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By Locutus at 15/03/2010 - 22:12
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PC hardware guru Loyd Case posted a short report about the Intel-sponsored GDC talk that Civilization V Graphics Lead Dan Baker held at last week's Game Developers Conference (GDC). In the talk Dan Baker explained that the graphics engine of Civ4 required a lot of CPU power and wasn't very good at taking advantage of multi-core systems, which meant that "many systems would start to see serious frame rate degradation as the unit count on screen approached 100."
Quote:
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So Firaxis’ development team threw out the old engine and Baker re-architected a new graphics engine from scratch. The idea was to make the graphics engine smartly threaded, not simply task threaded. The new graphics engine spawns numerous small jobs, which make more efficient use of multi-core CPUs. Aiding this effort is a new message-passing architecture, in which the main game engine communicates with the graphics subsystem through messages. Messages can be prioritized, and even serialized as needed.
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The article also explains that the new DirectX 11 engine will give benefits even to users that don't have DX11 hardware, as the multi-threaded nature of the DX11 architecture will speed things up on (multi-core) DX9 and DX10 systems as well. You can read the full article on hardware site Tom's Hardware.
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