14 DAY TRIAL // Intel presented a game simulation demo at GDC featuring the Core 2 Quad. The CPU utilization goes to 90% on all 4 cores but manages to pull out 200 frames per second. A single thread takes 50 fps in the same game, that shows a castle made of bricks and a cannon to destroy them with.
The castle has 5000 blocks and each can interact with the other. Obviously, this takes some time to calculate. Intel doesn't use Ageia, but some other proprietary engine. The more objects you have on the scene, the less performance you'll have from the real physical objects. At 100000 blocks, The Inquirer reports that performance becomes tragic.
Another example is made using bouncing spheres within a cube with sphere-sphere and sphere-plane collision detection mechanisms implemented using Newtonian physics. Initially, spheres collide with each other and the walls of the enclosing cube. After collision is detected, collision response code is executed to calculate the new velocity. The user has an option to run either a multi-threaded or single threaded version. Threading is implemented to compute physics equations in a separate thread while rendering takes place in the main thread.
The goal is to showcase how to use separate threads to perform CPU intensive physics computations independent of the actual rendering process. It is beneficial to use multiple threads to perform different tasks. Hence, the performance of an application can be increased by having multiple threads work individually to take advantage of available CPU cycles.
All of the next generation computers and consoles are multi core, so multi-threading will be very important for games and other applications, that will have to start using multi threaded code. Soon after the dual core, we will have quad core and after that, who knows.