Multi-Threaded Games

[mendocinosummit]

Does anybody know what old and new games are multi-threaded? For example I was wondering about Company of Heroes it has high system specs and I was wondering if my dual core X2 will be able to handle all the physics at the highest settings.

 

[swtethan]

alan wake unreal tournament 2007

 

[brikis98]

i believe you can change some config files in HL 2 and Oblivion to make them take more advantage of multi core CPU's by using more threads...

 

[CP5670]

Quake 4 is, although you get hardly any benefit at GPU-limited resolutions.

 

[mendocinosummit]

Alan Wake I don't think is out yet and UT2007 has a couple of months. So, no current games natively support dual cores. I know my dual core optimizer makes my CPU a single core to games, but what if the game is or will be multi-threaded, how will that work?

 

[mendocinosummit]

Ya, Alan Wake is TBA still

 

[LittleNemoNES]

Quake 4 and Oblivion slightly.

 

[imported_inspire]

Crysis

 

[theteamaqua]

yeah not many of em i can think of,

Oblivion is prolly the most multithreaded games out there right now, difference between single core and dual core cpu is significant. Also Quake 4 with 1.3 patch, and i think thats it. Half life 2 wasnt multithreaded, i think not sure though. Core 2 Duo is faster than AMD K8 and Pentium 4 clock for clock.

Also i would love to see whether or not Oblivion and Quake 4 really benefit from quad core, kentsfield. If they did, why didnt intel install quake 4 and oblivion on their kentsfield rig in IDF?? so i am guessing no. They only show some heavily multithreaded apps like divx, 3d max stuff .... not games. I think there is reason behind why they only demoed 1 game: Alanwake on their kentsfield rig.

however more and more games com'n next year should take advantage of quad core.

 

[BrownTown]

But taking "advantge" doesnt mean all that much becasue most will only see a few percent increase for hte extra cores (os a higher clocked dual core would be faster), and pretty much everything is GPU limited anyways.

 

[Zenoth]

Company of Heroes, I believe, is multi-threaded.

One thing I know is that during the installation process it clearly detects and shows that you've got a Dual-Core processor, and warns you that in such a case it is better to make sure you installed proper "drivers" and "fixes" for it to take full advantage.

 

[myocardia]

No game, available for purchase at the moment, was designed for more than one core, as far as I know. And only two that I have heard of support multi-core, with patches, Quake 4 and Oblivion, as the people above me have already said. Of course, chances are very good that the majority of new games will be SMP-enabled, from now on. We'll just have to wait and see, though. Those code writers might actually be that lazy.

 

[Conky]

One of my favorite games, Call of Duty 2, has an option to enable SMP if you have it patched to the latest version.

 

[akshayt]

You should go with a dual core CPU provided you don't compromise on the graphic card while doing that becuase games like Oblivion will be GPU limited even with a single 1900XTX on AMD 64 3200.

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: akshayt
You should go with a dual core CPU provided you don't compromise on the graphic card while doing that becuase games like Oblivion will be GPU limited even with a single 1900XTX on AMD 64 3200.

Don't you mean cpu limited?

 

[theteamaqua]

like i said the most heavily multithreaded game todate as of this moment and i know of is Oblivion, check anand's article

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2747

and i doubt it will perform better under quad core . ie. Core 2 Duo vs Core 2 Quad at same clock speed

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Max Payne.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Originally posted by: mendocinosummit
Alan Wake I don't think is out yet and UT2007 has a couple of months. So, no current games natively support dual cores. I know my dual core optimizer makes my CPU a single core to games, but what if the game is or will be multi-threaded, how will that work?

Thats not how dual core optomizer works. It basically helps windows with the on and off timers between cores. Windows did have issues with certain A64 x2 configs that made games stutter because it didn't know when one core was going off and the other was going on.

 

[cmdrdredd]

Quake3 Arena had SMP support way back in the day. It benefits from it pretty heavily, but then that game gets like 400fps anyway so getting 600 is pretty dumb.

 

[mendocinosummit]

Thats not how dual core optomizer works. It basically helps windows with the on and off timers between cores. Windows did have issues with certain A64 x2 configs that made games stutter because it didn't know when one core was going off and the other was going on.

Never knew that.

I find it weird that apps and games can be multi-threaded, but only really work well with dual core and not quad core, why?