
Originally Posted by
Pc Perspective
On the topic of the new multi core processors in both the Xbox 360 and the PS3, John mentioned that the industry might have been better off not going to such a revolutionary architecture this early in the game. Game developers and coders in general working on applications that are not “embarrassingly parallel” are still having a difficult time with even coming up with a theory on correctly utilizing multiple cores and thus much of the potentional in these consoles might go unused for many years. By the time the next generation of consoles arrives, we might have a better solution.
That doesn’t paint a very good picture for the state of multi core gaming on the PC market either, and Carmack emphasized that point as well. Though his own Quake III code was perhaps the first to implement multi threaded support (by running the render in one thread and the game engine in another) he found the processor to be difficult and easily “broken.” Users of Quake III will remember the on-again/off-again scenario that was SMP support in the game.
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