Quote:Original post by Kylotan
I really don't think games are a great application for this. There's hardly anything you can effectively run in parallel with the CPU when your system needs to be fully synchronised 60 times a second. Our software just doesn't (currently) suit parallel models.

Forgive my ignorace as I’ve got very little experience as far as game programming goes, but why would the system need to be fully synchronised sixty times a second? I mean – one core can do all the game-related stuff like updating the world while the second core would only render the data the first core computed, sixty times per second... Certain level of atomicity would still need to be preserved of course, but still I don’t see why full synchronisation would be needed...

Is this possible but not yet done, or are there any significant reasons not to do this?

Quote:Original post by Oxyd
Forgive my ignorace as I’ve got very little experience as far as game programming goes, but why would the system need to be fully synchronised sixty times a second?

Things don't necessarily need to be, but that's pretty much the way that everything works. It's the tried and tested method that developers are familiar with, and it was optimal for pretty much every platform until relatively recently.

Quote:I mean – one core can do all the game-related stuff like updating the world while the second core would only render the data the first core computed, sixty times per second... Certain level of atomicity would still need to be preserved of course, but still I don’t see why full synchronisation would be needed...

Where's this dividing line between 'certain level of atomicity' and 'full synchronisation'? Which part of the data can I choose not to lock when going through the world and deciding what to add into the render queue? Do I lock the whole thing, holding up the other thread? Or do I lock and unlock individual items or areas, incurring massive overheads? (Locking is not cheap.)

As it stands, rendering isn't the problem - most that already occurs in parallel, on the GPU. What remains are things like AI and physics, which tend to operate on a complete game world, or a large area of it, and require consistency to operate. There are documented ways around this, especially for AI, but AI is non-trivial and non-standard, which means there is still some way to go.