Sometimes, I get the shakes.

[jackofallgeeks]

I have Gamer's Fever. After reading This Article about upcoming quad-core computer processors, and recalling my current woes of gaming performance (Annie's a good girl, but when a lot happens she tends to get tired), I'm thinking that an AnniePlus may be in the works within the next year or two. She'd probably only need a new motherboard to support the new processor, and I may get her some accessories to pretty her up a bit, but I'm currently fairly content with her sound and video, which are half of gaming anyways (RAM and Processor power being the other two). Depending on power-requirements, she may need a new power supply, too. And, of course, I'm still planning on cannibalizing Unicron's internals to boost Annie's current RAM and hard-disk space.

Comments

[surichan.livejournal.com]

I may have found you a tabletop roleplaying circle. Maybe. I don't know if they'd be willing to play Vampire, but I happen to know that one of them has been fiending to run a Rifts game for a long time now...

[otakulk.livejournal.com]

I feel the like multiple core technology is a lot like razor technology.... Really... 5 Blades?! WHY?

Anyway, games, unfortunatly, won't be seeing any use out of these chips for a while. Most games are single threaded, meaning a dual core or hyper-threaded chip does nothing for your games right now (but it makes the internet work really well when you are transcoding videos for the ipod!)

There are some sad truths about processors in current games:
1) The pipeline of the P4 never really fills up. Which means you don't make the most of your chip. Thats why they added the extra thread.
2) Games have 3 processor sucking things: graphics, physics, and game logic. A good video card (you get what you pay for) will take care of number 1. the second two really depend on the game.
3) Bus speed needs to get faster before chip speed can really be taken advantage of. You need to get the numbers to the chip for it to work well, especially with context switching and all of that. But have no fear, highly numeric computations (which just slam on the processor) work well because you just have aligned memory zipping through sse2. Most games try to do stuff in vectorized code.

Anyway, if you are having performance issues and you build a new baby, don't dump too much into your proc. I think the best thing is to buy a top of the line mobo, then the lowest chip it can support. That way you can upgrade if you really need to. And, in the words of Enist Hemmingway, buy a lot of ram. You'd be surprized how much faster your processor seems when you have more RAM. My desktop was like another machine when it had 1GB (RIP). Games like RAM.

[jackofallgeeks.livejournal.com]

This is all true. Of course, They (don't ask me who, but I know Cryptic Games is involved) are developing a Physics Processing Unit (PPU) so that a Real Gaming Machine will have a nice Video Card, a PPU, and a lot of RAM (hee hee, Earnest Hemmingway). And right now, Annie's got a nice vid card and 1GB of RAM, and if I cannibalize Unicron she'll go up to 2GB (not to mention the extra 160GB of drive space.