Dual-Core dans les jeux

Anandtech s'est penché récemment sur les répercutions dans les jeux de la technologie Dual-Core adoptée par les futurs processeurs d'Intel et d'AMD. Notre confrère met principalement l'accent sur le prometteur moteur 3D Unreal Engine 3 qui semble avoir été d'ores et déjà optimisé pour une gestion massive de threads simultanés. Pour cet article, Anandtech s'est entretenu avec Tim Sweeney, PDG et fondateur d'Epic Game.

Implementing a multithreaded system requires two to three times the development and testing effort of implementing a comparable non-multithreaded system, so it's vital that developers focus on self-contained systems that offer the highest effort-to-reward ratio.

"You can expect games to take advantage of multi-core pretty thoroughly in late 2006 as games and engines also targeting next-generation consoles start making their way onto the PC. Writing multithreaded software is very hard; it's about as unnatural to support multithreading in C++ as it was to write object-oriented software in assembly language. The whole industry is starting to do it now, but it's pretty clear that a new programming model is needed if we're going to scale to ever more parallel architectures. I have been doing a lot of R&D along these lines, but it's going slowly."

Lire l'article sur la gestion multi-threads dans les jeux vidéo