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8204 Call of Duty Dual Core patch

post #1 of 9
2/4/06 at 12:51am
Thread Starter 
Activision is offering a patch for Call of Duty that optimizes it for Dual Core processors. This is really good news. If some of the manufacturers are able to release updates to existing games that will enhance they're performance on dual core machines. People have been saying for some time now that "it will be a long time before games will be able to utilize dual core". This is a pretty sweet surprise.
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post #2 of 9
2/4/06 at 3:26am
awesome I can't wait to get this bad boy.
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post #3 of 9
2/23/06 at 8:14pm
anyone try this yet?
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post #4 of 9
2/23/06 at 10:39pm
Thread Starter 
Sure, I did. About 30 minutes prior to posting this thread.
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post #5 of 9
2/24/06 at 3:33am
Call of Duty was developed for XBOX360 which has 3 CPUs I believe. Probably not too much effort to release a dual-core patch.
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post #6 of 9
2/24/06 at 4:00am
Well, what was the experience when using the patch? Anything you can say about it?
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post #7 of 9
2/24/06 at 8:41am
Thread Starter 
It worked. I don't want to comment on whether or not it was that much faster because I didn't compare. COD2 is a lot faster but I also have a faster all around computer. I'm confident it did something but to what degree I'm not sure. At the very least it shows a willingness to update to the newer technologies coming out and a better chance that the up and coming games will be actually built around or at least ith Dual Core in mind.
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post #8 of 9
3/3/06 at 12:33pm
From what I've seen the CoD SMP patch didnt improve performance, even hurt it in some instances... However Quake4 saw an almost 20% improvement with its SMP patch...

Also, just because the game was designed to run on the Xbox360 with its 3 cores, does not mean it will be easy to bring that optimization to the PC. The Xbox uses a PPC based processor, while the Windows based PCs are all on x86. Two incompatible platforms. A little more than simply moving the code over to the PC platform would have had to happen :P
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post #9 of 9
3/3/06 at 2:09pm
PPC uses an alti-tec vector pipeline and x86 uses SSE vector pipelines. Intel and Moto offer tools to vectorize and optimize your code for their vector units, and you have to use them (or hand code in assembler). Other than that, multicore = multiprocessor. Computers have been using multiple processors for decades now. Code that can be executed as multiple processes (or threads/subprocesses), can be scheduled and executed by the kernel across multiple cpus. The kernel manages the spin locks and mutex's to manage resource contention between the processors and threads.

Its very easy to write highly granular, threaded business or scientific software, but games are fairly difficult to break into parallel processes simply because they need very tight synchronization between the different processes. Example, you code an OpenGL rendering process, a Sound process, a Traingle/vertex process, a disk IO process, a network IO process, an event loop process, etc. Each of those has to be 100% in sync with the others or the game gets choppy.

Optimizing for a cpu is easy. Re-architecting your game so that it is threaded and parallel enough to take advantage of multiple cpus is hard.
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