List of PC Games that are Multithreaded

Cheezor722

Weaksauce
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Mar 13, 2008
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I can't seem to fine a definitive list as to what games support multiple core CPUs. Anyone know Games that support Dual Cores?

Here are the ones i know:

Quake 4
Company of Heroes
Crysis
Supreme Commander
Call of Duty 4
Unreal Tournament 3
Prey
Fear
 
Oblivion is multi-threaded. Any Valve game that uses the Source engine would be multi-threaded now. I would guess most new games are now, but I can't say I pay that much attention to it.
 
Careful, almost every game these days is multithreaded. Taking full advantage of multiple processors (cores) is a completely different story and IMO not a single game has really done it.
 
Supreme Commander and its Forged Alliance expansion will definitely take advantage of a 2nd core... but not by much. And whilst quad core owners will also say they receive much better performance, its been proven the game physically cannot scale across more than about 2.5 cores (and thats partial on each one).

Its also been proven that a dual core clocked slightly higher than a quad core gives better performance on Supreme Commander. (Duals tend to overclock higher than quads so this is a legitimate statement)

I do remember everyones favourite PC game company (Epic!) comment recently that you will see a significant game when running UT3 on Quad core vs dual core. Not sure if that translates to other games which also use the UT3 engine.
 
Not sure whether it's programmed that way or not, but I notice my son's computer with a Q6600 loads levels much faster then my rig with an E6400 running at 3.2Ghz. His CPU is at the stock 2.4Ghz as well and we both have the same amount of RAM. I have the faster hard drive. To me, that points to it being the CPU.
 
PCMusicGuy said:
Careful, almost every game these days is multi-threaded. Taking full advantage of multiple processors (cores) is a completely different story and IMO not a single game has really done it.

QFT. There's a difference between being multi-threaded and optimized for multi-core processors. A multi-threaded application can be run on a single core processor.

Its been a while since I took operating systems, but basically, an application can spawn different threads to perform concurrent operations, and the operating system normally determines what gets executed and in what order. An os can direct different threads to different cores/cpus if they are available but it has no knowledge of what that thread is doing. Applications can direct their threads to different cores explicitly, which can lead to better optimization because it should theoretically know which threads are heavier than others. The os has no knowledge of this so it just directs them based on whatever algorithm it uses. Therefore, you will definitely see increases for most games even if they are not multi-core optimized, but probably not as much as you would if it were done by the application.
 
Any Valve game that uses the Source engine would be multi-threaded now. I would guess most new games are now, but I can't say I pay that much attention to it.

You'd think that'd be true considering the amount of blaring they did about it few years back. Anyhow most evidence points towards "multithreaded" games to actually only use 2 cores rather than nCores, where n is an integer like 2 or 4 or whatever.

I doubt the source engine is well optimised for multithreading.
 
Versions 1.3 and 1.3.1 of Doom 3 are also multi-threaded, albeit lightly.
 
Microsoft FSX is great a utilizing multiple cores. I regularly see 90-100% of all 4 cores being used.

For Source engine games you need to type in the console "mat_queue_mode 2". This will enable the engine's true multi core support. I regularly see about 70-80% of all 4 cores being used. It also gives about a 20-30fps increase. You have to put this into the command line or autoexec, it doesn't save this for you.
 
Microsoft FSX is great a utilizing multiple cores. I regularly see 90-100% of all 4 cores being used.

For Source engine games you need to type in the console "mat_queue_mode 2". This will enable the engine's true multi core support. I regularly see about 70-80% of all 4 cores being used. It also gives about a 20-30fps increase. You have to put this into the command line or autoexec, it doesn't save this for you.

Unless they fixed it in a recent update (highly unlikely) this command will make your game extremely unstable. I crash after about 10 minutes of playing with it on. Valve is, as usual, mum on the subject of simple questions like what is it? Why doesn't it work? When will it work?
 
Unless they fixed it in a recent update (highly unlikely) this command will make your game extremely unstable. I crash after about 10 minutes of playing with it on. Valve is, as usual, mum on the subject of simple questions like what is it? Why doesn't it work? When will it work?

I've played with it on for multiple 1.5-2 hour sessions and had no problems at all. It has never crashed once.

This only reason I can see that they don't have this on by default is that some objects flicker sometimes (like a wall sign) maybe once every 10 min. Well worth it to get the extra fps.

I forgot you can also enable these to help further.

r_threaded_renderables 1
r_threaded_particles 1
r_threaded_client_shadow_manager 1
cl_threaded_bone_setup 1
cl_threaded_client_leaf_system 1

Some people say that it causes instability but I have never encountered it for the months that I have been using them.

I hope game/engine developers start investing in some time to get true multi core games out the door like FSX.
 
On my quad core theres no point enabling those comands. Forcing multithreading decreases stability without any preformance boost. It already runs max settings @ 1920x1200 steady at 60+ fps.
 
if I recall, cod2 has a patch that enables it to make use of hyperthreading and multicore cpu's

I could be wrong as this was a while back, but I think it has.
 
Microsoft FSX is great a utilizing multiple cores. I regularly see 90-100% of all 4 cores being used.

For Source engine games you need to type in the console "mat_queue_mode 2". This will enable the engine's true multi core support. I regularly see about 70-80% of all 4 cores being used. It also gives about a 20-30fps increase. You have to put this into the command line or autoexec, it doesn't save this for you.

I saw the same on my dual core rig yesterday while flying around JFK. Both cores were running 99-100% about the whole time the sim was running. Of course you have to have at least SP1 installed to take advantage of that. Out of the box FSX will only utilize a single processor core.
 
To update this thread I can add in the last few years some new games have come out that really push threads:

bf3 would use 6 threads.
bf4 would use 8 threads.

Doom touches all 12 of my threads on my 3930k.
 
Any remotely modern engine probably just uses a thread pool / task system and can technically throw work at any number of cores.

How well it can actually scale is another story.
 
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