Multi-core in the Source Engine

Question: weren't you going to put up the videos in downloadable, hi-quality versions instead of crappy youtube versions? What ever happened to that idea?

Reviving an old thread to ask: HL2 EP.2, now it's been released, maxes one core on my q6600 and leaves the three completely idle: was all this stuff about multithreading just hype?

Originally Posted by TomD22
Reviving an old thread to ask: HL2 EP.2, now it's been released, maxes one core on my q6600 and leaves the three completely idle: was all this stuff about multithreading just hype?

Makes me wonder...

Or one core is enough?

depends on the scenario surely... have you tried it when there's lots of physics going on?

Well I happen to have 2 monitors, so I can see the cpu usage widget all the time. Now, OK, I'm spending more time looking at the game than looking at that of course, but I've been glancing over fairly often and I've never seen it use anything but core 1 so far. I'll try and remember to take a look when I next get to one of those bits where a whole bridge or something disintegrates and see if it uses more then.

But as I say, it puts the 1 core it does use on 100%....you'd think it would be a bit of a coincidence if it could use more cores but it just so happens that 100% of one core is the perfect amount of cpu time and it doesn't need the others. If it was like 90% or something then I might have supposed that was the explanation.

I've noticed after playing Ep 2 recently that it does in fact use 2 cores. Core 1 hovers around 95% and core 4 hovers around 10-15%. It's obvious that the engine is offloading something onto one of the spare cores. When I quit the game all four cores drop to the same low level. Cores 2 and 3 don't seem to get any use.

You've got to remember that Valve couldn't make the game too dependent on having more than 1 core. More than half of their players will still only be using a single core so the only noticable acceleration will be with stuff that don't effect gameplay such as particle effects.

it's still very single core...... Ep2 basically used 100% of 1 core, and less than 50% of the second, while the rest are left along.

we want to see UT3 or Lost Planet sort of multi-core!!