Valve Particle Simulation:

Last November when we visited Valve Software's offices, the developer gave us a benchmark that shows off how the Source Engine can apply multi-threading to the problem of particle physics.

What is particle physics? Well, it's the interaction of micro-elements within the game - smoke, water, rain, fire. Valve's Tom Leonard told us that "with multi-core, you can have more complicated systems. You can have smoke that drifts off, bounces off the ceiling and then out the door."

"Better, you can have particle systems that actually have gameplay implications. Currently, particle systems are a representation of a game state - something is on fire - but they are fundamentally disconnected from the game world. But how about this - suppose you had a game where you were a wizard, and there was a field on fire. You could be genuinely concerned that the embers flying off the fire in the wind might hit the scroll in your hand - the scroll that has the spell on it to summon rain, the drops from which realistically douse the fire. These kind of experiences re-enforce the consistency of the world."

During our meeting with Valve, we were also told that the nice thing about particle systems is that they scale really well, and this makes them good for a benchmark. Chris Green, one of Valve's visual gurus, helped develop a benchmark to illustrate just that. The benchmark processes a number of particle examples and, depending on how quick it is able to do those, spits back out a number that is representative of performance.


Here's an example of some really fantastic scaling for the quad-core processors and although this doesn't replicate real world gaming, it does show how adding more physics and particle effects (that are offset onto the CPU) into a game engine can result in higher performance for those using quad-core processors. In terms of raw numbers, we're talking about improvements in the realm of 80-85 percent, which is pretty good in the grand scheme of things.

Cinebench 9.5 Rendering:

Cinebench is a free benchmarking tool based around Maxon's Cinema 4D 3D rendering software and the benchmark creator says that performance in the benchmark represents the kind of performance you can expect in Cinema 4D. We've used the CPU rendering benchmark for our testing purposes here and we've recorded the Cinebench Score.



3D Rendering is another area where there can be distinct benefits for multi-core processors and again we see percentage performance improvements in the 70's. That's not to be sniffed at.