High performance application software: How big a deal is multi-core processing for game developers? We asked Mark Rein, vice president at Epic Games, who says, "When the Intel folks first told us that they were taking a multi-core approach, we cheered and clapped. For our customers, it is all about performance"

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Multi-core Changes the Game for Epic

How big a deal is multi-core processing for game developers? We asked Mark Rein, vice president at Epic Games, who says, "When the Intel folks first told us that they were taking a multi-core approach, we cheered and clapped. For our customers, it is all about performance and experiencing many different things in parallel. There is no question that we will be able to use as many cores as Intel can throw at us."

Better, faster, smoother games with more detail—that’s how multi-core processors will improve the experience for gamers. Says Rein, "Take our next Unreal* Tournament game as an example. With Unreal Engine 3, we will be able to take advantage of multi-core processors to deliver a superior experience."

Rein describes one thread that has really improved Epic games. "We call it asynchronous background loading. As the player moves to the next part of the map, the game loads those scenes in advance. Picture driving from Nevada to California in a game—when you get to California, the game will have already loaded California scenes, so the transition between locations is seamless. Asynchronous background loading enables us to show a large amount of detail without having to load it all in memory at one time. This will mean the end of loading screens once the game is in progress."

Epic will be threading functions that have the greatest benefit to their users—audio and physics functions will have their own threads, for example. But being smart about threading is essential. Epic developers avoid threading functions where doing so would provide minimal performance benefits or drastically increase complexity for programmers. The main game loop, for example, is not threaded because it does not require more computing power than a single core can provide.


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