Core blimey - they're finally all getting used!

[YG_Bot]

Cores in a CPU, that is. Yes, at long last, after two years from when the first dual core CPUs (and nearly one year for quad cores) appeared on the market, we've now got games properly using the hardware that many gamers have these days. However, we've noticed on our forums that people are stating that some of the big names, such as the recent Crysis demo, are using all of the cores "fully". Read on to find out the truth behind this and what "fully" using all of the cores actually means.


Read entire article: http://www.yougamers.com/news/13735_...l_getting_used

[Nick[FM]]

Finally! It is a shame that devs didn't have time (or resources) until now to properly support multi-core CPUs. Nice to see that some even give it a go.. :)

Cheers,

Nick

Supreme Commander has taken advantage of Dual- and Quad-Core processors from release.

I suspect a big part of deverloper support for multi-core came about as a result of having to accomodate multi-core consoles for multi-platform titles.



.......Multi.

you idiot!!! There have been dual core processors inside macs for more than six years now, not only for two years like you said.

It said dual core, not dual processor. A machine with two processors isn't the same as a machine with two cores in a single socket. You look like the idiot now.

[Drakemoor]

Originally Posted by Unregistered

you idiot!!! There have been dual core processors inside macs for more than six years now, not only for two years like you said.

6 years?

You mean the IBM powerPC stuff? news to me....

[valtterieranen]

Every game I know except Supreme Commander is so GPU limited even with a GTX that they're not even maxing out a dualcore.

Now that the developers have finally optimized for multi cores, we will start to see the ps3 come into it's own. I'm sure most developers aren't using all 16 cores effectively yet, but it won't be long before desktops have similar number of cores, and the PS3 games will start to look a lot more impressive than their xbox counterparts (I'm actually impressed that the ps3 looks as good as it does with ports that are obviously only using 4 cores)

[ajbarnes]

These results are interesting, and I would love to hear what the developers are doing specifically to utilize multiple cores. Efficient parallel programming is non-trivial, and from what I've read games aren't well-suited to multithreaded techniques (I'm specifically recalling a Carmack quote about his preference for more MHz over more cores).

I may be wrong, but we're likely seeing the benefit of the past few years of console development filtering over to the PC, which includes more effective use of multiple cores.

I'm going to try the same test under Linux with the Quake 4 client, using both pre-SMP code and a version after SMP support was added to the engine.

Neeyik, you're posts are like schoolwork assignments. How ironic. :)