Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Ladies and gentlemen, we are all living in the future!

Actually we are living in the present.

> The CPU is hardly ever the thing you're waiting 
> for. (Hardcore gaming aside... and even then, most of the hard work is 
> GPU-limited.

Not always. There are many computationally-intensive things that games
have to do with the CPU because the GPU is too specialized for that.
(And besides, it's already pretty busy calculating pixel shaders to do
other things.)

The is not just theoretical, because some games *do* benefit from
extra CPU cores, and in fact some of them require additional cores if
you want to turn on certain features.

One recent example I have played is RAGE. It will work on a dual-core,
but will benefit from four cores. However, more to the point, there's
an optional graphical feature in it that will require you to have at
least *six* cores or else it will be too inefficient. (Yes, I tried
it with my quad-core, and it indeed was too heavy for it.)

(The game engine in RAGE uses tons and tons of textures. The game
developers can basically add any specialized texture anywhere in the
entire game world. The engine loads and unloads textures on-the-fly,
as the player moves in the world. Naturally because of the sheer amount
of textures, they take an enormous amount of memory, and because texture
RAM and disk space is limited, the "least important" textures will have
a lower resolution. What the feature in question does is that, while
loading textures to the GPU's texture RAM, it will "sharpen" them to
add more detail and remove pixelation. Since textures are being constantly
loaded in an almost endless stream, this requires a lot of computing
power, which is where the extra CPU cores come handy. Or this is what
I have gathered from the info on the subject out there.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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