Multi-core in the Valve Source Engine

jmke · 2nd November 2006, 11:12

Valve's Hardware Days have become something of a staple in the world of the technical press. We first went out to visit the legendary game makers in order to see Lost Coast, then followed that up last year with coverage of the cinematic extensions to Day of Defeat.

This year, Valve is talking to us about what is possibly its most difficult iteration of the Source engine yet - adding multi-thread support to make the most of the new dual-core and quad-core CPUs coming from Intel and AMD. The timing of the day is to coincide with the release of Intel's Kentsfield quad-core chip, which is released today.

We had an hour-long presentation from Valve staff, then asked questions of the team, including Gabe Newell, for a further hour. We discussed the transition to multi-core in depth, and we have come away with a slick understanding of Valve's implementation, as well as a couple of benchmarks that we can use to demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach. This is an exciting one, so sit down and prepare for some multi-threaded crowbar action.

3rd November 2006, 05:45

Great! About time to hear/see it! Sounds like this may have been the elusive third game Anandtech hinted would appear to make good use of Quad-cores for 2007... Leave it to Source to pull it off too.

jmke · 3rd November 2006, 07:28

let's hope the integration will go further than just a few extra particles, not another PhysX addition :/

6th November 2006, 01:32

Hopefully this will mean stable FPS in situations where its needed such as in cs source. An example would be a team taking a bomb site with smokes frags and 5 people rushing the same spot at once. That used to own my old 3400+ 6800 GT combo down to like 30-40 FPS, and +1 for PhysX being a useless addition to any system.

2nd November 2006, 11:12	#1
jmke Madshrimp Join Date: May 2002 Location: 7090/Belgium Posts: 79,021	Multi-core in the Valve Source Engine Valve's Hardware Days have become something of a staple in the world of the technical press. We first went out to visit the legendary game makers in order to see Lost Coast, then followed that up last year with coverage of the cinematic extensions to Day of Defeat. This year, Valve is talking to us about what is possibly its most difficult iteration of the Source engine yet - adding multi-thread support to make the most of the new dual-core and quad-core CPUs coming from Intel and AMD. The timing of the day is to coincide with the release of Intel's Kentsfield quad-core chip, which is released today. We had an hour-long presentation from Valve staff, then asked questions of the team, including Gabe Newell, for a further hour. We discussed the transition to multi-core in depth, and we have come away with a slick understanding of Valve's implementation, as well as a couple of benchmarks that we can use to demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach. This is an exciting one, so sit down and prepare for some multi-threaded crowbar action. __________________

3rd November 2006, 07:28	#3
jmke Madshrimp Join Date: May 2002 Location: 7090/Belgium Posts: 79,021	let's hope the integration will go further than just a few extra particles, not another PhysX addition :/ __________________

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3rd November 2006, 05:45	#2
Kougar Posts: n/a	Great! About time to hear/see it! Sounds like this may have been the elusive third game Anandtech hinted would appear to make good use of Quad-cores for 2007... Leave it to Source to pull it off too.

6th November 2006, 01:32	#4
goingpostale1 Posts: n/a	Hopefully this will mean stable FPS in situations where its needed such as in cs source. An example would be a team taking a bomb site with smokes frags and 5 people rushing the same spot at once. That used to own my old 3400+ 6800 GT combo down to like 30-40 FPS, and +1 for PhysX being a useless addition to any system.