Quote:
Originally Posted by dduff442
Well I'm sorry I upset you but your remark about guessing I'm not a programmer got me going. I think enough reasons other than technical grounds were given for the near total lack of either memory- or processor-intensive games was given in any rate. Other fields in computing use these features routinely.
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Fair enough, being insinuated as a non-programmer is serious stuff
Still - after spending 15+ years of writing multi threaded c++ code, and at the same time writing some games I sometimes get tired when people that are not programmers "buy" the Intel/MS propaganda that you must have 64-bit OS with at least 4 cores for your entertainment PC - and then demand that the game developers must start using their hardware. We all know that Intel would love to increase the CPU speed instead of doing a more complex chip with many cores - but they have reached a technology barrier with the current production process - so they went for the multi core strategy instead.
I first suspected you might be a guy that had ditched his old overclocked E6700 to a new i7 and had realized it was not faster in games - but obviously you do work with software development in some way? You arguments are interesting and I agree with most of them...
In my opinion, the problem is that normal games /that does not have that many AI objects) manage to end up being GPU limited instead of CPU limited, even on the Core 2 family of CPU:s... Is that because the AI is to simplified then? Maybe, but fact is that as very few games are CPU limited - why do the extra work of trying to do an efficient multi threaded engine?
Sure, as the market is now going to a 4+ cores per socket in every new computer, and the raw processing power of each core is not increasing that much - the multi threaded approach is the way to go for the future. But if your engine is not CPU limited today - why do the extra work if you have a tight budget (like most non blizzard projects)? Sure, some obvious candidates like threads for strategic AI and preloading textures to memory etc are candidates today to reduce "stuttering" in the game - but the main render loop is still responsible for a very large portion of the CPU cycles used...
What is your proposal for the multi threaded strategy for games?
Regards /Mazex