Alan Wake Needs Dual-Core or Better?

by Sean Pelletier — Wednesday, September 27, 2006, 07:39 AM EDT

Anandtech has posted an interesting bit of news from IDF regarding the highly anticipated upcoming title Alan Wake and its apparent need for a dual-core CPU or better. Used as a demonstration to showcase the power of Intel's new quad-core CPU's, the exceptionally detailed game was actually running no less than five independent threads. Most surprising was the fact that using the Havoc physics engine, 80% of an entire core from the quad-core CPU in the test system was being dedicated strictly to physics. For all of the skeptics wondering why the industry was excited about quad-core processors, it appears as though Remedy and Intel have made a strong statement. Beyond Alan Wake, there is a ton of interesting news pouring out of IDF this year. Be sure to head over to Hot Hardware's own report and see what Dave and Marco were able to dig up!

Surprisingly enough, Markus indicated that Alan Wake would pretty much not run on any single core processors, although it may be possible to run on single-core Pentium 4 processors with Hyper Threading enabled, with noticably reduced image quality/experience. The game will actually spawn five independent threads: one for rendering, audio, streaming, physics and terrain tessellation. The rendering thread is the same as it would be in any game, simply preparing vertices and data to be sent to the GPU for rendering. The audio thread will obviously be used for all audio in the game, although Remedy indicates that it is far from a CPU intensive thread.

Tags: Core, DS, LAN, dual, dual-core, EDS, K

Alan Wake Needs Dual-Core or Better?

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