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Games: sse, sse2 and dual processors

Forum CPU & Components : CPUs - Games: sse, sse2 and dual processors

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mito   05-18-2003 at 10:33:09 PM

Are there any games that have a code set designed specifically for the above mention technologies?

/\/\ito

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lhgpoobaa   05-19-2003 at 04:47:39 AM
- 0 +

The quake3 engine is dual cpu capable. But the performance gain is very minimal.

Most modern games have some sort of optimisations incorporated.
I know that Serious Sam has 3dnow and SSE enhancements.


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mito   05-19-2003 at 06:00:48 AM
- 0 +

What about Doom3?



/\/\ito

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reever2   05-19-2003 at 06:15:24 AM
- 0 +

Maybe sse and sse2 optimized, but i will doubt it will work with dual cpus, and i dont see what sort of gain you would get as doom 3 relies heavily on your videocard

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EvilHammie   05-19-2003 at 06:41:39 AM
- 0 +

*squeak*
Undoubtedly yes.

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c0d1f1ed   05-19-2003 at 01:38:25 PM
- 0 +

DirectX and OpenGL will (should) use SSE, SSE2, 3DNow!, dual processor and Hyper-Threading technology if present. Many other libraries use low-level assembly optimizations transparantly to the user and even the application programmer.

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hellodeadcat   05-19-2003 at 10:21:40 PM
- 0 +

From my understanding of it, Q3 SMP mode was really for older machines before the days of fast videocards and will probably slow it down. I have dual processors, but my board (A7M266-D) for some odd reason does not like to play quake in smp mode for more than 2 seconds without freezing. I would guess that more and more games and programs with be multithreaded in the near future because of intel's use of hyperthreading on all their newer products.

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imgod2u   05-20-2003 at 04:27:52 AM
- 0 +

Most games would not be optimized for SSE/SSE2/3DNow! or SMP. The time-to-market for games is very demanding and it's usually better to just compile without any intensive optimizations and release the game 6 months early than hire SIMD programmers and/or parallel programmers and have the game run twice as fast.

"We are Microsoft, resistance is futile." - Bill Gates, 2015.

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c0d1f1ed   05-20-2003 at 09:38:22 AM
- 0 +

I'd say this is true for many games where performance is not a terrible issue, but I wouldn't say "most" games. Lots of libraries do the SIMD optimizations for us and performance would probably be halved if they didn't. And in the game code it only takes a few days to spot the bottlenecks and optimize them. Any worthy game programmmer knows a bit of assembly.

But what the poster probably meant is, is it useful to have a dual processor with SSE2 support for gaming? My answer is no. If the game doesn't run on a single processor, it's not a good game. SSE2 is not very useful for games because it processes two double-precision floating-point numbers in parallel. SSE on the other hand processes four single-precision floating-point numbers in parallel. Since double precision is nearly never needed in games, only SSE makes a difference.

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imgod2u   05-20-2003 at 11:32:00 AM
- 0 +

As I recall, much of the pre-optimized libraries provided by Intel for their ISA extensions are for video/media applications. Not many are for 3D rendering. There may be other libraries out there, however, the usage of these are limited.

"We are Microsoft, resistance is futile." - Bill Gates, 2015.

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