SMP-enabled Gaming Benchmarks
@ 2005/12/24Until recently, threading has been one of those “Meh, whatever” features for game enthusiasts. And the prospect of losing precious megahertz due to yield considerations made the idea even less attractive, never mind the very real performance gains in optimized applications such as Microsoft Media Encoder 9. But according to AMD, gamers who’re into today’s games won’t want to sacrifice frame rate for the possibility of better performance down the road, which is why its current flagship, the Athlon 64 FX-57, persists as a single-core powerhouse wielding plenty of clock speed.
Of course, now that multi-core hardware is both available and affordable, plenty of software will inevitably follow, right? Well, I still haven’t seen any games written with threading in mind and I do know that the development costs of a multi-threaded game are substantially higher. Not promising.
Of course, now that multi-core hardware is both available and affordable, plenty of software will inevitably follow, right? Well, I still haven’t seen any games written with threading in mind and I do know that the development costs of a multi-threaded game are substantially higher. Not promising.
Of course, only provided PCIE stays with us long enough which should be the case as I do not see Nvidia and ATI enjoying the additional costs of keeping cards for both interfaces caused by the switch to PCIE.