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

[Sanborn]

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/







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

[[XC] Lead Head]

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

[arisythila]

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

~Mike

[Sanborn]

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

[FghtinIrshNvrDi]

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

[Kallenator]

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

[Sanborn]

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

[Fr3ak]

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.

[cky2k6]

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.

[Starscream]

@ 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?

[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.

[[XC] Lead Head]

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.

Yeah, they look so... 2D

[Starscream]

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.

[phelan1777]

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

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.

[Anemone]

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.

[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?

[Anemone]

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

[Ron 61]

The daylight shot of that road is awesome.

[cybertec69]

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

[clayton]

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

[erwinz]

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

[diablomonic]

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....)

[***Deimos***]

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?

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.)

[NightCrawler™]

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

[iddqd]

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

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).