Intel Shows Off at Developer Forum - Gaming to Drool For?
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I mentioned that Intel's first quad-core chips are aimed at gamers. So what kind of performance can you get from them, assuming your game is set up to handle multi-threading? Well, Remedy's "Alan Wake" is one example, which was demonstrated at the Intel show.
Markus Maki, Remedy's director of development, explained that the game is designed to send tasks to different cores. One thread handles the main game action, one simulates the physics of game objects, and one prepares terrain information for the graphics chip to render. Each of these threads can go to a separate core. The fourth core can occupy itself with things like playing sound and grabbing data from a DVD.
So what does it look like? Well, people who saw the game used the word "spellbound" among others. "Alan Wake" is a psychological thriller of a game set in the Pacific Northwest. The company had a 30-person team working on this project; they came from Finland and took about 40,000 pictures of that part of the United States to get the right feel. According to Dean Takahashi, who saw the demo, "They had the forest-covered landscapes of Oregon and Washington state rendered perfectly in real time."
That's just the start, though. With the game's graphics, you could see extremely bright and shadowy images in the same frame. The team made excellent use of lighting and other features to change and set the mood of the game. But that's just atmosphere; what about the motion? In his demonstration, Maki threw a tornado at a small town and controlled it like a weapon. It swept up all sorts of objects with accurate physics modeling. Cars, trailers, and flimsy buildings were thrown into the air, while tires rained from the sky. While they haven't yet posted any action images, you can still check out some screen shots from the game. They're breathtaking all by themselves.
Ronen Zohar, part of Intel's benchmarking and analysis team, talked about how quad core processors affect your experience of the game. With separate cores devoted to separate parts of the game, the action can flow a lot smoother, and a lot more realistically. Boring, ambient characters can take on lives of their own. "With quad-core you could have things like rabbits running around and realistically do what rabbits usually do," Zohar commented. Quad core processors could also be a lot better at rendering the explosions gamers love so much. Imagine a game in which 60,000 pieces of flying debris from an explosion could be accurately rendered! Better make sure that shrapnel doesn't hit you.
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