| stephen700 said: Multicore in never as easy as single core - Only a very few games on the PC can load balance multicore Both Xenon and Cell are multicore but most developers probably just use one core while the others do almost nothing just like most pc games. However once you get a good multicore balance algorythm happening then 3 cores or 8 cores is all the same and just as easy and last time i checked 8>3. |
It's not just a matter of making an algorithm to do load balancing. You have to completely restructure your engine around the idea of multi-core. And of course it's only worth it to use additional cores if this makes performance better.
I've done a bunch of multi-threaded applications (not games) and I often found that using additional cores actually made performance worse, due to the need of synchronization and other forms of inter-thread communication.
From my understanding, game engines are complicated beasts with some interdependent parts, some of which are serial in nature (hence KZ2's diagram). While I'm sure that future engines and games will use multi-core CPUs better, progress will be slow and there will be roadblocks on the way.
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