Intel Brings Home Extreme Multicore Gaming For The Holidays

The era of multi-core PC gaming is here and at the Intel-sponsored Cyberathlete Professional League (CPL) World Tour Grand Finals some of the best players, hardware and software come together.

“We have spent the last year empowering more than 10,000 software developers with thousands of multi-core development platforms,” said Bill Kirby, director of planning in Intel’s Software and Solutions Group. “We are now beginning to see the new threaded applications and multi-core platforms gamers have been waiting for.”

Intel’s multi-core processors, such as the Intel Pentium processor Extreme Edition, let software developers add features to their games that create more realistic experiences. The ability to run different threads – or components – of the game in parallel can not only make the game run faster, but can also make it more engaging.

“In Black & White 2, multi-core technology enabled our development team to move the entire physics engine – the component that makes game objects behave like real-life objects – to a separate thread,” said Tim Rance, chief technology officer of Lionhead studios. “As a result, we have managed to run many more objects in the physics simulation so complex scenes appear much more realistic. We also utilized multi-core capabilities in our title The Movies* and are excited about the future of multi-core processing.”

Another exciting PC game available for the holidays, City of Villains* by NCsoft North America, also benefited from work with Intel’s software team.

“Thanks to Intel multi-core development systems and tools, we are creating cutting-edge games that benefit from these new technologies,” said Jeremy Gaffney, vice president of Product Development at NCsoft. “We see appreciable differences in frames per second and rendering times thanks to the threaded game engine technology.”

Additional multi-core gaming titles are listed at www.intel.com/go/gaming.