Saturday, December 24, 2005
First multi-threading support for games appears
The first support for SMP in modern games have started showing up as patches. Both Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2 now both sport patches that add support for multithreading.
FiringSquad has an article up that shows some pretty impressive performance increases in the graphics rendering subsystem. Their article is flawed, however. They're running timedemos of Quake 4, which only uses the graphics and sound subsystems. AI and physics aren't enabled in timedemos, and physics simulation can be one of the most CPU intensive tasks in modern games.
I'd rather have seen them post benchmarks taken with FRAPS in real-life situations. Less reproducible, perhaps, but timedemos are useless for testing CPU performance.
FiringSquad has an article up that shows some pretty impressive performance increases in the graphics rendering subsystem. Their article is flawed, however. They're running timedemos of Quake 4, which only uses the graphics and sound subsystems. AI and physics aren't enabled in timedemos, and physics simulation can be one of the most CPU intensive tasks in modern games.
I'd rather have seen them post benchmarks taken with FRAPS in real-life situations. Less reproducible, perhaps, but timedemos are useless for testing CPU performance.
