Multithreaded gaming coming any time soon

i know there are games that take advantage of 4 cores such as supremem and WiC but im more talking about mainstream and if there are links to any websites(current!) that know this. i have googled and only get early mid 07 talk about it

sry if this is the wrong place bu it is about pc gaming.

thanks B Madd

Yea, at least a year from now. And maybe by then Intel and AMD will actually have cpu/gpu setups thatll make have more than 2 cores worth it. My problem is, they spread it all over the net that Intel and M$ is giving 20 million for future multithreaded research to be done. Thats not even the cost of making 1 good game. What a joke this is. Good PR, poor commitment

Saw that Universe At War is optimised for multiple cores. Shouldn't be too long before we see it much more often

I noticed that when I'm running the Crysis benchmarks I never exceed 65% CPU usage. I wonder if that's because my video card is limiting?

Just to clarify, I'm using a dual core, and on my 2nd display I have speedfan running. I was watching it the entire time for CPU usage (thos benchmarks get boring) and it never went over 65%. 3dmark06 CPU test loads both cores to 100%.

I just wish my games would use all of my system. That's why we build 'em right?

i thought crysis was meant to be very well multi threaded

Well that's why we call it performance bottlenecks. In this case it is your GPU that is the bottleneck. If you would have gone over the videocard tests that have been published on the net lately you would know that Crysis does not run that well on a 3870x2, which is why the gap is a lot (35% on both cores). You didnt mention at what resolution you're playing the game but especially at higher resolutions the game takes much more kindly to Nvidia cards. I don't think there's any video card out there that would make the CPU being the bottleneck again at this time (again depending on which resolution you want to play the game) but 35% underutilization is a lot.

If you look at firebird's example you can see that crysis is doing very well in that department, utilizing both cores not higher than 65%. If Crysis would not be optimized for multi-core, then you would see a single core going much higher while the other would be utilized at a much lower percentage.

The interesting thing for me is this: will a good optimization for 2 cores also lead to a good optimization for 4 or higher? Depending on the chosen strategy it will usually lead to better performance on quad and higher as well but as long as this is not really taken care of automatically (by the compiler) you will see huge diversity in performance between games (those that understand multi core programming and those that do not).

On a related note, I wonder how much work it is to get a game written for the Cell processor (PS3, asymmetric cores) optimized for PC (intel/AMD) multi-core, which are symmetric architectures. Any thoughts on this?

All of my comments are based of a resolution of 1920x1200.

I've heard that DX10 and/or 10.1 is geared to run better on a single GPU, and that multiple GPUs usually hinder performance. Is there any validity to this? I just assumed it was because developers haven't learned all the ins and outs of it yet and just needed time to optimize.

Doesn't the O.S., in this case Vista, control the use of multiple cores to an extent? So if I have a few apps open but none have a specific affinity set, will Vista choose the core/CPU to execute on?

I've noticed that during Crysis benchies, core 1 on my system is fully utilized, while core 0 is only partially utilized. I currently do not have a tool that displays usage per core, just overall usage with graphs indicating the level per core. GPU usage is typically bouncing around 90-100% as well (both cores?).

So looking at the system from my point of view, I see 100% utilization on core1 and about 15% usage on core0. How much of this is under control of the application vs. the O.S.?

I'll have to look into this more when I get home, to look at other apps that might not be GPU bound. Very interesting though.