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#1 Is dual core worth it? (gaming-wise)
Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 7:55 am
by Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman
An interesting article I read on
TR.
[quote]There seem to have been a lot of questions lately about multiple cores and multithreaded code, and it just so happens I was answering a question for someone else recently that caused me to write a bit of background on the topic, so I thought I’d modify it a bit and post it here. (Note: I’m going to try to keep this high-level and not get too hung up in the specifics – that naturally means I’m going to be generalizing and simplifying things… perhaps oversimplifying. I know there are several of you here on TR that do this for a living and probably know as much about this topic as I do, or more; keep in mind that I’m trying to write this for an average TR reader who keeps up on the tech but might not ever have written code or know much about the details of threading, so try not to nitpick me to death ;) ).
It’s true that multiple cores can improve the responsiveness of a system: as we run more apps simultaneously and add more and more background processes (virus-checkers, audio players, chat programs, etc), having another core (or more) to offload that work can do a lot to maintain the “creamy smoothnessâ„¢â€
#2
Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 8:13 am
by Ace Pace
I'm too tired and very excited about something else so I'll be brief.
If you mean in terms of FPS? The differance is usually in the few percent range, and not worth upgrading JUST for it.
If you mean in terms of usability, YES YES YES.
I cannot state how much I rely on dual core in my day to day gaming. Good example would be TBS gaming. Or any gaming.
my setup at any moment is mail, trillian(CPU intensive at moments), foobar(music), Bit torrent, zone alarm, anti virus, Opera with dozen of tabs.
Add a game and RAM use spike, and alt tabbing between game and system is a chore.
With dual core, it's smooth, what more, if trillian suddenly decides to spike, i never notice it.
Dual core is NOT about gaming FPS, it is about usability, it's about being actully able to multitask two preformance heavy tasks at once, or being able to dedicate the computer entirely on one heavy preformance task.
#3
Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 10:05 am
by Ace Pace
Hell, read a better article, by Anandtech.
Linka
More on Alan Wake & Multi-core Gaming
We had a chance to sit down with Markus Maki and Lasse Seppanen of Remedy Entertainment, Ltd. to talk more about their upcoming psychological thriller: Alan Wake.
Alan Wake was demoed during Paul Otellini's keynote on an overclocked Core 2 Quad system running at 3.73GHz, mainly because the game itself is significantly multithreaded and could take advantage of the quad-core system. While development is still continuing on the forthcoming game, we did get some insight into exactly how Alan Wake will utilize multiple cores.
Surprisingly enough, Markus indicated that Alan Wake would pretty much not run on any single core processors, although it may be possible to run on single-core Pentium 4 processors with Hyper Threading enabled, with noticably reduced image quality/experience.
The game will actually spawn five independent threads: one for rendering, audio, streaming, physics and terrain tessellation. The rendering thread is the same as it would be in any game, simply preparing vertices and data to be sent to the GPU for rendering. The audio thread will obviously be used for all audio in the game, although Remedy indicates that it is far from a CPU intensive thread.
The streaming thread will be used to stream data off of the DVD or hard disk as well as decompress the data on the fly. Remedy's goal here is to have a completely seamless transition as you move from one area to the next in Alan Wake's 36 square mile environment, without loading screens/pauses. With Alan Wake being developed simultaneously for both the Xbox 360 and the PC, efficiency is quite high as developing for a console forces a developer to be much more focused than on a PC since you are given limited resources on a console. Markus admitted that being a PC-only developer can easily lead to laziness, and developing for the 360 has improved the efficiency of Alan Wake tremendously. With that said, Markus expects the visual and gameplay experience to be identical on the Xbox 360 and the PC when Alan Wake ships, hopefully without any in-game load screens.
The physics thread will be used to handle all of the game's physics, which is driven using Havoc's physics engine. As Alan Wake uses Havoc's engine, there is no support for AGEIA's PhysX card and thus the host CPU must handle all physics calculations. During the keynote Markus mentioned that the physics thread used an entire core by itself, later clarifying that on a normal Core 2 Quad processor approximately 80% of one core would be used by the physics thread. With 80% of a single core being used for physics alone, the dual core CPU requirement is no longer so shocking.
As a mostly outdoor game, Alan Wake features a tremendous amount of varying terrain that is generated semi-procedurally as you encounter it. The generation/tessellation of the terrain as its encountered occupies the fifth and final thread that Remedy's game spawns. If Remedy can get the game running on Pentium 4 CPUs with HT enabled, it will be with less smooth terrain tessellation (so you may see some popping of terrain) and obviously with fewer physically simulated objects.
Although we are very curious to see how development the Cell processor would run Alan Wake, given that Microsoft Game Studios is Remedy's publisher the game's Xbox 360/PC exclusivity needs no explanation. Remedy's Alan Wake team is approximately 30 strong, which is quite lean for a next-generation title, although most artwork is outsourced under the direction of Remedy. Remedy will supply specifications for the art it wants designed, and then hand it off to external art firms that will then produce it to the specs. By outsourcing the artwork, Remedy is able to focus on its development strengths and keep the overall team size down while leveraging the expertise of dedicated artists from around the world.
The demo ran extremely well on the test system, which was a Core 2 Quad running at 3.73GHz with a GeForce 7900 GTX. Markus said that it would have run just as well if the Core 2 Quad was running at its default clock speed, which we assume was 2.66GHz. The game looked even better than when we first saw it at E3 and we eagerly await its release. If Alan Wake is any indication, it won't be long before gamers start thinking about the move to dual/quad core if they haven't already.