multithreaded games

[vorador]

I want to know what games are actually multithreaded to take advantage of a dual MB.

I know the quake 3 engine is. Supposedly you can enable this in any game with the engine. Is this true?

I've also heard of unreal 2 being multithreaded.

Please feel free to share your knowledge.

 

[goloap]

Almost every program is multithreaded, as such I beleive almost all games are two. You can see this by openning the task manager under win2k/XP and going under performance and looking at the thread vs process numbers. For example I have 28 processes currently running but 382 threads. I don't know however if some games use multithreading with a particular benefit in mind. For games I beleive that the bulk of the computations is done by the GPU so you will see minor improvments with two CPUs.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies

 

[vorador]

You are correct sir!
The number of threads is indeed far greater than the number of process. I am going to compare the numbers when the system is iddle and when I am playing to see if my games use a lot of threads.
By the way, I just went from a geforce fx 5200 to a geforce4 mx to a geforce4 4200 in the past 3 weeks, so I can testify that GPUs make a dramatic difference in gameplay as well as graphics.

 

[vorador]

Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour appears to be running 3 processes and just about 9 threads, but the number keeps fluctuating a little. I still haven't tried other games. Medal of Honor will be next.

 

[goloap]

Yes a program can create many processes. In Windows a program as at least one process and one thread in that process. But the programmer can create as many threads and/or processes as he likes.

For the change in graphic card. I had the same effect when going from a radeon 7200 to a radeon 9500 pro. It tripled my 3D Mark benchmark score.

In ancient times they had no statistics so they had to fall back on lies