A pair of new articles (Thanks, edhe and Romulan!) concerning the much-touted dual-core CPUs that are on the horizon: First up, a piece on the technology and an interview with Epic Games' Tim Sweeney at Anandtech.
AnandTech: The new Unreal Engine 3 is designed for multi-threading, and will make good use of dual core CPUs available when games on the new engine come out. What parts of the game will benefit/be improved, thanks to multiprocessing? What will be the parts that will benefit the most?
Tim Sweeney: For multithreading optimizations, we're focusing on physics, animation updates, the renderer's scene traversal loop, sound updates, and content streaming.We are not attempting to multithread systems that are highly sequential and object-oriented, such as the gameplay.
Implementing a multithreaded system requires two to three times the development and testing effort of implementing a comparable non-multithreaded system, so it's vital that developers focus on self-contained systems that offer the highest effort-to-reward ratio.
The second, is a story at Gamespot Hardware that looks at the upcoming Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 that features two physical Pentium processors on a single chip.
As a bonus, the article showcases a short video of RoboHordes, an upcoming Unreal Engine 3.0 game that was announced recently. The game comes courtesy of Dave Taylor, of Naked Sky Entertainment, formerly of id Software.
AnandTech: The new Unreal Engine 3 is designed for multi-threading, and will make good use of dual core CPUs available when games on the new engine come out. What parts of the game will benefit/be improved, thanks to multiprocessing? What will be the parts that will benefit the most?
Tim Sweeney: For multithreading optimizations, we're focusing on physics, animation updates, the renderer's scene traversal loop, sound updates, and content streaming.We are not attempting to multithread systems that are highly sequential and object-oriented, such as the gameplay.
Implementing a multithreaded system requires two to three times the development and testing effort of implementing a comparable non-multithreaded system, so it's vital that developers focus on self-contained systems that offer the highest effort-to-reward ratio.
The second, is a story at Gamespot Hardware that looks at the upcoming Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 that features two physical Pentium processors on a single chip.
As a bonus, the article showcases a short video of RoboHordes, an upcoming Unreal Engine 3.0 game that was announced recently. The game comes courtesy of Dave Taylor, of Naked Sky Entertainment, formerly of id Software.
