Items tagged with multi-threading
id Software's long-awaited FPS Rage is set to ship in October. When it launches, it'll be the first game to feature id's newest graphics engine, dubbed id Tech 5. With expectations running high in the wake of the latest game trailer shown at QuakeCon last week, we've put together an article to examine the merits of both the game and the technology behind it... Rage: The Tech Behind Id Tech 5...
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id Software's long-awaited FPS Rage is set to ship in October. When it launches, it'll be the first game to feature id's newest graphics engine, dubbed id Tech 5. With expectations running high in the wake of the latest game trailer shown at QuakeCon last week, we've put together an article to examine the merits of both the game and the technology behind it. Note: Some of the big images in this article are quite large. This was done to make certain texture detail and rendering quality weren't adversely affected by JPEG compression. The Game Vehicular combat is a major part of Rage. The engine doesn't support tessellation, but character detail is good...
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A key Microsoft kernel architect, David Probert, has come out with a surprising statement regarding Windows' ability to harness multiple cores. While Windows has taken advantage of multicore technology for over a decade, Probert notes that users rarely see the performance that they should. "Why should you ever, with all this parallel hardware, ever be waiting for your computer?" Probert asked in a presentation last week at the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center in Champaign-Urbana. Each successive OS release from Microsoft has improved multicore scaling but bottlenecks regularly occur as multiple applications jockey for position. Priority scheduling helps a certain amount, but it's...
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Yesterday, news broke regarding Microsoft and Intel launching parallel research centers at UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to investigate way to accelerate developments in mainstream parallel computing. And today, we've posted some details and commentary on the subject over at HotHardware. Here's a snip from the piece... "Even today, writing software able to take advantage of multi-threading is notoriously difficult. In order to help drive the development of the tools and threading-aware applications, Microsoft and Intel are together awarding the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of California at Berkeley $10 million dollars...
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It's no secret that the days of procuring performance exclusively through faster clock speeds are over. The current crop of multi-core server, desktop, and mobile CPU designs are a dead giveaway that processor vendors like Intel are instead looking to increased parallelism as the facilitator of more computing horsepower. The problem, according to David Patterson, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, becomes one of scheduling and balancing workloads across multiple sets of processing resources, so that you can truly get more performance out of those threaded designs. If an application is only running in one thread, upgrading to a dual- or quad-core chip won't help speed it up. It's a...
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