Co-Processors strike back

[TrinireturnofGamez]

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2005Jun/bch20050621031037.htm   <<<<Companies are releasing co-processors for PCI X1 and X4 slots that consome  10-20 watts of power and but out 25 GFLOPs, considering your average pentium only does 10GFLOPS for 100 watts of power... this will be very nice for intensive scientific calculations .

[TriniXaeno]

lol @ coprocessors.

by definition, wouldn't a GPU be a co-processor?

a second processor, dedicated to certain mathematical functions, that is off loaded from the main processor.

but from the link, doesn't sound like this will be coming to consumer level machines any time soon.

Not that we need it, you seldom see games being cpu limited nowadays.

The last I encountered was C&C Generals. Its AI path finding code was so atrocious, that if you selected all your units and told 'em to move to a location, the processor would start begging for mercy. Lag iymc.

That was on 1600 Athlon XPs though. An Athlon 64 3000+ should handle the strain, no probs.

Any other game you know out there that eats cpus for breakfast?

[TrinireturnofGamez]

LOMAC the flight sim , the game never went above 30fps on any setting , once you get in the air and start blowing stuff up the physics drops the game to 10-15fps , even an Athlon FX maxes out at 40fps .

[W1nTry]

Umm... actually in the latest benchies with the 4000+ A64 and the 7800GTX (plus in SLI) it was seen that the processor was becoming the bottleneck again. The Graphics card was flying by whilst its performace was noticed to be hampered, they could only rule it as CPU. Strange eh! and then look at the fact we have the PPU (physics processing unit) soon to be released cause the CPU just ain't up to it in gaming.

[TriniXaeno]

that plane game sounds like it is poorly coded.

lemme rephrase that, any game worth playing that is CPU limited?

lol @ 7800 SLI being CPU limited.

Wow.

But it will be a while before the rest of us even reach that level to begin worrying about our CPU holding back our dual sli 7800 gtx graphics cards.

I hope you bought your lotto ticket!