In Oblivion you could alter ini options to improve performance on some systems by increasing the maximum and minimum threads being used. I'm not a programmer so I don't know what that means except in the most rudimentary sense, but do you think it's likely - now that we're in the age of quad (and more) core CPUs - that we'll see greater benefits in multi-core systems versus single-core systems? I would imagine that the new engine would have to be optimized for multithreading anyway, because of the the console versions of the game (albeit in different ways since the CPUs are different obviously, especially on PS3 with Cell.) So you do you think we'll reap the benefits?

I would hope so. As with DX11 support it would be dumb in my opinion not to utilize multi-cores to their fullest on a newly built game engine.

God, I hope not.

Oh, come on, at least your DX11 trolling has a sort of reasoning, what could you possibly have against not leaving processor cores idle?

I was being sarcastic. Optimizations such as this are a must if Beth wants this game to have long legs.

What? Why the hell not? How on earth could 'making more effective use of multi-core CPUs' be seen as a bad thing?

EDIT: Oh, sarcasm. I didn't realise, sorry. But going by recent posts in this section I wouldn't be surprised to see such a post.

Fallout 3 showed more improvements than Oblivion when enabling threading options in the .ini files. We might see the same here, maybe not. Sure hope Beth does that though. Multicore support is important.

Sure hope so, and also that they make use of 64 bit processors, seeing how they are pretty much standard these days.

Hahaha awesome

Good posts today!

Oh... I'm hoping there is quad core optimization. It's bad enough DX11 seems a no-go, but to bottleneck the engine to two cores is almost sadistic.

Probably multi treading has to be build into the base of the engine so with bad multi core support it will get problems later, now add most pc’s has 2-4 and xbox 360 has three cores you would want to support multiple cores

I think it will do, the FO3 engine was already more optimized for multi-core than the OB engine, so it should be there.

But endless .ini tweaking is fun!

They could use that extra CPU juice to calculate more complex things so yes please.

I don't understand why we would have to edit .ini files if all of this is built into the new OS like windows 7? It should just all be automatic if you have multiple cores the game takes advantage, if you don't it does not take advantage, why make the gamer become a programer? I don't get that part at all...if it is all automatic and seamless then I am all for it otherwise I think Bethesda should take the time to make it so....

... like cloth simulations, better physics and more objects / particles

Of course. I'd really like to see my OC'd Intel i7 stressed out by Skyrim. :user:

I'm sure it will. When Oblivion was released, multi-core CPU's were a relatively new thing, and it was still a benefit to have one. Fallout 3 was much more optimized for multi-core support and that was in 2008. Here we are in 2011, so I'm sure the engine will be well optimized to support today's CPU's, especially considering that they built the engine from the ground up, this time around. I'm very optimistic about this.

I belive Bethesda will do it. Cant really see any reason why they shouldnt. After all they got a reputation to keep up, Oblivion looked amazing, so did Morrowind. Skyrim will look amazing too

Don't think it works like this, AFAIK your program has to be designed around doing several things at once.

Exactly! I wouldn't hold my breath with cloth simulations though.

even electronic brain pancake crystal elderly

Multiple threads let you do two or more things at the same time rather than scheduling them after another. On multi-core system it lets you use your whole processor's power and not just one of the cores (f.e. a sequential program only uses up one core on a dual-core system, i.e. only half your machine's capacity). The recent trend in increasing the number of cores is related to the fact that the technological limits for a single core have already been reached. Hence the only way to get more power is to use more of them, but then the need for multithreaded programming arises, and it's 10 times harder than traditional programming. Nevertheless, game developers have to go multithread if they don't wish their games to get stuck in "tech limbo". So yeah, it's pretty definitive that in time more games will let you utilize more threads, and Skyrim is a likely candidate, especially with the many middleware components (like Havoc Behaviour) that it uses.

If the engine is optimized for multi-threading, does this mean it would be able to use of large amounts of RAM more efficiently?

If not, what is it that governs how much RAM a particular game is able to make use of?

My laptop has 16GB RAM and I have yet to run any game that uses more than 3.7 GB or so. It only seems to have an impact on being able to Alt+Tab back and forth between open windows without crashing a game.

Yes it does. I'm a programmer and I can confirm that. You can't just take sequential code and tell a magical part of your PC "Here, split this up into threads for me". The only way to take advantage of multiple threads is to program for them from day one.