I can’t really stress this enough, but I find it really interesting to see how all these hardware technologies come together, and it all just makes sense when explained by an expert. Well, Not that Kalos calls himself an expert, he’s just to timid But I mean I thought I had a decent amount of knowledge, and it’s very refreshing to be filled up on ten times that information.

Thanks a million Kalos, I really appreciate the time you take to write this. I really look forward to the next edition! And some time in a distant future a buyer’s guide as well Don’t forget laptops in that guide though, I love laptops!

Another excellent article Kalos and well written too.  I managed to pick up some info on multithreading that I wasn’t originally aware of.

You made a good point about the development start date for SC2; it might be unlikely that this technology will be fully used with the release but it’s definitely something that they should consider for future games.

I probably don’t know enough about game programming, but I assume it wouldn’t be feasible to “enhance” the code with the inevitable expansion?

Another excellent article Kalos and well written too.  I managed to pick up some info on multithreading that I wasn’t originally aware of.

You made a good point about the development start date for SC2; it might be unlikely that this technology will be fully used with the release but it’s definitely something that they should consider for future games.

I probably don’t know enough about game programming, but I assume it wouldn’t be feasible to “enhance” the code with the inevitable expansion?

This article was really interesting and well written, but you have left me with one doubt:

A game designed with multi-threading in mind so it takes good advantage of multiple processors / cores would run well in a single core computer, or would the constant switching between threads slow down the game? Of course we’re assuming the rest of the computer is up to par and capable of running the game.

This article was really interesting and well written, but you have left me with one doubt:

A game designed with multi-threading in mind so it takes good advantage of multiple processors / cores would run well in a single core computer, or would the constant switching between threads slow down the game? Of course we’re assuming the rest of the computer is up to par and capable of running the game.

[QUOTE=Yamael;5641]This article was really interesting and well written, but you have left me with one doubt:

A game designed with multi-threading in mind so it takes good advantage of multiple processors / cores would run well in a single core computer, or would the constant switching between threads slow down the game? Of course we’re assuming the rest of the computer is up to par and capable of running the game.

Indeed, the overhead from managing and coordinating the different threads would be quite costly on a single core processor. I’d expect at least a 10% drop in performance, increasing as more threads are introduced. The threads often have to duplicate some of the same maths as they can’t pull the conclusion out of a seperate thread on that operation at the same point in time. There would be much greater performance benifits in multithread processing machines that decreases in the single thread PC market however. It is just a very difficult process to isolate areas of execution that can be processed seperately, not to mention isolating them from the main thread without making the whole thing inoperable: the main reason why multithreaded applications are usually freshly built rather than recrafting a single thread program, from what programmers tell me it is radically different.

Many applications on the small scale, without major processing demands, simply don’t benefit noticably from a multi-threaded nature, so amature small time programmers rarely go to the both of learning a set of styles that is overly complicated for what they are doing. Right now, multiparellelism in hardware works, but in most software it is ignored, for others it is nothing but a marketing gimmick, and in a minority it is actually benifitting the task. I believe the up to date versions of WinRAR and Photoshop take advantage for gains that can be seen in the time taken for tasks.

[QUOTE=Troglodyte;5606]Another excellent article Kalos and well written too.  I managed to pick up some info on multithreading that I wasn’t originally aware of.

You made a good point about the development start date for SC2; it might be unlikely that this technology will be fully used with the release but it’s definitely something that they should consider for future games.

I probably don’t know enough about game programming, but I assume it wouldn’t be feasible to “enhance” the code with the inevitable expansion?

It is hard to retrofit multithreaded subsections and actions into a multithreaded design, but I wouldn’t put it beyond Blizzard and their engine. I half expect them to make minor multithreading from the physics processing. It is hard to say what can be isolated and processed seperately, a typical example is AI but there is no evidence or sourcing to suggest such an undertaking. Features added later into the build, such as an expansion, I suppose would have a higher probability of being multithreaded that the original core components, it depends on what kind of things they’ll choose to add I suppose.

The PS3 is hard to program games for due to this reason; the Cell processor it uses is actually several cores of varying speeds and capabilities (making it a very strange choice for a games console processor by increasing the difficulty for developers but it does make for good boasting rights for Sony I suppose).

to verify PS3