Looks like Source

[zeus]

is capable of multithreading.

Anyone have any idea if the Unreal3 Engine is going to be as well?

I have never played any Source games? Any good? I heard a lot of rumblings early on about the distribution system.

[Urtho]

The following extensive quote is taken from here:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sh ... i=2866&p=7

With their highly anticipated Xbox 360 title, Gears of War, on the verge of shipping we were lucky enough to get some information on Unreal Tournament 2007's thread usage from Tim Sweeney, Founder and President of Epic Games. We asked Tim to tell us a bit about what threads UT2007 will spawn, and he responded with the following:

"Currently Unreal Engine 3 runs two heavyweight threads all the time: one for gameplay and one for rendering. In addition, there are several helper threads to which we offload all of the physics (using Ageia's multithreaded PhysX library), streaming, and several other tasks.

We plan to extend the threading support further in time for the release of Unreal Tournament 2007 next year, to further exploit multi-core PC CPUs. Major opportunities for multithreaded optimization include particle systems, animation, and terrain. Also, since UT2007 uses very extensive vehicle and ragdoll physics, we expect that at peak times during gameplay that we'll have no trouble fully exploiting 4 threads at the maximum detail settings.

There are lots of other interesting prospects. I expect we'll be able to exploit as many cores and Intel and AMD are able to ship in the foreseeable future."

It looks like by the time UT2007 makes its appearance on the PC it will be juggling, at times, more than two CPU intensive threads. Tim added one more comment that was particularly interesting: UT2007 will not require a dual core CPU, meaning there's still life for single core in gaming, even in the 2007 - 2008 timeframe.

Despite the relatively gung-ho attitude by Remedy, Epic and other ISVs on being able to use more than two cores regularly, the fact of the matter is that neither Alan Wake nor UT2007 are coming out anytime soon. And it's tough to say how long before other titles actually show a noticeable performance or experience difference between two and four core CPUs. Our pragmatic side can't help but point out that if you're building a high end gaming PC today, going quad-core will help in the future, but we can't really say precisely when that future will be.

*****

<< End of website quote >>

Hope this helps.

[zeus]

Good info. Thanks!

[kaeolian]

Hmm quad core eh ?

sounds like more expense but on the plus side it does give you the option to wait a little longer for prices to settle etc...