Multi-core in the Source Engine

Zitat

This year, Valve is talking to us about what is possibly its most difficult iteration of the Source engine yet - adding multi-thread support to make the most of the new dual-core and quad-core CPUs coming from Intel and AMD. The timing of the day is to coincide with the release of Intel's Kentsfield quad-core chip, which is released today.

We had an hour-long presentation from Valve staff, then asked questions of the team, including Gabe Newell, for a further hour. We discussed the transition to multicore in depth, and we have come away with a slick understanding of Valve's implementation, as well as a couple of benchmarks that we can use to demonstrate the effectiveness of their approach. This is an exciting one, so sit down and prepare for some multi-threaded crowbar action.

[...]It's also about add-in cards - GPUs want to do more multi-purpose work, and physics accelerators want to take on some of that load. By spreading physics and other such applications across CPU cores, is Valve shying away from using dedicated physics acceleration cards? Jay tells us: "The stuff we're doing here is not multi-threading the physics beyond the coarse approach, really. However, once we look at larger architectural changes, doing something with dedicated physics cards is not out of the question. But right now, it's a case of the adoption rate of that being pretty low." In other words, if physics cards take off, we might see acceleration in Source v2 - but don't hold your breath.