Multithreaded gaming...

[homercles337]

Now that we all have multicores, when are multithreaded games going to arrive? I ask because Bioshock has a recommendation of dual core. However, it only uses one core on my X2. What are the games that will truly use multicore? Are they here yet? If not, when?

 

[Acanthus]

Supreme Commander and Civilization 4 both use 4 cores.

Many games support at least 2 cores.

Also many games utilize at least 2 cores through optimzations in Nvidia and ATi drivers.

 

[schneiderguy]

Originally posted by: homercles337
Now that we all have multicores, when are multithreaded games going to arrive? I ask because Bioshock has a recommendation of dual core. However, it only uses one core on my X2. What are the games that will truly use multicore? Are they here yet? If not, when?

Bioshock uses both of my cores, it gets to around 70-80% usage on both

Medal of honor Airborne maxes out both cores on my x2 3800+

Prey and Quake 4 are both multithreaded and get a large framerate increase with a dual core processor.

 

[homercles337]

Originally posted by: schneiderguy

Originally posted by: homercles337
Now that we all have multicores, when are multithreaded games going to arrive? I ask because Bioshock has a recommendation of dual core. However, it only uses one core on my X2. What are the games that will truly use multicore? Are they here yet? If not, when?

Bioshock uses both of my cores, it gets to around 70-80% usage on both

Medal of honor Airborne maxes out both cores on my x2 3800+

Prey and Quake 4 are both multithreaded and get a large framerate increase with a dual core processor.

Bioshock maxes just one of my cores. X2 4400. Hence the question. I never got into MoH, i was too burned out on WWII shooters. Maybe i will try the prey demo (assuming there is one).

 

[NoSoup4You]

Oblivion benefits nicely from a dual core.

 

[Piuc2020]

Homercles did you apply the amd dual core timing fix? (its included in the bioshock dvd)

Bioshock should be a dual core optimized game considering its primarily a 360 game and the 360 has 3 cores.

 

[rstrohkirch]

70-80% on bioshock
Like noted above, you have an issue if bioshock isn't using both of your cores

 

[gorobei]

dont you have to set #of core affinity in the shortcut?

 

[you2]

Setting afinity limits it to a single core. You do that for old games that crash and burn when there are more than one cores.

 

[jonks]

I think firingsquad.com ran benchmarks and showed how dual-cores ran bioshock almost twice as fast.

 

[BFG10K]

Now that we all have multicores, when are multithreaded games going to arrive?

Almost every single commercial Win32 title ever made is multi-threaded (i.e. most games from the last ten years or so). Even GLQuake uses about four threads.

The problem is using multi-threading doesn't guarantee any kind of speed-up on a multi-core system. The threads have to be made to run in parallel with minimal dependency on each other.

However, it only uses one core on my X2.

Something is wrong with your system as Bioshock should be using both cores.

 

[ArmchairAthlete]

I would think that even if the game only used one core and even if it were single-threaded somehow, there's still another core for OS/background apps. So perhaps it would get a core more to itself, though I'm not sure... this is speculation.