By: Nick Evanson Aug 21, 2007

At this year's GC Developers Conference, a tech session by Eric Reinhardt (Intel GmbH) reminded game developers of the importance of including solid multithreading work in their game engines. It doesn't take a genius to realise this - but the talk was also a good reminder for end users.

How so? Well, between all the nerd talk of synchronisation and cache issues, it was clear that creating a multithreaded engine is not a piece of cake. This means we as end users shouldn't expect all current and near-future games to get huge performance or visual advantages from multicore CPUs.

In fact, it's becoming clear that to really take advantage of dual, quad and, eventually, eight core CPUs, developers are going to have to spend a lot of time fine-tuning and tweaking their engines. This is likely to mean that such work is only going to be undertaken by either the engine behemoths, such as Epic or Id, or by development houses that have the means to spend long periods of time on such matters, such as Remedy or Valve.

Smaller, lesser known, developers may well attempt to create good multithreaded game engines, but their efforts are likely to be heavily constrained by human, time and financial resources.

Ultimately though, this is no different from any area of modern game development and in the words of Markus Mäki (big, code and tech person at Remedy): "if you can't take that leap, then you have no business being on the leading edge of game development...". It's a harsh world.

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