is either, i know it started with support for hyper-threading, but some of these days came out before that, for those I'm not sure how it is, but on various forums people say they do.

 

[snowdog]

added 3 links in the list after q3 on wich somewhere on those pages theres a text about quake 3/q3 engine dual core support, if anyone is bothered to read. Also on the forums of a site ocuk doesnt like (starts with an H) theres a post about q3...


Damn its hard to find info about dualcore support, google really gives a lot of crap and unrelevant results...
Ill try Chacha.com .

Edit : meh search with a guide on chacha gives:
Status: 500 Internal Server Error Content-Type: text/html
500 Application error
Ahwell ill try tomorrow...

 

[snowdog]

I think there is a danger people are getting the wrong idea when people read multi core support. That does *not* mean the game will run much faster, it means the game is aware of the second core and might use it. Have a look at those benchmarks, the vast majority of games gain a mere few percent increase, thats probably more thanks to the game having the whole CPU rather than sharing it.

To my knowledge the only game to use a dual/quad cores is Supreme Commander. Everything else probably just uses it for MP3 decoding etc and gives a minimal speed up.

There are still VERY few games to use multiple cores.

EDIT: I just don't believe half the games on that list, could you put links next to each as evidence.

For wich games, half those games are based on the quake 3 engine, thus only posted links after quake 3...

If you see any game you are sure that doesn't support it post a link with evidance that it doesn't.

 

[snowdog]

How come there are games from 2000 on the list?
I am sure that they weren't designing games to use multi core CPUs in the year 2000.....

See the post after your's and my post before your post, those are games based on the quake 3 engine.

But there is another problem. Q3 isn't really dual core enabled. Carmack apparently wrote it as a test, and it was never officially supported as the performance gain could vary greatly and even hinder frame rates. It was done as a test, and Carmack concluded that it wasn't worth pursuing until the next big engine. I think some of the games based on the Q3 engine removed the option. I don't think Q3, or any games based on it should be on the list.

Surely the point here is to see which games really benefit from a dual core CPU and result in a noticable frame rate increase.

Doing a bit more research, Quake 4 got a SMP patch, and a large speedup was the result. See here: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/quake_4_dual-core_performance/default.asp

So all those sites about the quake 3 engine supporting dualcore are wrong ?
Ahwell ill update the list later today or tomorrow (too tired at the moment).

Damn when is my dualcore cpu coming in, that way i can check the games myself for cpu usage, supid mail service lol.

 

[snowdog]

No, thats just it, they are kind of correct. The trouble is, what counts is the benchmarks. As in, go from an identical single core to dual core setup, where there is no difference in the clock speed (like a A64 3800+ to a A64X2 4800+ (are those the right models?)) and you get >10% speed increase.

Quake 3 might make some use of a second core, but it doesn't seem to relaibly give much of a frame rate boost at all.

Why should you expect above 10% performance increase with dualcore on those games if they run fine on a 500mhz pentium 2 cpu , any performance increase counts imo, however now i'm confused what to do with them, as i generally add games to the list that utilize both threads, regardless of performance increase...

 

[snowdog]

How they run on a slow computer by today's standard is irrelevant. Many old games are still CPU limited with the right settings.

Surely what counts is if you are better off having a dual core CPU over a single one for that game. Otherwise what you are doing is making a list of games that work on dual core systems, which should be all games! After all, what you said in the original post was "the game must actually utilize the 2nd core". I gave the 10% figure as a rough gauge, but often you will get a slight boost anyway, and I take more than that to mean the game actually makes non-trivial use of the second core.

Utilize the 2nd core as in making total cpu usage 100% on that single app, regardless of performance, instead of limited to 50%, wich most games do is what i meant...
I'm unsure about what I'll do with it now, ill see tomorrow at the moment I'm really too tired to decide.

Could use some advice from others, what kind of dualcore utilization should there be till its considered dual core ready??
Or make a cathegory with games that utilize the 2nd core, but where the performance doesnt rise more as 5 %, or owt, and keep the green cathegory only for games where it gives a noticable boost of over 5 or 10%?

 

[snowdog]

Will update the list when i'm back from school today...

np. Caustic, i agree and ill do it that way.

Reason i made this thread is because i'm upgrading from a 3ghz p4 to a 3ghz pentium D, and wanted to see wich games might run better and couldn't find any recent and accurate lists/threads on the net about it...

 

[snowdog]

why dont u also list dual core and Quad core games separetly? (if any)

Only 2 quad core games im sure of are alan wake and supcom, and i think crysis too, but aside that thats the list for quad or more cores...


Supcom i cant find any info atm about it(dotn have time for advanced search) but im sure it supports 16 cores.

alan wake info from wikipedia:

Alan Wake was demonstrated at the Intel Developer Forum in September 2006, running on an Intel Core 2 Quad processor clocked at 3.73GHz. The demonstration took the form of a tech demo, showcasing engine features such as day/night cycle, volumetric light, weather and physics. It was revealed that the game engine is multi-threaded and able to make full use of all four cores, with separate threads for physics, graphics & sound processing and seamless streaming of world data. It is therefore likely that the Xbox 360 version will also be able to take advantage of the Xenon CPU's three cores which have a total of 6 threads.

It was also claimed that the game is unlikely to run on single-core systems, but hyper-threading enabled Pentium 4 CPUs may be able to run it with significantly reduced detail.

And for crysis :

Here is a list of confirmed information...

Crysis will run on both DX9 & DX10 as well as Windows XP and Windows Vista.
A graphics card that supports Shader Model 2 or higher is required.
CryEngine2 is estimated to scale back 2 years, and scale ahead 1.5 years.
A single 7800GTX will run the game quite well on fairly high settings according to Crysis Art Director, Michael Khaimzon.
Jack Mamais of Crytek said in an exclusive Crysis-Online interview that his X1900XT runs the game very well at reasonably high settings ( still unoptmized ).
Crysis will dynamically utilize all processing threads available. Meaning quad-core processors will be supported.
The following specs are estimates made by myself based on the above mentioned information and other sources. These estimates are NOT official - but are based on official information.

From crysis-online page....

 

[snowdog]

No support:
Call of Duty 2 - See http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cp...pu-games_7.html

Btw caustic, cod2 has claimed support for dualcore: its based on the quake 3 engine and more than 1 forums say it has dualcore supp...

 

[snowdog]

Link?

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/call_of_duty_2_dual-core/

Now Infinity Ward is getting in on the game too, releasing their dual core patch for Call of Duty 2 merely 10 days after id on Dec 22nd. Like the Quake 4 patch, the Call of Duty 2 patch promises performance improvements for users with dual-core processors, multiple processor systems, and Pentium 4 processors with Hyper-Threading Technology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_III_engine

Games using the Quake III Arena engine
...
Call of Duty (2003) — Infinity Ward
Call of Duty: United Offensive (2004) — Gray Matter Interactive
Call of Duty 2 (2005) — Infinity Ward
...

EDIT: Found it!

lol, too late

 

[snowdog]

quake 4 boost from 90 to 128 fps:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=457&model2=439&chart=166

looks like no quad core support though, only dual...

Sorry for posting this like per post but i gtg in 5 mins and wont be back till in 2 hrs, thus dont have time to edit my 1st post...