• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Quad Core Usless For games (well Near Future)

not surprising at all... multi cpu/multi core is still dominantly for highend software and the gaming side is only in its infancy.
 
Looking forward to games being properly multithreaded so that they scale well the more cores you have. The game they used for the quadcore demo still isn't properly multithreaded, they basically split up the modules of the game into seperate threads. On a positive note one of the threads loads assets in the background so you don't have loading screens :)
 
Minstadave said:
The Intel Quad-Core demo of Alan Wake looked incredible, and apparently used all four cores.
Click to expand...

Yeah...and apparently Alan wake won't even run on Single core processors...and it says that since the xbox "ONLY" has 3 processors frame limits of 30fps are acceptable.
:eek:
 
Is there an proper hi def version of this Alan Wake demo? Apart from just the youtube rubish which you can hardly see :D
 
The Inquirer article author has blatently been talking to the wrong game studios. Yes folks like Valve are going to be extremely reluctant to implement multi-threading properly because they've just spent millions on writing the HL2 single-threaded engine... Pretty much all current games use the same approach of taking a single threaded engine and trying to extend it to use another thread or two. It just doesn't work and it's why they have to spend years doing testing to make sure they haven't introduced subtle threading bugs elsewhere. And ultimately what they're left with doesn't scale whenever Intel/AMD increase the core count.

Other game studios have decided to rewrite their engines from scratch to be fully scalable on multi-threaded hardware. It will be just like how some server software like say MS SQL Server increases its performance almost two-fold as soon as you plug in another CPU. It is a totally different design methodology and practice. It probably takes several months to get the basics working and to get their programmers heads in tune with the underlying complexity but once that stage has passed the development time is not going to be much different to traditional game design.

I've no idea what design this "Alan Wake" game uses but from the sounds of things it probably isn't using the traditional design ;) Which is good.
 
Last edited:
gurusan said:
Quake 4 seemed to pump out their multicore patch pretty quickly....
Click to expand...
Mr Carmack did most of the work for that already it just needed to be activated. It still isn't the proper way to do things though. It's just outsourcing a specific task to another thread. Not scalable at all.

The way a properly designed MT game works is.

1) opens 1 thread per cpu/core in the system.
2) sets up a job queue for these threads ("jobs" may be things like, render frame, calculate physics for object, process keyboard/mouse commands, handle network I/O, load texture from disk/memory etc etc - there'd probably be hundreds of different job types...)
3) jobs are queued and processed by an available worker thread (if no worker thread is available then the job remains queued until one becomes available.)
5) some jobs will require exclusivity (e.g. frame buffer job couldn't be processed until the physics and texture jobs with a <= sequence number are completed) in which case that job would block the thread until it was ready to run. It is this area specifically that most optimisation and thought is required to ensure high performance.
 
Im sure the next gen engines from the likes of Epic and Valve and others are all mentioning they will support mutliple Cores anyhow.

And the Alan Wake as we can see looks as "Real" as Reals gonna get, besides surely if a games got proper mutlicore support the more cpus the better....
 
HighlandeR said:
Im sure the next gen engines from the likes of Epic and Valve and others are all mentioning they will support mutliple Cores anyhow.

And the Alan Wake as we can see looks as "Real" as Reals gonna get, besides surely if a games got proper mutlicore support the more cpus the better....
Click to expand...

Naturally.

However, the 'next generation' engines from Valve/iD will probably not be released for a good three years - if not more - because who will want to license the Source code or the one from Doom 3 if there's something better on the horizon? Longevity is an important financial consideration for these companies which is why they design their games to run like dogs on the latest hardware at the time so that they scale very well as the technology develops. With the advent of SLi/Crossfire, gamers have access to the experiences of tomorrow's hardware today (sorry, whoever that slogan belongs to). As such, developers will take advantage of such massive rendering power and produce games that need multi GPU systems to run at half their capability. Just because they can.

As more and more cores are built into CPUs, games will get exponentially more complex with individual algorithms for weather/environment, physics, vectors, etc. until what once took three years to render on Silicon Graphics hardware becomes a real-time experience for the likes of us.

It is only a question of time but, like DX9, that time won't come for another two/three years. IMHO.
 
DX10 will make things a bit easier for the developers. The developers won't need to worry about the differences between NV and ATI hardware anymore (because of DX10's hardware abstraction layer). So they can refocus that time and effort on threading and physics.
 
mrthingyx said:
Naturally.

However, the 'next generation' engines from Valve/iD will probably not be released for a good three years - if not more - because who will want to license the Source code or the one from Doom 3 if there's something better on the horizon? Longevity is an important financial consideration for these companies which is why they design their games to run like dogs on the latest hardware at the time so that they scale very well as the technology develops. With the advent of SLi/Crossfire, gamers have access to the experiences of tomorrow's hardware today (sorry, whoever that slogan belongs to). As such, developers will take advantage of such massive rendering power and produce games that need multi GPU systems to run at half their capability. Just because they can.

As more and more cores are built into CPUs, games will get exponentially more complex with individual algorithms for weather/environment, physics, vectors, etc. until what once took three years to render on Silicon Graphics hardware becomes a real-time experience for the likes of us.

It is only a question of time but, like DX9, that time won't come for another two/three years. IMHO.
Click to expand...

You may be right - but I have a feeling that as the majority of gamers are already using dual core cpu's of somekind it will become more obvious that their hardware isnt being used to its abilities by one base engine or developer and these games wont sell in the quantities needed to make the dev teams the money.

I would agree that the majority of users may not know how or why the programs/ games dont run very well - but all it needs is posts on sites like this saying " xxxx runs like a dog" on xxx system , with enough of these posts or even just word of mouth sales will plummet

From the developers point of view its also a case of using this "lean time" when not many or any at all devs are using mroe advanced tools on released games to eactually learn the new technologies / techniques rather than waiting for initial spartan releases before starting to learn and wasting a year or two's time developing a game or engine to learn these things and potentially having a corporate name that is mud in users circles in mean time......
 
You say the "majority" of gamers have dual core CPUS I dont belive this is true.

Refering to the steam surveys its suprising to see that the majority of people are still using "older" hardware.

I have been considering getting a dual core CPU but in reality right now for me its pointless.

The minute that most games are multi threaded ill move in a heartbeat but i dont see it happening in the next gen or 2s hardware.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom