Is Far Cry SMP-aware/muti-threaded?

[MichaelD]

I game on an AthlonX2 4400 system.

I just played some Far Cry; immediately upon exiting, I looked at Task Mangler.

Both the CPU graphs showed about 75% average usage, up and down (varying), etc.

I have nothing extravangant running in the background (no Folding, etc).

Does this mean that FC is SMP-aware?

 

[xtknight]

Nice find! Yes, it does, if you're running nothing else that would take up more than 1% CPU.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Many Windows programs are multi-threaded but that isn't really the same as taking advantage of (really using) dual-core.

If a program starts one thread to play sound, one to run AI, one to render then Windows can split them up across the two cores. But, there are usually choke points in a program where one of those threads is maxing out its CPU at the same time as the other CPU is lightly loaded. That's why games perform basically as if there is only one core in all of the gaming benches I've seen.

The hard job, that no one is really doing yet, is to split single tasks into two cooperating threads. This is much, much harder than one task - one thread since data sharing / shared data modification is very hard to get bug-free.

It's the hard job of 2 threads / one task that will really give a speed bump to games on dual-core, but AFAIK no games do this yet including FC.

What you might be seeing is useless extra work, like AI that recalculates a solution five times because that core has nothing better to do, or rendering 200 frames/sec on an easy part of a map when 100+ of those frames are never displayed.

 

[MichaelD]

Hmm. You bring up very interesting points, Dave.

This is all new to me. Though I had a dual Xeon gaming rig for awhile...it was never stable enough for me to get any hard results from.

You (or anyone!) wouldn't happen to know how i get FC to display FPS while I'm playing, would you?

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: DaveSimmons
Many Windows programs are multi-threaded but that isn't really the same as taking advantage of (really using) dual-core.

Yep, but if he is infact right that no other processes are taking up the CPU, then it could be doing it efficiently. Why would the second core be doing useless stuff unless it was a debugging feature?

 

[SynthDude2001]

Originally posted by: MichaelD
You (or anyone!) wouldn't happen to know how i get FC to display FPS while I'm playing, would you?

Type '\r_displayinfo 1' at the console.

 

[MichaelD]

Originally posted by: SynthDude2001

Originally posted by: MichaelD
You (or anyone!) wouldn't happen to know how i get FC to display FPS while I'm playing, would you?

Type '\r_displayinfo 1' at the console.

Oooooh! BRB.
*edit*

Heh, so much for "BRB." That worked great. This rig cost a fortune, but getting 130+ FPS @ 1024x768 with 4AA/4AF/all details maxed is freakin' great! :beer: