Possible uses for second core?

[New user]

Could a second cpu core be used as a physics processor? If so would it be worthwhile to use it as such. I am also curious about software rendering with a second core. If the entire second core was used for software rendering what speed would it eqaute to of a dedicated gpu. For example my system has a 6150le for video would using the second core to render graphics be faster, slower, or equal to the 6150 in terms of speed.

 

[Ika]

CPUs suck at rendering graphics, so it would be worse.

It could conceivably be used as a dedicated physics processor, but that's not really all that useful, because CPUs calculate physics anyway. All games have to do is take advantage of dual-core CPUs by using multithreaded physics software.

 

[Lonyo]

Try reading this: http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2868

 

[myocardia]

Yes, the second core could be used for processing physics. The problem with that, though, is that the software would have to be totally rewritten to take advantage of that. And the people who write code for games seem to be the laziest of all software authors. If they weren't, every game released for at least the last 6 months would have been fully SMP-enabled (able to take full advantage of more than one core/processor).

It will never happen, in other words. Plus, when you add the fact that cpu's are never as good at something as any dedicated processor, it doesn't make all that much sense, anyway.

 

[New user]

I guess I was thinking something along the lines of a modified processor driver that can be switched from dual core mode to one core and one physics mode. For games that do not support multithreading the second core would work in conjunction with the video card for a performace boost. Somewhat like SLI but with one core and the video card instead of 2 video cards.

 

[Munky]

The cpu is so bad at rendering graphics compared to video cards, that it's no use even trying. Some games coming out in the near future may use the second core, but right now it makes no difference in most games. I have only 2 uses for my second core at the moment: video encoding and image processing.

 

[TheRyuu]

Play CS:S on one, encode that DVD on the other.
or
Play CS:S on one, do something on the other 😉

 

[Zap]

I know I've mentioned this somewhere before, but stuff like physics should be integrated into DirectX. That way a hardware manufacturer just has to write a driver for DirectX and game developers can just make their game take advantage of DirectX. So, dedicated physics cards, spare video cards, spare cores on the CPU... all just need a DirectX driver and voila!

Of course I don't know if/how it would work... just a thought.

 

[Lonyo]

Originally posted by: Zap
I know I've mentioned this somewhere before, but stuff like physics should be integrated into DirectX. That way a hardware manufacturer just has to write a driver for DirectX and game developers can just make their game take advantage of DirectX. So, dedicated physics cards, spare video cards, spare cores on the CPU... all just need a DirectX driver and voila!

Of course I don't know if/how it would work... just a thought.

Havok is the producer of a very popular physics middleware solution, licensed and used by tons of big-name games. Havok is used in Age of Empires III, Brothers in Arms, F.E.A.R., Half-Life 2, Halo 2, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and lots of others. Last October, Havok announced they were working on a project called Havok FX, which would leverage any graphics card capable of Shader Model 3.0 to accelerate physics. At the core, that's what this whole "SLI Physics" thing is about.

Basically instead of making a DX physics component, they just build onto the graphics component by using it to do physics calculations, which allows any graphics card to support it, although that doesn't allow you to put it on the CPU or a dedicated PhysX card.

 

[New user]

It would also be cool to be able to use my onboard video for physics when I get a dedicated video card later on.

 

[aka1nas]

Originally posted by: Lonyo

Originally posted by: Zap
I know I've mentioned this somewhere before, but stuff like physics should be integrated into DirectX. That way a hardware manufacturer just has to write a driver for DirectX and game developers can just make their game take advantage of DirectX. So, dedicated physics cards, spare video cards, spare cores on the CPU... all just need a DirectX driver and voila!

Of course I don't know if/how it would work... just a thought.

Havok is the producer of a very popular physics middleware solution, licensed and used by tons of big-name games. Havok is used in Age of Empires III, Brothers in Arms, F.E.A.R., Half-Life 2, Halo 2, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and lots of others. Last October, Havok announced they were working on a project called Havok FX, which would leverage any graphics card capable of Shader Model 3.0 to accelerate physics. At the core, that's what this whole "SLI Physics" thing is about.

Basically instead of making a DX physics component, they just build onto the graphics component by using it to do physics calculations, which allows any graphics card to support it, although that doesn't allow you to put it on the CPU or a dedicated PhysX card.

The only downside is that it's a proprietary third party API so support would be lower. I would much prefer an API for physics built into DirectX and then Havok, or Ageia or anyone else can handle the hardware and driver implementations. The uptake of physics acceleration tech is partially so low right because games have to explicitly support each individual technology and thus each tech has only a handful of games that can be used with it. Standardising on an physics API would make a big difference, IMO.

 

[Arkaign]

Teh second core is for teh pr0n!

Didn't you get the memo? Sheesh :evil: