Multi-core gaming

First real game and test:

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwNiwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Ah, I see - you should have mentioned Quad core in the title/post.

Valve too are championing Quad core development.

I do not belive this will be the industry norm for a long time. However, it will be more succesful than 64 bit gaming.

Dual core is multi-core too...



I disagree... going higher Mhz-wise has proven to be expensive (manufacturing) and also sufficient cooling is a problem because high Mhz produces lots of excess heat.

Both Intel and AMD think now that it's best to add horsepower by using multiple cores that run at decent speed and haven't that big heat problems. So multicore tech is here to stay, and game developers have to find ways to utilize those fully or 50%-75% of the CPU power idles unused.

How do you figure that? You can't even buy a processor anymore that isn't 64 bit? All newer games that I've seen have recommended specs in the dual core region. Which is good because an absurd amount of games won't even work on multi-core processors.

But do any games (or anything at all) actually make use of the 64 bit capability?

Shadow Ops: Red Mercury (2004)

http://news.com.com/First+game+arrives+for+AMD+64-bit+chip/2100-1006_3-5376409.html

..And even Valve is making (Dec 2005) 64-bit version of its Source game engine:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/news.php?id=496

These two were found with google, and I'm sure that there are more. Wheter it requires 64-bit OS to work I don't have a clue.

I believe one of the selling points of Farcry was that it was written specifically for 64-bit systems.

64 bit will eventually come around, but there is an infrastructure issue. new OS, new drivers, etc. Multi core is the wave of the future. Infrastructure is in place, games just need to be multithreaded. Then when 64 bit comes around too, pretty nice! I thought it was great to see some real world testing. Sevral new games are natively supporting multicore and some upcoming are requiring it! By next year I think we will find most games support multicore out of the box.

I'm especially looking forward to Multicore Raytracing GFX cards and get rid of all those creepy shaders.

Game producers surely are adapting quicker to the multi-core architecture than the 64 bit architecture. I think that is what Puki meant. Obvious, because you don't have to totally re-write your code. 64 bit is not the problem though, it's the absolutely horrible hardware driver support, which makes people wait or even move back to a 32bit OS.

No, but it was the first game to receive a 64 bit patch.

And no, 64 bit support will not work unless you're running a 64 bit OS.


Agreed. I was going to run Vista in 64 bit. That stopped within a few days.

Most non-corporate Windows versions will only support a maximum of 2 logical CPUs.

So yet another thing Linux is better at than Windows. Interesting.

What's the big deal with 64-bit processors? Is floating point imprecision that big of a deal, or am I missing something crucial?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit

I still don't get it. 64-but processing will just be slower, and we're not going to need 4 gigs of ram for another ten years.

This year certain games will already run best with 2 GB of RAM and you really believe that 4GB (which you don't fully get by the way) are sufficient for another ten years?

If i remember right then depending on the architecture/manfacturer you also do get more registers and enhancements like that.

There are still no real life applications out there that actually benefit from 64 bit technology. 64 Bit Far Cry for example does NOT perform better than the 32 Bit version, this had been tested and analized by several magazines. AMD obviously had a great interest in the 64 Bit port, but that´s basically the whole truth behind it. And another well analyzed fact is that 64 bit applications usually are just fatter and actually slower than their 32 bit counterparts.

By the way, most Intel Core Duos that I see are 32 bit CPUs, so I'm not so sure whether all processors are really 64 bit today. And the truth still is: It does not matter.

Provided they are properly designed, applications benefit more from multi-processing than from 64 bit architectures. The complexity of today´s applications benefits from parallelization, not from bigger registers.

BlitzMax does not support either technology, so the discussion in this forum is purely academic, isn´t it?

I think we will see memory hikes to over 4Gb in the next five years, a couple of years ago 1Gb was a big amount of ram not thats the normal requirement, 2Gb is a big amount so logical progression will see 4Gb or more in the next few years.

I wonder if server apps count as real life apps? Anyway photoshop, video, even pathfinding can eat up a lot of memory.

No they aren't. Intels last 32-bit processor was the Prescott 5xx. Everything else is EMT64/AMD64.

The benefit of 64 bit (and larger) CPU architectures is that it makes VLIW processors plausible, improving parallelization and reducing the cost at the same time. Except on Windows probably, which is probably why Microsoft is resisting the cahange as much as they can.

Yes. Like most. :o>

Well 4GB (or rather 3.6 GB on Win32) is the Limit for a 32-bit chips addressing space.

Here's an interesting article that tries to debunk myths about Vista, and in doing so I learned something about the OS that I found ridiculous:

excerpt from myth #8:


So if you are unlucky enough to buy one of these machines it is crippled right out of the box?!? Heh, so much for Vista and multicore gaming unless you happen to have purchased the "business class" edition of Vista for your gaming rig.

> So if you are unlucky enough to buy one of these machines it is crippled right out of the box?!? Heh

I'm pretty sure that in the long run windows will loosen that restriction. Not out of the goodness of Microsoft's heart, but rather because linux and apple are still out there.

The ironic thing is that Vista is supposed to be such a great gaming platform and yet Microsoft cripples their Home editions, the version that most gamers probably assume they need for the best gaming experience. I mean, how many gamers are going to think "hey, I need the Business edition of Vista to get the most out of Supreme Commander"?

Seriously, it sounds like there's a Class Action lawsuit to somewhere in there...

The big edition costs more, simple microsoft manipulation.

My running Linux (in 32 bit because I was warned against the driver support for 64 bit) ended in a few days too.


I'm pretty sure that would probably be -2- processors (or is that cores), not one as that article claims, because past 'home user' versions of Windows supported 2. I'd be very surprised if they'd reduced that...

I'm confused why some people seem to be intentionally misreading this bit about multiple cores.

Myth Number 8 clearly states



And they link to the licensing.

So clearly ( unless I'm missing something ) it's not crippled against multi-core machines.

Why exactly don't you have to re-write your code to utilize a multi-core architecture?

To truly take advantage of a multi-core operating system, you have to leverage the concurrency features (aka threading model) extensively. A surprising number of applications don't bother. And I don't blame them. Multi-threaded applications are a lot harder to follow and debug.

On top of this, a fair number of multi-core processing systems are poorly implemented with inadequate cache on the CPU. Leveraging concurrency in those situations becomes prone to cache thrashing and actually degrades performance.

If an application is written for a more abstract programming model (such as .Net or Java), it will survive the move from 32-bit to 64-bit with little to no re-write on the part of the developer (depending upon how many times the 32-bit specific APIs are used directly within the app) To convert from a single to multi-threaded app is quite a bit more work in either case.

No, ALL Core Duos - the mobile chip - are 32 bit. Core 2 Duos are 64 bit.