Quote:
Originally Posted by Heliocon
Of course they will have dual core support, standard is 4 cores now, by 2012 will be 6 or 8 (high range 32nm intel and the new AMD Bulldozer). Not that this is 8+ threads since each core is also 2 virtualy cores. So real question is will they support hyperthreading?
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Well, if they manage to balance 4 threads that really does something useful and don't spend too much time on synchronization/sleep/wait/join so the main render thread can not continue they can start thinking of that
Multi threading is good for a lot of stuff but in a game where the game render loop runs at 100 fps you can't wait 10 ms for some shared memory that is locked by the AI thread that is busy or you will get problems... Ok, for some tasks like loading data or textures in the background that does not mess with shared memory it can be useful but to spread ai, physics, net code etc on different threads and really gain performance you easily end up with code that is a pure hell to debug or tune... Multi threading works best for stuff that does not share stuff - like in a business application where one thread can chunk tasks that run for a while with no interaction with the other threads and then return a result. Thats not how a game works unfortunately...