Next gen Processors/ consoles to be held back by code?

[TrinireturnofGamez]

 Gabe Newell warned that the next gen consoles and processors may be held back  by the level of code produced by the industry , even Carmack himself catched his @55 trying to make a multi threaded version of the quake 3 engine , to the point that he gave up . Thus either companies must spend greater fortunes in game engine development in order to take advantage of the next gen consoles , or they must be limited to single threaded processing on  newer processors and consoles  . 
    The first multi threaded engine scheduled to be released seems to be the unreal 3 engine , it will not hit the market until late 2006 or early 2007 , and not all companies may want to pay  several hundred thousand dollars and a percentage of their game's profits for that or other engines made by 'pros' , and many of our games for coming years will be single threaded , and thus held beack from the full potential of  multicore processors on consoles and PCs .
   This may not be too great a problem , as physics processing units are around the corner , and the driving force for many games has mainly been advances in graphics technology for many years , but it may make all the fuss for multi core and next gen consoles seem stupid when few games actually are multithreaded to take advantage of them . 
   And then again, who listens to fat people anyway ?

http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=510&Itemid=2

[TriniXaeno]

lol

it already has.

while new to consoles, the PC world has been "enjoying" this since Pentium II days. Can anyone say Xeon?

It hasn't actually made a dent in the industry and for very good reasons.

While it may help you fetch data from that Oracle database a fraction of a second faster, it won't do jack for your games. 99.9% of them anyway.

The hope with consoles, is that they would have enough of a "mass presence" to make multithreaded games worth creating.

As it stands, in GATT, there may have been 2 people, if so much, with dual Xeons or Dual AMD processors.

Hardly worth a programmers time to pump out the necessary game code.

Now if every tom dick and mario had a cheapo console that was multi cpu.....

Ready market idmc. That changes everything.

Again, not quite sure in what way...but improved AI and pathing are good options.

but to get back to the point, right now, it won't mean anything and existing code won't be able to use it.

A console needs to be future proof for about 3 years, so nothings wrong with that. during the course of it's life, bet your bottom dollar, titles will be released that will make use of all the power therein!

suhuweat!!!!!!!!!

[Beomagi]

I'll bet my bottom dollar that we'd get titles that barely use the power, or use it incorrectly at first. thread synchronization is a bitch.

If programmers want to push better engines they WILL have to learn it, since rate of cpu speed increases has fallen, and instead companies are going dual and then multi. big development houses should be first ones with it though.