Where do i get this engine for testing my own system?

by this i mean the vrad map-maker and the graphics tester

URL please

thanks!

Why multicore sucks - Amdahl's law

When talking about the spatial partition the article states that only 95% of the work can be parallelized (time only reads are required). This means that even if you had a computer with an infinite number of cores you could only see a speed up of 20 times! With a dual core machine you could only get 1.904 times improvement. With quad core it would only be 3.478.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law

Boots can u confirm that CS S randomizes shots. Cause you're the first person to ever mention that. And from your reply's i'm gonna assume u don't play CS source, correct me if i'm wrong. Do u have any links or proof to this statement?

Episode 2 just got bumped from February to summer. When the article says this stuff is supposed to be out before Episode 2, is that referring to the old release date or the new one?

Valve has invested significant resources into optimizing its Steam engine for multi-core systems...

Should be Source

Honesty why at this point in time?

Break it down in sales. How many copies will be sold to people with single core CPU's vs multicore cpu's? I bet if the game came our right now it would be something like 70/30 single vs dual.

Also even if you make the changes will you be able to notice it while playing a game? If I had a fast single core CPU and a good or great GPU...would I notice a difference while playing the game?

I guess if they make it for the 360 it will work....since they all have multi-core CPU's:)

Umm...aren't games sequential because of the nature of what a game is? What happens next depends upon what is happening now, unless you guys mean something else by sequential.

TR's a little late to the party. Anandtech had their article up on 11/7

They're doing it because of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions:

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/718/718515p1.html

Gabe Newell:

"The amount of time it takes to get a good multicore engine running, the Xbox 360 might not even be on the market any longer."

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5...

I thought the physics revolution was supposed to come around with PhysX?

Realistic AI I already saw comming from that one company (forgot the name).

Just makes me wonder if engine developers now have so much power at their disposal they're looking to take on things they don't really need to. Personally I think HL2 could use some better hit detection and net code before better physics and ai. Just like processer makers are going to try and take on the tasks of graphics as well as general processing.

Perhaps this sort of thing shows that we aren't thinking far enough into the future for the amount of resources we have at hand.

All the cores in the world wont help the AI if there isn't effort put into programming it. Games today on single-core CPUs have enough overhead that the AI should be better than "bad guy charge the player". Unfortunately that's all we get with most games. The reality is that good game AI code is hard and tweaks to underlying engine code don't make it any easier to write.

Wasn't Valve bitching about how multithreading was "too hard" not too long ago?

Kudos to Valve for being the first to really devote energy to multithreading. Looking forward to the updates to the engine.

they make just as much money, if not more, in licensing their game engine than actually selling copies of games.

why do you think they keep harping on about how the developers will get 'free' multi-core enhancements without having to program for it!

but yeah... that is the best way to do it. so more power to them :)

Cool idea, but ulimately pointless to do with the current revision of Source engine. Any half-decent CPU/GPU can handle source-engine based games fine.

IMO, Gabe and the other Valve programmers should focus their multi-threading efforts on their next generation engine al HL3.

I am wondering some things.

Will we start getting benchmarks with 1,2, and 4 core CPUs?

At this point in time, there are a lot of single and dual core CPUs, and 4 core is starting to pop up, so for the next year or so, it may be nice to seem some comparisons for certain configs.

For instance, a dual core 3800+ X2 at 1.8Ghz versus a 3Ghz P4 w/HT versus a Quad Core Kenstsfield at 2Ghz.

Just for those of us that may not be upgrading anytime soon.

What does the score in the Source particle benchmark represent? Just seeing the differences in the scores is somewhat informative, but knowing what they mean would be moreso. Right now it's like answering "15" when someone asks how fast your computer is.

I have a proposition that would obviously never be accepted but sounds neat. Distribute gaming processing across everybody in the same game on a server, or everybody on the server. If somebody's got a blazing computer, some of their power would go to helping out people with slower machines so that everybody gets about the same experience. It would have to be stuff that really really really didn't care about latency of course. And obviously the guy with the fast machine would be pissed, but it would be interesting to make it work.

This is probably why Episode 2 is delayed. Delayed for a good reason too.

About time.

I'm especially curious to know how this will affect graphics cards and (blah) dedicated physics cards as physics co-processors. It was actually pretty neat to think that an old graphics card could be held on to and serve some purpose other than selling for half what you paid to fund an upgrade. I haven't seen any mention by Vavle on this, I see the advantage of focuing on CPU multicore for physics but it would be nice if they didn't just abandon the alternative route of graphics cards and dedicated cards.

Geoff or Scott use your connections and hook us up with the info :)