Any good lists of current/coming multi-threaded games?

[jdoggg12]

Anyone know of any pretty definitive lists of games that currently have multi-threaded engines AND upcoming games that will be multi-threaded to take advantage of MORE THAN 2 cores?

It seems like with all the talk of "future proofing" PCs, it'd be a good idea to see what the near future has in store to take advantage of more than 2 cores. ie- the hot topic of e8400 vs q6600


Discuss

 

[IL2SturmovikPilot]

Crysis,WiC,SupCom,UT3 and Alan Wake just to name a few games.

 

[jdoggg12]

Originally posted by: IL2SturmovikPilot
Crysis,WiC,SupCom,UT3 and Alan Wake just to name a few games.

Yea, those are the ones i've seen over and over. But everyone keeps talking up the need for quad core for 'all the multithreaded games due out in the next year or so'

Thats a pretty small list to be touting the validity of taking a q6600 over a faster dual core when the majority of games due out are single threaded for at least the next year - after which it'll be time to upgrade anyway.



I'm just wanting to know if i'm missing something.

 

[IL2SturmovikPilot]

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: IL2SturmovikPilot
Crysis,WiC,SupCom,UT3 and Alan Wake just to name a few games.

Yea, those are the ones i've seen over and over. But everyone keeps talking up the need for quad core for 'all the multithreaded games due out in the next year or so'

Thats a pretty small list to be touting the validity of taking a q6600 over a faster dual core when the majority of games due out are single threaded for at least the next year - after which it'll be time to upgrade anyway.



I'm just wanting to know if i'm missing something.

I've seen plenty of that too,but i haven't looked into a whole lot of upcoming games to know much about it they're multithreaded or not (Most of the games i play and like are old-school )

 

[Modelworks]

Multi core games development is really hard.
You can do things like number crunching with multiple cpu but anything real time becomes a problem.
Intel is investing millions with developers to try to come up with solutions to fix some of the issues.

The problem is say I use core1 and have it doing main game functions, but I want to use core2 for physics.
I have to be sure that I slice up the threading on my game so that anything I send to core2 is finished quickly.
If you don't, then you get a situation where core1 is ready to update the game, but core2 hasn't finished the physics calculation, so now core1 is sitting there doing nothing waiting for core2 to finish.

So if your not careful you end up slowing down the game rather than speeding it up.

It was explained to me like having 4 cars in a race.
The cars can't see each other or talk to each other.
Your program is the control to each car.
Now you have to tell each car to speed up or slow down so that they all finish the race at exactly the same time.
Keep in mind the speed changes as they go around the track, curves, etc.
How fast they finish the race depends on how fast you can give orders to each car + how fast the cars are.

 

[jdoggg12]

I understand the difficulty in making the games, but thats not the topic at hand. I'm just wanting to see if there's any basis for these people saying that you gotta buy quad core now for gaming b/c its the inevitable NEAR (8-16months) future. The evidence for such a statement just doesn't seem to be there.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
I understand the difficulty in making the games, but thats not the topic at hand. I'm just wanting to see if there's any basis for these people saying that you gotta buy quad core now for gaming b/c its the inevitable NEAR (8-16months) future. The evidence for such a statement just doesn't seem to be there.

I really can't see it.
We have had dual cores for a long time now and the games that support them are few.
I can't see quad cores being used in gaming for quite some time.

I see lots of people that got a quad core and only use the pc for gaming or everyday stuff that doesn't make use of it. Its like adding extra monitors that you never turn on . I would tell people to spend the money on ram or a better video card instead.

It would be great if you could just write a program and poof it runs on however many cores are available and speeds up accordingly. But its a lot more complicated than that.
The more cores, the more complicated it gets to use it efficiently.

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: IL2SturmovikPilot
Crysis,WiC,SupCom,UT3 and Alan Wake just to name a few games.

Yea, those are the ones i've seen over and over. But everyone keeps talking up the need for quad core for 'all the multithreaded games due out in the next year or so'

Thats a pretty small list to be touting the validity of taking a q6600 over a faster dual core when the majority of games due out are single threaded for at least the next year - after which it'll be time to upgrade anyway.



I'm just wanting to know if i'm missing something.

That is no longer a true statement - major titles that have come out in the past year have been multithreaded, and certainly the games we see this year will be multithreaded to an even higher extent.

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6177688/p-7.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-6.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6183967/p-5.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6166198/p-6.html

You cannot play modern games on a single-core CPU at reasonable framerates.

As far as quad vs dual, that it is a harder question to answer but I think most people going dual-core this year will be disappointed a year from now that they did not buy a quad-core CPU.

In 2005 and 2006, people said the same things that you say now, I remember this kind of debate being common... faster single-core or go with a slower but dual-core X2? Just about a year later, in 2007, single-core wasn't even an option anymore for anyone serious about gaming. Who is to say it will not be the same for dual->quad? Dual-core CPUs came out in 2005 and were required to play games well by 2007, quad-cores came out in 2006..

You can say that a dual will be faster in games, but that is not really true at this point. A Q6600 @ 3.6GHz and an E8400 @ 4.0GHz are equally good for any game out there right now. But a Q6600 will be much better for anything multi-threaded that you use, and will certainly be better later this year and into next year.

 

[jdoggg12]

^ Thats not necessary true. The advantage of dual core was to put system resources on 1 core and have a 2nd core able to deal with the game. The effect of diminishing returns is much greater going from 2 to 4 than it was from 1 to 2.

As i said before, i'm looking for games designed for multithreaded functionality. Thats it. Yes, some single threaded games benefit slightly from more than 2 cores, but I doubt its by design, and the difference is negligable. As seen in the links above, the only game designed to be multithreaded is the only one showing real advantages over dual core.

 

[Modelworks]

Heres a good read on the pitfalls + bonuses of using multiple cores in gaming.
Its mostly xbox360 related, but its still 99% relevant.
Easy to follow as well.
http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~l...c14_multicoregames.pdf

 

[AstroManLuca]

Originally posted by: Extelleron
You cannot play modern games on a single-core CPU at reasonable framerates.

Probably only because Intel and AMD no longer make fast single core CPUs. If you want a single-core, you have to go to their truly bottom-of-the-barrel options. There's no such thing as a Core 2 Solo equivalent to the Q6600 or E8400. The fastest they get is 1.2 GHz. They're meant for subnotebooks.

 

[Jax Omen]

Not true, you can disable the other cores in a high-end Core 2 Duo. Modern games generally choke if you try, especially RTS and physics-heavy games.

 

[IL2SturmovikPilot]

Originally posted by: Jax Omen
Not true, you can disable the other cores in a high-end Core 2 Duo. Modern games generally choke if you try, especially RTS and physics-heavy games.

Could i do this with a E4500 on a Dell PC?

 

[shortylickens]

I moved from a slow single core to a fast dual core while playing Supreme Commander and saw absolutely no improvement.
Right now I think its all BS.

Also saw no bump in performance with Oblivion, Test Drive Unlimited, Neverwinter Nights 2, Dark Messiah, and a buttload of other heavy titles.

However, I have only played Call of Duty 4, Crysis and World In Conlfict on my new CPU, so I cant be sure if those would have run OK on the old one.

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Extelleron

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: IL2SturmovikPilot
Crysis,WiC,SupCom,UT3 and Alan Wake just to name a few games.

Yea, those are the ones i've seen over and over. But everyone keeps talking up the need for quad core for 'all the multithreaded games due out in the next year or so'

Thats a pretty small list to be touting the validity of taking a q6600 over a faster dual core when the majority of games due out are single threaded for at least the next year - after which it'll be time to upgrade anyway.



I'm just wanting to know if i'm missing something.

That is no longer a true statement - major titles that have come out in the past year have been multithreaded, and certainly the games we see this year will be multithreaded to an even higher extent.

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6177688/p-7.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-6.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6183967/p-5.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6166198/p-6.html

You cannot play modern games on a single-core CPU at reasonable framerates.

As far as quad vs dual, that it is a harder question to answer but I think most people going dual-core this year will be disappointed a year from now that they did not buy a quad-core CPU.

In 2005 and 2006, people said the same things that you say now, I remember this kind of debate being common... faster single-core or go with a slower but dual-core X2? Just about a year later, in 2007, single-core wasn't even an option anymore for anyone serious about gaming. Who is to say it will not be the same for dual->quad? Dual-core CPUs came out in 2005 and were required to play games well by 2007, quad-cores came out in 2006..

You can say that a dual will be faster in games, but that is not really true at this point. A Q6600 @ 3.6GHz and an E8400 @ 4.0GHz are equally good for any game out there right now. But a Q6600 will be much better for anything multi-threaded that you use, and will certainly be better later this year and into next year.

While that certainly may be true, its not a reason to buy a quad core now. It may be a reason to buy a motherboard that supports quad cores now though. Its generally a bad idea to buy a new technology for your PC in anticipation of a future need for it...because if and when that need finally comes around that technology will still be there, be more mature and probably be cheaper.
Back when dual cores were 250+ dollars people bought them. No games really made use of them so they didn't get a lot of benefit from them. Then their prices dropped and finally some games came out that at least sort of used them. They happened to have become cheap at that time. The guy that bought a single core picks up a cheap dual core at that point. The guy that bought the dual core early got a marginal amount of increased performance and paid a lot of money. The guy that bought a single core paid a lot less money and ended up in pretty much the same spot when all was said and done.

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
^ Thats not necessary true. The advantage of dual core was to put system resources on 1 core and have a 2nd core able to deal with the game. The effect of diminishing returns is much greater going from 2 to 4 than it was from 1 to 2.

As i said before, i'm looking for games designed for multithreaded functionality. Thats it. Yes, some single threaded games benefit slightly from more than 2 cores, but I doubt its by design, and the difference is negligable. As seen in the links above, the only game designed to be multithreaded is the only one showing real advantages over dual core.

Did you read the benchmarks I linked?

Those games are not single-threaded. They are multithreaded by design, and the difference is certainly not negligible. I don't know about you, but I don't consider the difference between a single-core CPU @ 2.4GHz and a dual-core @ 2.6GHz being 39 FPS vs 22 FPS to be negligible. In CoD4, I don't consider 26 FPS vs 60 FPS to be negligible either.

The gains that one could possibly see by having another core to run background processes are 1-2% gains, not 100% jumps in performance.

And it's not as if I am picking from a list of the supposed "select few" games that support multithreading... the games I linked to are the most popular games of 2007.

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: PingSpike

Originally posted by: Extelleron

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: IL2SturmovikPilot
Crysis,WiC,SupCom,UT3 and Alan Wake just to name a few games.

Yea, those are the ones i've seen over and over. But everyone keeps talking up the need for quad core for 'all the multithreaded games due out in the next year or so'

Thats a pretty small list to be touting the validity of taking a q6600 over a faster dual core when the majority of games due out are single threaded for at least the next year - after which it'll be time to upgrade anyway.



I'm just wanting to know if i'm missing something.

That is no longer a true statement - major titles that have come out in the past year have been multithreaded, and certainly the games we see this year will be multithreaded to an even higher extent.

http://www.gamespot.com/features/6177688/p-7.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-6.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6183967/p-5.html
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6166198/p-6.html

You cannot play modern games on a single-core CPU at reasonable framerates.

As far as quad vs dual, that it is a harder question to answer but I think most people going dual-core this year will be disappointed a year from now that they did not buy a quad-core CPU.

In 2005 and 2006, people said the same things that you say now, I remember this kind of debate being common... faster single-core or go with a slower but dual-core X2? Just about a year later, in 2007, single-core wasn't even an option anymore for anyone serious about gaming. Who is to say it will not be the same for dual->quad? Dual-core CPUs came out in 2005 and were required to play games well by 2007, quad-cores came out in 2006..

You can say that a dual will be faster in games, but that is not really true at this point. A Q6600 @ 3.6GHz and an E8400 @ 4.0GHz are equally good for any game out there right now. But a Q6600 will be much better for anything multi-threaded that you use, and will certainly be better later this year and into next year.

While that certainly may be true, its not a reason to buy a quad core now. It may be a reason to buy a motherboard that supports quad cores now though. Its generally a bad idea to buy a new technology for your PC in anticipation of a future need for it...because if and when that need finally comes around that technology will still be there, be more mature and probably be cheaper.
Back when dual cores were 250+ dollars people bought them. No games really made use of them so they didn't get a lot of benefit from them. Then their prices dropped and finally some games came out that at least sort of used them. They happened to have become cheap at that time. The guy that bought a single core picks up a cheap dual core at that point. The guy that bought the dual core early got a marginal amount of increased performance and paid a lot of money. The guy that bought a single core paid a lot less money and ended up in pretty much the same spot when all was said and done.

The problem with that argument is that the current situation is nothing like that of 2005-early 2006, when the cheapest AMD dual core cost $300 and you could get a similar single-core CPU for $150 or less.

The choice now is between a Q6600 for $225 (April) or an E8400 for around the same price which also happens to be impossible to find. So you're no longer talking about paying 2X the price, you're talking about Dual vs Quad at the SAME price.

There is no reason not to go Q6600 at this point, even if you are a gamer. The only reason to go E8400 is for power consumption, and if you are a gamer with a good video card, then you are not concerned with power consumption.

 

[andrei3333]

^ you're assuming everyone over clocks, but thats not the case

 

[jdoggg12]

Originally posted by: Extelleron

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
^ Thats not necessary true. The advantage of dual core was to put system resources on 1 core and have a 2nd core able to deal with the game. The effect of diminishing returns is much greater going from 2 to 4 than it was from 1 to 2.

As i said before, i'm looking for games designed for multithreaded functionality. Thats it. Yes, some single threaded games benefit slightly from more than 2 cores, but I doubt its by design, and the difference is negligable. As seen in the links above, the only game designed to be multithreaded is the only one showing real advantages over dual core.

Did you read the benchmarks I linked?

Those games are not single-threaded. They are multithreaded by design, and the difference is certainly not negligible. I don't know about you, but I don't consider the difference between a single-core CPU @ 2.4GHz and a dual-core @ 2.6GHz being 39 FPS vs 22 FPS to be negligible. In CoD4, I don't consider 26 FPS vs 60 FPS to be negligible either.

The gains that one could possibly see by having another core to run background processes are 1-2% gains, not 100% jumps in performance.

And it's not as if I am picking from a list of the supposed "select few" games that support multithreading... the games I linked to are the most popular games of 2007.

Once again.... i'm not talking 1 vs 2cores... i'm talking 2 vs 3+ cores. Dual grants you the ability to have a core dedicated to gaming(while the other manages system resources), single does not allow this. The same results that you just posted can be seen for single threaded apps.

 

[Modelworks]

I think I see what the problem is.
Don't confuse multitasking with multithreading.
All applications under windows are multitasking.
Run any application and unless you lock it to a single core , using affinity, it will use whatever core is available at the time.
So almost every game right now uses both cores when your playing, unless you lock it to a single core using affinity.
Whenever the game executes an instruction it will use whatever core is available at the time, switching cores as the game plays.
That does not speed up the game much though because the game is still only doing 1 task at a time.

The only time that would speed up the game is if you had other programs running.

If your comparing fps between single and dual with a non multithreaded game, make sure the single core pc does not have anything else, services also, running in the background.
Thats the only way the comparison is fair.

Also when you code for multithreading you don't get to pick core 1 for windows, core2 for my game, core 3 for physics , like you can on the xbox360.
You only get to divide your game into multiple threads, windows will decide who uses what core at that second, so your game code is changing cores every time it executes an instruction. Which is why its hard to write code for a dual core and a quad core at the same time.

If you code for 2 cores then it won't run faster on quad core, just the same as 2 cores.
If you code for 4 cores then its going to run slower on the dual core.
To use both you have to code in a system to decide how many cores there are and adapt the game.
Like I said , its a major headache for developers and the reason why developers aren't going crazy over quad core cpu.

 

[Piuc2020]

Games are not limited by CPU speed at ALL right now, even the big pubba of all, Crysis, tops out at a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo and so do most other games according to the CPU scaling tests some website published (if I find the link I'll get it) and scaling with four cores on Crysis was non very significant, only SupCom scaled favorably on quad-cores.

With the talks about offloading physics to GPUs I don't think we are going to need more than a dual core for at least 2 years, not like upgrading to one would be very expensive anyway. What we need now is faster GPUs, CPUs are plenty fast (for gaming at least).

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: Extelleron

Originally posted by: jdoggg12
^ Thats not necessary true. The advantage of dual core was to put system resources on 1 core and have a 2nd core able to deal with the game. The effect of diminishing returns is much greater going from 2 to 4 than it was from 1 to 2.

As i said before, i'm looking for games designed for multithreaded functionality. Thats it. Yes, some single threaded games benefit slightly from more than 2 cores, but I doubt its by design, and the difference is negligable. As seen in the links above, the only game designed to be multithreaded is the only one showing real advantages over dual core.

Did you read the benchmarks I linked?

Those games are not single-threaded. They are multithreaded by design, and the difference is certainly not negligible. I don't know about you, but I don't consider the difference between a single-core CPU @ 2.4GHz and a dual-core @ 2.6GHz being 39 FPS vs 22 FPS to be negligible. In CoD4, I don't consider 26 FPS vs 60 FPS to be negligible either.

The gains that one could possibly see by having another core to run background processes are 1-2% gains, not 100% jumps in performance.

And it's not as if I am picking from a list of the supposed "select few" games that support multithreading... the games I linked to are the most popular games of 2007.

Once again.... i'm not talking 1 vs 2cores... i'm talking 2 vs 3+ cores. Dual grants you the ability to have a core dedicated to gaming(while the other manages system resources), single does not allow this. The same results that you just posted can be seen for single threaded apps.

I feel like I'm talking to a wall here.

The gains that I am showing in all of those games are NOT, I repeat NOT, gains from simply having an additional core sit idle and manage background tasks while the other core concentrates on gaming. These games take advantage of multi-core CPUs to run game code. They are multithreaded. Similar results most definately cannot be seen with single-threaded applications.

A few of those games also support quad core CPUs, although the number of such games is pretty small at this point. I guarantee you that this number will increase within the next year with newer games coming out. People back in 2005 and even 2006 said the exact same things that you say now, and it turns out they were dead wrong.

As I said before, at the same price point, the choice between Quad core and dual core is extremely clear. An E8400 @ 4.0GHz has absolutely no gaming advantage over a Q6600 @ 3.6GHz at this point, meanwhile the Q6600 will be faster in everyday tasks and in some current and future games.

 

[CP5670]

As I said before, at the same price point, the choice between Quad core and dual core is extremely clear. An E8400 @ 4.0GHz has absolutely no gaming advantage over a Q6600 @ 3.6GHz at this point, meanwhile the Q6600 will be faster in everyday tasks and in some current and future games.

Although I agree that the Q6600 is better for the same price, it has no advantage either for "everyday tasks." You would have to be running a very bloated Windows install to notice any difference in browsers, email programs and so on.

Also, a game which gets improvements from one to two cores won't necessarily gain anything further by going from two to four cores. I only know of two current games (Supreme Commander and Flight Simulator X) that are supposed to get a significant boost with all four cores, and they apparently still run like crap.

 

[jdoggg12]

Originally posted by: Extelleron

As I said before, at the same price point, the choice between Quad core and dual core is extremely clear. An E8400 @ 4.0GHz has absolutely no gaming advantage over a Q6600 @ 3.6GHz at this point, meanwhile the Q6600 will be faster in everyday tasks and in some current and future games.

Orly? So you're saying that a q6600 at 3Ghz will run HL2 faster than an e8400 at 4Ghz?

BTW... i'm only using HL2 as one example of the plethora of single threaded games compared to the FEW multithreaded games. In the non multithreaded games, you're saying the q6600 will do just as well?

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: jdoggg12

Originally posted by: Extelleron

As I said before, at the same price point, the choice between Quad core and dual core is extremely clear. An E8400 @ 4.0GHz has absolutely no gaming advantage over a Q6600 @ 3.6GHz at this point, meanwhile the Q6600 will be faster in everyday tasks and in some current and future games.

Orly? So you're saying that a q6600 at 3Ghz will run HL2 faster than an e8400 at 4Ghz?

BTW... i'm only using HL2 as one example of the plethora of single threaded games compared to the FEW multithreaded games. In the non multithreaded games, you're saying the q6600 will do just as well?

A Q6600 @ 3.6GHz will run any game, even single-threaded, just as well as an E8400 @ 4GHz.

There is not a single game where a Core 2 @ 3.6GHz will bottleneck even a Quad SLI setup, much less the average single GPU that most people have. The E8400 will be faster, but you are talking about situations where the Q6600 is 100 FPS and the E8400 is 110 FPS. There is absolutely no gaming advantage to having 110 FPS vs 100 FPS.

And once again, the number of modern games that are multithreaded is not few. I've provided benchmarks showing that the most popular games of 2007 all supported at least dual-core CPUs.

I'll add yet another blockbuster to my list of multi-threaded games, World in Conflict: http://www.gamespot.com/features/6179006/p-7.html

AMD 64 4000+ @ 2.4GHz: 10 FPS
AMD FX-60 @ 2.6GHz: 23 FPS

Originally posted by: CP5670

As I said before, at the same price point, the choice between Quad core and dual core is extremely clear. An E8400 @ 4.0GHz has absolutely no gaming advantage over a Q6600 @ 3.6GHz at this point, meanwhile the Q6600 will be faster in everyday tasks and in some current and future games.

Although I agree that the Q6600 is better for the same price, it has no advantage either for "everyday tasks." You would have to be running a very bloated Windows install to notice any difference in browsers, email programs and so on.

Also, a game which gets improvements from one to two cores won't necessarily gain anything further by going from two to four cores. I only know of two current games (Supreme Commander and Flight Simulator X) that are supposed to get a significant boost with all four cores, and they apparently still run like crap.

When I said everyday tasks, I did not mean improvements in word processing and internet surfing performance both of which require no more than a single core CPU to begin with.

There are numerous non-gaming tasks that can see benefit from multi-core CPUs. If you do any video editing or rendering, then it is night and day. For anyone who runs Folding@Home, the difference is night and day. And there is a significant advantage to having 4 processing cores versus 2 when it comes to multi-tasking.