Tim Sweeney is just plain awesome

[PricklyPete]

Interview

He's the real brains behind Epic.

 

[Born2bwire]

ZZT ftw!

 

[erwos]

More credit than he gets? I remember adoring interviews with him when the 3dfx Voodoo was the fancy new thing.

 

[destrekor]

I think you may not realize the amount of credit he gets. He just speaks less often compared to Mark Rein.

 

[PricklyPete]

Originally posted by: destrekor
I think you may not realize the amount of credit he gets. He just speaks less often compared to Mark Rein.

I don't think he gets some of the respect that other big name developers get like John Carmack, Gabe Newell, etc. I think he deserves just as much respect/acknowledgment for his advancement of computer/console gaming.

 

[her34]

Beyond two cores or hardware threads, UE3 performance continues to scale up, as the additional threads accelerate physics and decompression work. However, not all scenes are performance-bound by such things, so there are diminishing returns as you go beyond 4 cores. By the time CPUs with large numbers of cores are available ? thinking 16-core and beyond ? we?ll be on the start of a new engine generation, with some significant changes in software architecture to enable greater scaling.

how can an engine make good use of 16 cores?

1 rendering
2 ai
3 physics
4 user interface, networking, etc
5 decompression
6 animation
7 audio
.
.
.
16 ?

 

[otispunkmeyer]

Originally posted by: her34

Beyond two cores or hardware threads, UE3 performance continues to scale up, as the additional threads accelerate physics and decompression work. However, not all scenes are performance-bound by such things, so there are diminishing returns as you go beyond 4 cores. By the time CPUs with large numbers of cores are available ? thinking 16-core and beyond ? we?ll be on the start of a new engine generation, with some significant changes in software architecture to enable greater scaling.

how can an engine make good use of 16 cores?

1 rendering
2 ai
3 physics
4 user interface, networking, etc
5 decompression
6 animation
7 audio
.
.
.
16 ?

well u could have one for the OS, and the torrenting your doing and folding and perhaps encoding or batch processing images or something

still doesnt take up 16 tho!

also who's to say all those things u mention will only need 1 core? physics might require 4 or something. unless everyone pimps up ageia PhysX PPU, which IMO isnt a worth while venture. not for computer gaming

 

[darkswordsman17]

That was a pretty generic interview. I didn't see too much in there that is really noteworthy (let's face it, if you give them more CPU cores to work with, eventually they're going to try to make use of them). Really the only thing I see is he doesn't speak too fondly of displacement mapping (which gets a lot of use right now, especially on consoles), and a few tidbits about UT3.

I would agree though, he doesn't seem to get quite as much credit as some others in the industry. I wonder how Epic is setup though. He might really be just part of a great team and so the team gets the credit versus individuals (perhaps thats how he wants it). Doesn't really matter though, as they are definitely at the forefront of gaming. We're just now seeing the fruits of UE 3.0, and they've already been working on its successor (and I believe they've also said they've already been looking into what they should focus on beyond that even). I think they did a better job of figuring out what developers would need than id or Valve did, as evidenced by the fairly low number of games that utilize either of their latest engines (don't get me wrong, I'm sure they're great, but they seem to not offer other developers as much). Granted, yes UE 3.0 is coming out what 2-3 years later than they did.

 

[Extelleron]

Originally posted by: her34

Beyond two cores or hardware threads, UE3 performance continues to scale up, as the additional threads accelerate physics and decompression work. However, not all scenes are performance-bound by such things, so there are diminishing returns as you go beyond 4 cores. By the time CPUs with large numbers of cores are available ? thinking 16-core and beyond ? we?ll be on the start of a new engine generation, with some significant changes in software architecture to enable greater scaling.

how can an engine make good use of 16 cores?

1 rendering
2 ai
3 physics
4 user interface, networking, etc
5 decompression
6 animation
7 audio
.
.
.
16 ?

Why only have one thread for physics? Alan Wake will use two threads just for physics, and make full use of a quad-core processor. There's no reason a game can't have amazing physics (fully destructible environments, etc) by using say 8 threads just for physics.

You could easily fill up a 16 core processor, or really ANY number of cores. With a 16 core processor, 8 or even 12 threads could be used for physics, 2-3 for AI, 1 for rendering.... and there you go, you've filled up your CPU.