News City of Villains, F.E.A.R. support dual core

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/08/24/city_villains_fear_dual_core/

 

Bleh, I doubt we'll see much of an advantage; games are very linear with how you conduct your actions, so until we see completely new game engines, I doubt we'll see improvements in performance.

 

So just how is this going to effect AMD 64 X2 CPU's ? All people talk about is inthell.

 

It's an Intel event that Wil is covering.

 

That, is a good point..

 

it's a mess doom3 engine (quake4) doesn't support multicore :|

 

Well, it was released over a year ago before even HDR and SM3 was introduced. ID seem to be out of sync unfortnately for them.

 

What Intel need it so secure Source Engine support, and Unreal 3.0 and they're sorted. In fact, with the latter already licensed for PlayStation 3, wouldn't that hint as possible multi-core support?

 

They may be a bit out of sync, but they also have the guarantee that peopls are going to buy it because of the fact that it is Quake 4. I had the pleasure of playing it at QuakeCon and there will be no shortage of customers there.

 

I know they say dual-core, but is it written for one or two cores only, or as many as are available (I'm obviously thinking ahead here with quad- and octa-core procs)?

Still, I genuinely hope there's an option for "leave one core unused" (or X cores for more-than-dual-core procs, x of course being one less than the total) so you can have the same effect as DC has on current games - that of letting your virus scan or Xvid encoding not slice performance down to nothing or go slow as hell because the game is hogging all the resources.

Pope - I don't see ANY new game engines being written and not supporting multi-core. Much like I wouldn't imagine developers making an engine not supporting a PPU once they're available and we've decided they didn't go the way of RAMBUS.

 

just force cpu affinity through windows, then the game has no choice but to use the only core offered to it
you have to do this to a certain extent with some crappy games to make them work properly (*cough*BF2*cough*)

will be very interesting to compare the retail DC FEAR against the demo SC FEAR

 

I'm sure there are things that could be put in seperate threads, the AI and physics spring to mind. Or even possible a different thread for each AI agent active

 

I have mentioned before here, the game currently being finished off by Bethesda Softworks, "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion" is going to make good use of a dual core processor. This is confirmed by the developers themselves. The game will be released 'during the holiday season' in 2005, my guess not long after F.E.A.R. See their website for more details.

 

Dual core optomizations can greatly increase gaming from what I have seen.

AI and Physics has the biggest boost as both are currently handled almost entirely inside the CPU. I look forward to a game that is as challanging in single player as it is in multiplayer. Imagine...a large game with lots of independent AI with no jerks and team-killers.