When is Valve's multi core patch getting released?

I think it might help minimum frame rates mostly. Im not convinced on the rest of it though sorry, maybe single figure gains and a lot of unlocked potential especially for servers which do use their CPU a lot I think

AI takes up cpu but modelling remote players doesnt imo. Its about 5kb/s of traffic you have to render.

Years ago I accidentally ran bf2 at half my cpu speed. 1ghz AMD socket A, thats about a 100 second superpi time. A fifth of what I have now on conroe.
It ran bf2 fine for a few games until I had about 6 vehicles on the screen then the fps dropped like a stone and I knew something was up.
The bf2 vehicles have about 8000 polys max so it was rendering 48k of polys max and thats when the cpu suffered, upto then it was fine.

I think the same will be mostly true of hl for now, till they find ways to use the power

Test it yourself by underclocking and seing if you notice much difference
 
lol, generally if you're gonna say how slow it is for you, you might want to mention what cpu you actually have. if you've bought a computer in the last 3 years, you'd be hard pressed to buy something below a 3Ghz p4, a 1.8ghz c2d, or a 2ghz ath 64, in the last two years, 2.5Ghz ath or a slightly slower dual core. or you save £20 buy getting some celery or crap cpu.

about 4 years ago , and a month or two, i bought a 2, or 2.2Ghz ath 64 FOUR years ago. any £40 cpu right now means you are completely and utterly NOT cpu limited in ANYTHING source. so yes, claiming its not cpu limited is perfectly valid, if you have a 4 year old + cpu and play current games and they don't work fantastically, well, you still get 50-100fps.

i'll give you a hint aswell, great players play the same at 60 and 300fps, very average, to bad players, claim its a massive advantage to have a 1ms ping, 300fps, and run 600x400 res ;)


also, that quote about 300fps at 2500x1600, that is TERRIBLE news. you have to read beyond it, a 8800gtx can not output 300fps on any current game unless its some old, useless terrible looking all options turned down engine even down at 1680x1050. if its giving out that framerate at that high a res, even with options turned way down its a massive indicator that its not going to be a massively updated and pretty engine. that or the guy was blowing smoke out his ass, or they had a ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous config file setup to disable lots of stuff, on a ai/npc less demo level to get that kind of framerate.

i don't want 300fps with my quad core, i want the same 100fps as on a single core, but vastly improved and more detailed physics, massively more impressive AI and better gameplay. 200fps i can't see does nothing for me, better gameplay is better gameplay.

lol, its just occured to me, if you have a cpu that means your cpu limited in CSS, you don't have a quad core anyway, so how on earth is this good news for anyone. if you have any, like i said maybe 2.4Ghz dualcore for stupidly cheap right now then you aren't cpu limited, and still you won't see any benifit from a quad core. people with a quad core, like me, are already completely and utterly not cpu limited, we will get the biggest advantage of everyone, and that will be slightly more spread out load, meaning slightly lower temps, yay.
 
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mrk said:
This has never been the case for Source games because ever since STEAM started distributing HD trailers for VALVE games they have always ran as fast as they look in the trailer as do the graphics look as they did in them too.
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Well, I'm convinced :rolleyes:

Min framerate improvements will be good most prob...aside from that, I agree with the single-figure framerate increases for less intensive scenes.
 
Aekeron said:
Well, I'm convinced :rolleyes:

Min framerate improvements will be good most prob...aside from that, I agree with the single-figure framerate increases for less intensive scenes.
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min framerate in most games these days come at those points where , i dunno, a nuke goes off in a cutsceney type bit and you've got mental effects going on. think like the ion cannon would drop framerate in C&C3, special effects, gpu limited. max framerate is really whats limited by cpu, if ever. IE< normal gaming the cpu can give you 250fps in low resolution, you put res up to what your gfx card can handle and your card limits you to 100fps but cpu can still handle 250fps just fine. the occasional bit in the game might get super cpu intense and drop that max down to 80 for a bit. but if its the gpu causing the 100fps limit, you can see its far more strained than the cpu is, and so is far more susceptible to being further loaded.
 
well then what are you complaining about? the games are out tomorrow and whilst we are all enjoying them at very high FPS you'll still be wondering WTF is going on because it just should not run so fast because you said so...

It's very rare for a VALVE member to state something as factual (even if in an informal interview) as hardware performance and that actually not being true.

This is VALVE, not UBISOFT for example.
 
THIS is what I'm complaining about. Because it's a clearly innacurate and/or exagerrated statement that people seem to be taking as gospel:

marmalizer said:
Here's an extract from Game Informer:-

What about people who are going multicore? Are you supporting that as well?

Walker: Yeah, if you’ve got a multicore machine, it helps a lot. As I say, the quadcore systems that we have here, their frame rates are just insane. It’s like 300 FPS at 2500 by 1900 or something like that. Those cores are just chewing up the animation systems and particles. All of our core technology systems, the engine itself is shared between TF2, Portal and Episode 2 and so on, so all the work that’s being done there is being shared across all of those products.
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Aekeron said:
THIS is what I'm complaining about. Because it's a clearly innacurate and/or exagerrated statement that people seem to be taking as gospel:
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If quad core does allow those framerates then what is there to complain about? do you not have quad core?

Nobody knows outside of a devteam what quad cores do for gaming because no game out today uses all 4 cores to palm off specific tasks - Valve do hence the comment in that interview.
 
And once again the OCUK forums decline into arguments about something that nobody aside from Devs can truly know the answer to.

Its out tomorrow, we may see 300+ fps on quad core cpus, we may not, however until it is actually RELEASED nobody can say with any real proof either way.
 
I'll happily admit fault on here if the figures are even remotely accurate.

If we're simply looking at a 10% performance increase (e.g. they're already getting 270 FPS with their 8800Ultras in SLI before the quad core tweaks) then these figures aren't anything to get excited about.

I guess I'm just used to the other forums on OCUK where people have a little more technical expertise and would find a claim of 300 FPS @ 2.5k x whatever resolution rather odd.

Whether or not anyone can know for sure exactly what they've managed to wring out of their code with the multithreading optimisations, it shouldn't take a genius to question something that goes against everything you know about how other engines work and how hardware works.

I've got dual core atm and will consider a quad core upgrade when it becomes worthwhile. I really couldn't be happier IF the claims turn out to be true...but seriously, does it not even seem a *little* circumspect to you? Even considering how CPU limited the Source engine is...

(post addressing multiple people. Split the rudeness in it equally :p)
 
That's the thing, Source is not like any other engine.

but yes, as I mentioned earlier, let's wait and see!
 
Aekeron said:
Do you want to quantify that argument?
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Well, it does seem very well designed to be able to add features and functionality without having to release and entire new engine. I take my hate off to them for that.

So when they do work on their new games, the old ones benefit too. Watching the 1Up vid of Episode 2, HL2 now looks far better, which much improved lighting.
 
Official screenshot that's been disputed:

ep2preloadxg1.jpg


My own screenshot on max settings, full AA and AF and higher resolution:

oopsic9.jpg


Pretty sad to be honest, Valve did a great job on shaders, effects, animations, and all that, but their environmental, texture and prop modelling leaves a lot to be desired. What a joke.
 
I dont know how anyone can say that its sad that the graphics aren't good on the environments or props. The engine is many many years old. In my opinion it looks amazing.

The environments are huge, so they can't have super high res textures because they want it to run good on every piece of hardware.
 
That's also probably the worst looking part in the whole of ep2, to the point where i noticed it was the disputed screenshot because i thought to myself "well after the caverns this really looks bland"

Towards the end when the sawmill blows up - probably one of the most awe inspiring gaming moments for me in years, it just looked awesome.
 
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