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To: wbmw who wrote (243946)	12/4/2007 1:23:32 AM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Wbmw: You continue to fail to see what I am saying without looking at what game users themselves are saying: incrysis.com Here they are saying that the quad's were supposed to make the game better. Well it didn't work: amdzone.com Going from single to dual helps quite a bit, 50%, but going from dual to quad doesn't do much. <1%. 2.2GHz dual core was a mainstream CPU, 3 years ago. Here is an interview with the developer mentioned above: eurogamer.net Cevat Yerli: As a PC game developer you have to make sure your game runs on two to three year old PCs. In fact, the current specification we're planning for is even four year old PCs. If you're a gamer who bought a new gaming PC two or three years ago, you can play Crysis, and you will get visuals that will compete with visuals of that time. Of course you won't get the super Direct X10 graphics, but we are competitive. Wbmw, your CPU optimization argument is blown out of the water. The other game developer's say the same things. They optimize so it is playable on older hardware first. For newer stuff, they get the hardware developers to optimize to their code, not the other way around! Crysis is clearly GPU bound. You get more performance for the dollar by spending highly on the GPU side. In fact, a good deal of the CPU load comes from managing multiple GPUs in their driver code. tomsgames.com EDIT: When I originally published this article and looked at the graph of the processor performance capture my first impression was that Crysis was utilizing all four cores - which is true. Crysis is passing instructions to all four cores but not maximizing their ability to handle instructions concurrently. All four cores look busy in the graph but the reality of it is that they are basically operating as a single-core and taking turns. In it's current state Crysis does not take full advantage of multi-core processing. Thanks go out to the readers who pointed this out. So this highly optimized game that uses quad cores isn't really all that optimal with a quad core. Dual core has one core doing the GPU, OS and user input and the other runs the game itself. That is load managing, not multicore optimization. Thus Crytek is not optimal and fails your optimization theory. They don't fit the game to the hardware (its bad for business, if they do), but others fit the hardware to their game, just like the server VARs do. The other games are the same way. Look at Carmack at ID as an example. He has a lot of comments about what a game developer actually does. Most of his optimization is trying different algorithms until he finds ones that looks good and does what he needs, yet doesn't load the test systems much. Pete