Intel talks about multithreading physics

INTEL showed a rather interesting game simulation demo at the show that brings the Core 2 Quad to its knees. The CPU utilisation goes to 90 per cent on all four cores but can perform 200 frames per second (FPS). A single thread takes some 50 FPS under the same game.

The demo is a castle make of bricks and big blocks and you can destroy it with cannon. The castle has 5,000 blocks and each one can interact with each other. This is very expensive as it takes a lot of calculations. Intel doesn’t use Ageia - it uses some other proprietary physics engine. The more objects you have on the scene, the less performance you have from the real physical objects. If you use 10,000 blocks the performance becomes tragic.