Source Engine & multi-core

Just got finished reading that. VERY interesting article. I guess my single core 4000+ is well on its way to obsolescence. After reading that article, along with the Intel Quad Core evaluations out on the web today, I'm really excited about PC gaming over the next year.
 
Pretty interesting, although the Source Engine generally flies on hardware ranging from single core original P4's all the way to the new quad core items.
As far as I could tell it was optimized quite a bit for almost any setup people might have already!
 
Good article. I like how all these companies are saying: "oh teh noes, programming for multiple cores is hard" well jeez, just give up then. Im pretty shocked the lack of PC games that provide support for multi-core cpus, its pretty sad when you need a console (360) to come out so publishers actually provide benefits to the hardcore.
 
I recall the Alan Wake presentations, and they described the quad-cores being used in the method described as "coarse" threading in this article.

And yeah, reading Valve's algorithm makes my eyes cross when I imagine trying to decipher the resulting code.
 
I've said it several times to the "single-core is obsolete, dual-core is the future of gaming" crowd, we will see quad-cores before games that truely takes advantage of multi-threading appears. And even then, if the publishers want the game to sell, they will make sure it scales well from single-core to multi-core.
 
"We realised that, 95% of the time, you're trying to read from a data set, and only 5% of the time are you actually trying to write to it, to modify it. So, we just allowed all the threads to read any time they want, and only write when the data was locked to that thread."
Click to expand...
Sound like the road to RCU. Hope gaming isn't going to run into OS patents :-\
 
This just confirms that my purchase of a 4000+ back when the X2's where just coming out, was in fact a good idea.

It's going to be ages before dual core is widely supported, when it is I'll get multi core, no benefits otherwise.
 
The Core 2 upgrade was smart I see :)

Sure, my box utterly smashes through current Source stuff, but as the engine gets updated, that means they will be able to tack on more and more because there's more performance overhead. I don't expect it to improve Cstrike and maybe not even Episode 2, but the next gen? That will raise the bar.
 
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