PC Game Alan Wake: Programmed for Quad Core (1 Core for physics!)

Well Ageia has very very tough times ahead of them.....

This story is actually several day old but I have been having login troubles (looks like someone is trying to hack my XS login)

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/09...ded_Alan_Wake/

Intel officially revealed the name of Kentsfield this morning, and branded it Core 2 Quad.

It will be out in November. We were treated to a demo of a Core 2 Quad machine running Remedy's unreleased follow-up to Max Payne, Alan Wake.

The game looked, frankly, stunning. Remedy has coded the engine to take advantage of quad-core processors - the engine scales as you move from single to dual to quad. We saw some amazing environmental effects, not to mention true next-gen graphics that easily rival anything from Unreal Engine.

Markus Maki, Remedy's rep at the forum, said that Alan Wake had been 18 months in the making so far. The multiple cores are used to stream data in the background in preparation for moves into new areas, and to prepare output for the graphics card to render.

Markus also revealed that one whole core is used for physics calculations, and we saw a hurricane tear up the in-game world in a rather realistic fashion as illustration.

For the true enthusiasts, Intel revealed that this Kentsfield, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, had been overclocked up to 3.73GHz, a 1GHz clock, with no issues. "Overclocking is allowed here, huh?" mused Otellini.

Alan Wake looked stunning, and it seems that quad-core could soon be ready for gamers. We'll be hearing far more later on in the day, so we'll be sure to let you know.

Watch a video of it here:
http://www.gameklip.com/v/1606/

http://images.xboxyde.com/gallery/pu...5/759_0009.jpg
http://images.xboxyde.com/gallery/pu...5/759_0008.jpg
http://images.xboxyde.com/gallery/pu...5/759_0005.jpg
http://images.xboxyde.com/gallery/pu...5/759_0007.jpg


(I'm not sure why some of the pics are duplicated)

Awsome looking graphics...just to bad the water texture is repeated:(

Wow... This look DAMN Good... I wonder if they can actually incorperate this into a real time game...

~Mike

?? It is a real time game, the video is even them controlling it with an Xbox 360 controller on a PC.

I assume that they are using a G80 of some kind. Those graphics are stunning.

I wonder how the old girl will do on that game. New video card in line? Me thinks so.

dx9c or dx10?

Ryan

The graphics are great for sure, but I really hate the surface texture on the ground rocks and such.

one of the contributing writers at IGN told me that Alan Wake was being ran on a Geforce 7900GTX, its not even DX10!

I saw some DX9 and DX10 screenshots of Flight simulator X today.
Comparing it to the water of Alan Wake, I would say its DX10.
The game looks more than great already. A German game magazine said that it will most likely be perfactly playable on a dual core, because physics only need 60-80% usage of the second core. But then again its not clear what dual core they were referring to.
Anyway, there is a bunch of really good looking games coming out in 2007. Cant wait to play them :)

Edit: Just had a closer look at the water and it doesnt look as great as it did ast the first look, so it could be DX9 as well.

water doesnt look that good at all. also the low lighting scenes look alot worse than the scenes with hdr, but the ones with hdr look simply stunning.

@ Sanborn
for ur login questions read:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=117329

and i think that they used the same area a few times for shots cause it really is a good angle (mountains, clouds and forest) to show what difrent kinds of weather look like (foggy, sun rise etc couldnt think of a better word then weather :/).

looks spanking but i dislike the name Alan Wade.
i want Max back.

btw why are they guys feet sinking into the street?

i think he is standing in a crack in the road, lol... and i understand the other screenshots, but understanding it doest really make it look better, the clouds and the fog just look really ugly.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cky2k6

i think he is standing in a crack in the road, lol... and i understand the other screenshots, but understanding it doest really make it look better, the clouds and the fog just look really ugly.

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Yeah, they look so... 2D

true the clouds look like their painted on a sealing (or however its written).
the fog depends what it looks like when ur actualy walking ingame.

that is not a crack in the road it is the shadow from a tree, his toes are "sinking" into the road.:nono:

the shots look awsome, though to me anyway it still has the "hazy", dreamy look to it, especially with the sunlight.

I have light colored eyes, so yes bright sunny days do bother my eyes, not much, but still, these newer games though as I said look like something from a dream sequence, or a haze.

Compared to games this time last year however this looks so much better.

Alan Wake is likely to be either the only or one of very few games in 2007 designed for quad core. The marketbase is going to be too tiny for a while yet.

However, I do think we'll see a lot more games starting to take dual core into account. The bad part about that is if you do other tasks with that second core, the game is now going to want to take over both cores :) But that's a reasonable thing I think.

One thing I don't understand is that if the CPU is running Physx, then does it mean that we don't need a physx card or GPU to run physx? Or is the CPU physx different from the Physx card and the GPU physx?

That would be correct, the physics card would either add additional features (unlikely) or be not needed.

The daylight shot of that road is awesome.

check out the Allan Wake videos, trailers, enjoy, www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?fs=1&id=1608

I wanna try and play this game Co-Op on LAN.:cool:
________
VOLCANO VAPORIZER

nice scene and graphics..:D there are manny new game this 2007

to the person complaining that it looked like a dream: Thats the point I think, the game is about nightmares coming true or something

To the person asking about physx: physx (the physics software api) is cross platform. It will run on cpu's, physx hardware card, cell, xbox360 cpu etc. It can do the same things on each, and can run on multiple things at the same time (eg partly on cpu, partly on physx hardware) HOWEVER the more power you throw at it, the more things it can model at the same time, and at a higher framerate/quality.

From the benchmarking i've seen so far, the physx hardware card is currently very roughly equivalent to adding one more extra 2-3ghz cpu core to your system (this should improve a bit with better drivers as they learn to use the hardware more efficiently), so if you have single core, going dual might be a better option, but if you already have dual core, and want some more physics power (and cant get quad) its a good buy :)

hope that helps

(and take everything here as very rough estimates, Ive followed physx a fair bit but its not like I work for them, or even own one yet....)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Shift

One thing I don't understand is that if the CPU is running Physx, then does it mean that we don't need a physx card or GPU to run physx? Or is the CPU physx different from the Physx card and the GPU physx?

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Those add-in physics cards are highly over-rated. Although they are more powerful than a CPU core, a cpu core, like core 2 duo, can be more than adequate for small-mid number of objects.

And, if you need to simulate more complex interaction, or many thousands and even millions of objects, you have the most powerful streaming floating point chips to date.. the GPU. And the GPU accelerated physics would be more versatile/flexible and much faster than add-in card.

However, I think the big obstacle is "scheduling". A single CPU core continuously doing physics can do it efficiently. But, if its also doing graphics/AI/sound/etc.. constant interruptions decrease efficiency. Likewise with GPU. Although not impossible, its a bit tricky to make drivers for GPU/CPU to allow smooth physics that doesnt severely impact other areas. I hope you guys understand what I mean (taling bout "real time scheduling algorithms", parallelism, concurrency, deadlocks, dynamic resource mapping, here.)

I think it looks great... stills never do a scene justice imo...
Definitely makes me wanna upgrade my rig in the near future...

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Originally Posted by Sanborn

one of the contributing writers at IGN told me that Alan Wake was being ran on a Geforce 7900GTX, its not even DX10!

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Damn right it isn't; it's just FarCry technology with higher polygon count. They don't have any of the new phyiscs code (notice his boots clip right through the ground).

boot clipping through the ground has nothing to do with DX10 or physics.. imho.

And, for the record, I think the technology used to achieve certain effect in game is poor metric of comparison. There are many many games which were very successful using "old" technology.

And, there are considerable number of visually impressive games that utterly failed. Afterall, the wow factor of spectacular visual imagery wears off pretty quickly when you're frustrated by the controls, ackward gameplay, lack of objectives or direction, and plot that kills braincells faster than beer.

Actually from a programming standpoint this annoucement is rather negative than positive.

When you change a program to take advantage of multiple CPU/cores, there are two ways:

1) in a main program, find some "other" work for the other processors to do, "on the side" so to speak.

2) split up whatever single thing you are doing right now so that it is SMP-capable. Do the same work on all processors (just on different moving chunks of data).

The second way is utterly superior in actually utilizing all processors at all times but difficult to implement.

The annoucement posted above admits that they are even proud to do 1). Of course that's still better than doing nothing,

I saw it live and I´m 99% sure it`s D3D10

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Originally Posted by JuanFlaiter

I saw it live and I´m 99% sure it`s D3D10

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Again, it's just bump mapping. A lot of very well-done bump mapping, but still no cigar.

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Those add-in physics cards are highly over-rated. Although they are more powerful than a CPU core, a cpu core, like core 2 duo, can be more than adequate for small-mid number of objects.

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Except not many people really rate Physics Cards at the minute, aside from Ageia.

Personally, i've been waiting for this game for about 2 years now, can't wait for it to come out.

im thinking of getting Q6600 and OC it to somewhere near 3.6GHz 400fsb (best case scenario), but 3.2GHz at least i hope

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Originally Posted by iddqd

Again, it's just bump mapping. A lot of very well-done bump mapping, but still no cigar.

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you sound pretty sure... why?
how do you differentiate bump mapping from:
specular maps,
environmental bump mapping,
normal maps,
parallax mapping (photon mapping),
displacement mapping,

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Originally Posted by ***Deimos***

you sound pretty sure... why?
how do you differentiate bump mapping from:
specular maps,
environmental bump mapping,
normal maps,
parallax mapping (photon mapping),
displacement mapping,

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TBH I don't see anything special; looks like plain old environmental bump mapping to me.

They may claim it has ray tracing for all I care, it still looks like a higher res version of FarCry.

Guess it's just me but those screenshots look similar to the ones they showed last year. That being said I would assume it's DX9.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by iddqd

TBH I don't see anything special; looks like plain old environmental bump mapping to me.

They may claim it has ray tracing for all I care, it still looks like a higher res version of FarCry.

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well, now that you mention it, every single game made in the last decade can be reduced down to just colourful textures on polygons. Isn't that all that it is?

Remember that this isnt the final game its just a pre-release to show off the fact the came up with 4 tasks for quad core processors...

Clipping bugs and textures are the sort of things that they are likely to be working on at the moment... and these things are MUCH less noticable when your playing the game than when looking at stils.

IMO, it looks pretty nice.
Quite clever that they managed to get some sort of quad core implimentation going. Maybe quad core might be some advantage in games. But this game might still be a year or more away.

As for AGEA... I think this sort of thing is going to HELP them not hinder them.
There biggest problem will be having games made that take advantage of there cards.
Although there cards are expensive at the moment... they may be able to drop the cost allot if they can sell volume. Most people are AT MOST going to have dual core CPU's when games like this release. If those non quad core people can get a decent FPS boost by buying a good value physics card then they might go for it... plus the performance freaks like us will probably buy quad core AND the physics card... this is XS after all!
Remember that "most" games players lag at least 1-2 years behind technolody, just look at the hardware stats valve produces for HL2.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ***Deimos***

well, now that you mention it, every single game made in the last decade can be reduced down to just colourful textures on polygons. Isn't that all that it is?

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Yes, but you can't say that FarCry looks exactly like Quake III. Even if you use exactly the same textures (and quality) and same polygon count, Quake III doesn't have the same shader effects that FarCry does, that make it look more realistic. Such as bump mapping, for example. So no matter how high quality the content for Q3 will be, it won't look as good (until you implement the newer techology, which is theoretically possible with the Q3 source code up for grabs).

But I just can't see anything new in these screenshots. Sure, they have more polygons. But I still see the same problems as in FarCry (such as grass sprites popping out of flat and shiny earth in the foreground).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by iddqd

Yes, but you can't say that FarCry looks exactly like Quake III. Even if you use exactly the same textures (and quality) and same polygon count, Quake III doesn't have the same shader effects that FarCry does, that make it look more realistic. Such as bump mapping, for example. So no matter how high quality the content for Q3 will be, it won't look as good (until you implement the newer techology, which is theoretically possible with the Q3 source code up for grabs).

But I just can't see anything new in these screenshots. Sure, they have more polygons. But I still see the same problems as in FarCry (such as grass sprites popping out of flat and shiny earth in the foreground).

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First and foremost, you gotta see the whole IDF Alan Wake clip from youtube.. WOW.. took me a while to roll up my tongue, get the jaw back up in position and find and reposition my eyeballs. Compared to exisitng games, their level of sophistication and seamlessness of technology is unprecedented.

iddqd, in ideal world we would be using much more realistic ray tracing for games, right? Then you could get CGI quality effects of all sorts. But, its very important to note that video game 3D graphics is about using as many shortcuts as possible to achieve as close approximation as possible at playable frame rate to create immersive environment. The how doesn't matter. You pick and tune specific technologies which best suit your purpose.

Imagine for a second Doom3 without dynamic shadows. While you're at it, remove all shadows. The game is no longer scary or thrilling. The illusion is completely broken.. now its cartoony.

There are many new exciting special effects features possible on current and next gen hardware, but not all are well suited to this kind of game. Using displacement mapping on the terrain although it would provide very high level of detail, would probably be impractical computationally. Likewise, it would be inappropriate to have colourful alien light distortion effects like in HL2. And BFG and rail gun special effects are obviously ill-suited for a game like Alan Wake.

Finally, although the IDF guys are quick to showcase quad cores, that *ONLY* 4x performance of single core. Pretty much everything in 3D graphics is exponential. double the resolution of some texture, and you're using up 4x as much space. An extra level of tessalation of tree objects and their polygon count doubles. Apply to the world scene and suddenly you have the burden of processing millions of new polygons. I hope you guys know what I mean.

oh damn, Looks so real.
Thanks

Only engine that will top Source engine in efficiency and amazingness imho. I cant wait for that game :D

well i wanna see somebench between Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad on that game see what the differences are

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Originally Posted by NickS

Only engine that will top Source engine in efficiency and amazingness imho. I cant wait for that game :D

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IMHO source engine is pretty lame.
I'd take Doom3 engine or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory engine over it anyday.

source engine water is too reflective, and poor portrail of waves. Lights arent dynamic. You cant shoot out lights. Models are fairly low detail (levels too.. pretty blockly.. HL2). Extensive use of specular EVERYWHERE to make stuff shiny. And, some bump maps. The ony significant impressive thing to me is the facial animation synchronization, and animation.

Back to Alan Wayke,
Do you suppose only several key objects are "physics enabled" and can thus be picked up by the tornado? wOuld the tornado pull up trees? Does the game support deformable terrain..?

three letters says it all

OMG

send the tornado through a city. with skyscrapers, glass, and cars.. lots of cars.

please.

WOW. Is that even a Game. :slobber: :slobber: :slobber: :slobber: It looks damn Real, Esp the 2nd one.

So will a Dual Core have have lower performance then Quad core in this Game ??

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Originally Posted by STEvil

send the tornado through a city. with skyscrapers, glass, and cars.. lots of cars.

please.

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I think they are saving that for an 8-core demo :D. :toast:

IMHO, they need to pace themselves. Should have let it be with dual core for 2006. Introduce quad core 2007. Make better version 2008. Introduce octuple core 2009. Introduce better version 2010.. etc..

otherwise the # cores grows exponentially and die shrinks can't keep up. It costs many billions for die shrink technology, and not enough time for sales.

Now, Pentium days were good. 1993 to 1997 on about the same architecture (small chip changes).
Heck even better were i486 days.. 1989 to 1993. If they released a version with slightly higher clock speed, you got all hyped up for Christmas time. Its quite unfortunate that:

"In May 2006 Intel announced that production of the 80486 would cease at the end of September 2007"