Slartibartfast
11-07-2006, 01:01 PM
Very interesting article over at Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/valve-multicore.ars
In one demo, over 500 tiny critters maneuvered around fire and complex obstacles, even tipping over a crate with their combined weight (physics calculations can also be multithreaded). The demo was run on a 2.6GHz Kentsfield CPU with four cores and 2GB of RAM. On a single-core 3.2 GHz Pentium 4, fewer than 100 critters could run around at the same frame rate, which looked much less impressive.
I've always kinda laughed at people who would make claims such as "dual/quad core is useless for gaming." Maybe right now, but everything is moving towards parallel architechtures.
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cpu/valve-multicore.ars
In one demo, over 500 tiny critters maneuvered around fire and complex obstacles, even tipping over a crate with their combined weight (physics calculations can also be multithreaded). The demo was run on a 2.6GHz Kentsfield CPU with four cores and 2GB of RAM. On a single-core 3.2 GHz Pentium 4, fewer than 100 critters could run around at the same frame rate, which looked much less impressive.
I've always kinda laughed at people who would make claims such as "dual/quad core is useless for gaming." Maybe right now, but everything is moving towards parallel architechtures.