Valve's "Multithreaded Rendering" in Team Fortress 2

So I was gaming on my HTPC yesterday, which is just a 2.2 Ghz Phenom and an 8600GT, so nothing too powerful. I usually pull around 20-40fps with the settings all high. When playing around with the settings, I saw a new menu item, specifically this "Multithreaded Rendering" option. Naturally I enabled it, and BAM, FPS went up to 50-60. All of a sudden this low-clocked Phenom was producing performance indistinguishable from my Core 2 at 3ghz. I looked at task manager, and sure enough, all 4 cores were being utilized. So, if you're a TF2 plaer, you might want to enable this, because it definitely helps slowdowns when a lot of stuff is going on onscreen. I hope valve enables this feature in more steam games.

work is always split up between cores, as long as cpu usage is over 50%, you know its benefiting from being a quad core rather than dual core.

Work from multiple apps is split between all cores, but individual apps have to be programmed to take advantage of all cores within the app itself. That is what valve has done, and kudos to them.

grimreeferx09 said:

work is always split up between cores, as long as cpu usage is over 50%, you know its benefiting from being a quad core rather than dual core.

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Actually no, TF2 did not split work between cores before this update.

j3ff86 said:

Actually no, TF2 did not split work between cores before this update.

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It is split up, but it can't run concurrently on separate CPUs if there's no threads or more CPUs than threads (note CPUs includes multi-core).

This existed for a while, there was a console command you could use to enable it and it would double your FPS, but it was buggy and alt-tab usually froze TF2.

sdlvx said:

It is split up, but it can't run concurrently on separate CPUs if there's no threads or more CPUs than threads (note CPUs includes multi-core).

This existed for a while, there was a console command you could use to enable it and it would double your FPS, but it was buggy and alt-tab usually froze TF2.

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I alt+tabbed fine with it now, so I guess they think its ready for prime time.

It made TF2 playable on my laptop again. When I first got it I could run max graphics @ 1440x900. I don't know what happened to it.