Question about games and multithreading.

[MBrown]

When they say that a game is multithreaded does that mean it runs two threads for two cores or cpus or do they mean as many threads as the game needs? I guess an example would be if they say a game is multithreaded will it run better on a quad core than a dual core and if know does that mean that a game has to be specifically made to make use of four cores or two cores.

 

[MBrown]

 

[statik213]

There's no definite yes/no answer, it depends on many factors. If a game runs 4 threads and each thread is completely independent of the other (i.e. no shared resources amongst the threads) then you should see a signiifcant performance boost in a quad core CPU.,,, When the threads are more dependent on each other you'll see less performance gain

 

[DaveSimmons]

It only makes a real difference if the work can be balanced so one core isn't running at 100% while another is at 10%.

That will probably mean splitting a single task between 2 threads, with both sharing and updating the same set of data. That takes a lot of extra time and effort to get working right which is why no one does it now.

Most games have a small amount of multithreading, but where each thread has a distinct task. Windows itself uses other threads (in other processes) for all the services you see in tasks. But for pretty much every existing game this makes only a tiny difference -- look at the dual-core benchmarks on the main AT site.