Games: sse, sse2 and dual processors

[mito]

Are there any games that have a code set designed specifically for the above mention technologies?

/\/\ito

 

[lhgpoobaa]

The quake3 engine is dual cpu capable. But the performance gain is very minimal.

Most modern games have some sort of optimisations incorporated.
I know that Serious Sam has 3dnow and SSE enhancements.


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[mito]

What about Doom3?



/\/\ito

 

[reever2]

Maybe sse and sse2 optimized, but i will doubt it will work with dual cpus, and i dont see what sort of gain you would get as doom 3 relies heavily on your videocard

 

[EvilHammie]

*squeak*
Undoubtedly yes.

<b>Friend of Fredi and his Cables. </b>

 

[c0d1f1ed]

DirectX and OpenGL will (should) use SSE, SSE2, 3DNow!, dual processor and Hyper-Threading technology if present. Many other libraries use low-level assembly optimizations transparantly to the user and even the application programmer.

 

[hellodeadcat]

From my understanding of it, Q3 SMP mode was really for older machines before the days of fast videocards and will probably slow it down. I have dual processors, but my board (A7M266-D) for some odd reason does not like to play quake in smp mode for more than 2 seconds without freezing. I would guess that more and more games and programs with be multithreaded in the near future because of intel's use of hyperthreading on all their newer products.

 

[imgod2u]

Most games would not be optimized for SSE/SSE2/3DNow! or SMP. The time-to-market for games is very demanding and it's usually better to just compile without any intensive optimizations and release the game 6 months early than hire SIMD programmers and/or parallel programmers and have the game run twice as fast.

"We are Microsoft, resistance is futile." - Bill Gates, 2015.

 

[c0d1f1ed]

I'd say this is true for many games where performance is not a terrible issue, but I wouldn't say "most" games. Lots of libraries do the SIMD optimizations for us and performance would probably be halved if they didn't. And in the game code it only takes a few days to spot the bottlenecks and optimize them. Any worthy game programmmer knows a bit of assembly.

But what the poster probably meant is, is it useful to have a dual processor with SSE2 support for gaming? My answer is no. If the game doesn't run on a single processor, it's not a good game. SSE2 is not very useful for games because it processes two double-precision floating-point numbers in parallel. SSE on the other hand processes four single-precision floating-point numbers in parallel. Since double precision is nearly never needed in games, only SSE makes a difference.

 

[imgod2u]

As I recall, much of the pre-optimized libraries provided by Intel for their ISA extensions are for video/media applications. Not many are for 3D rendering. There may be other libraries out there, however, the usage of these are limited.

"We are Microsoft, resistance is futile." - Bill Gates, 2015.