1. Threading Successes of Popular PC Games and Engines

2. What did we cover? Thread for performance Thread for features
Supreme Commander
Gamebryo Element Engine
Thread for features
Hellgate: London
Intel’s n-core experiment
Use threaded middleware
Allegorithmic’s Substance

3. What should I avoid? Don’t Get seduced by terminology
Use complexity rather than concurrency as your measure of success
Design for specific numbers of cores, or rely upon symmetry of cores
Freak out; nobody has cracked the problem yet and forgotten to tell you
Occasionally when we are talking to developers we meet someone who asserts that their technology “solves” threading – that they have an ideal solution for n-core. Closer inspection reveals that the developer has created a very complex approach to threading that doesn’t practically deliver more concurrency than more common approaches. So far, all the approaches we’ve seen have tradeoffs that fit specific designs but are not universal. When and if there is an accepted best way to thread a game architecture, we will be sure to tell you (and everyone) about it.

4. What should I do? Do
Use threaded middleware to ease your design efforts
Use a multi-threaded memory management scheme
Put task parallel and data parallel tasks into the same thread pool
Tell us about your progress and any problems you’re having
These appear to be the common features of well-threaded games.

5. paul.lindberg@intel.com bradley.j.werth@intel.com
Some final thoughts...
Thank you for attending today’s tutorial!
Special thanks to:
Stephen Chenney of Emergent Game Technologies
Charles Bauchet of Allegorithmic
Gas Powered Games
Flagship Studios
Paul and Brad will be at the Intel booth/lounge throughout the show – come talk to us!