I just got a dual core laptop and was wondering if the devs are going to make lfs a multi-threaded game anytime soon. I know there is a lot of work for this but in the new year and the year after i forcast 99% gamers will have dual core computers. Just imagine the physics advantages of being able to use more then one processor in lfs... finally i wont sore into the sky when hitting a barrier at 50km/h.

p.s. i am sorry if i am repeating what has already been said but i am in a hurry to be going out for newyears, and didnt search.

yea.. note: 99.9% gamers, not 99.9% of the people that have computers; about 90% of the people that use their home computers and do game... owell

this newyears is going to suck here, the weather is crappy, has been for the past 48 hours or so too

I'm certainly no authority on programming, but based on what I've learned about these things from a user's perspective, I don't see this coming in S2. It'd require radical changes to core LFS code.

As for S3, I've no idea. LFS is written in a way that makes it accessible to a huge selection of PCs - including not-very-new PCs. There may be aspects of the code that Scawen may parallel for dual core processing in S3, perhaps, but LFS is multiplayer racing simulator-oriented rather than visual eyecandy-oriented, and I don't think the PC specs for S3 will leave behind any but the oldest and least-capable of the currently supported range of CPUs.

That's all just my guess, based purely on speculation and my own projections of the development path to date

[edit] XCNuse makes the important point: LFS runs on home computers, not just gaming computers. Many LFSers are not, other than LFS, gamers at heart. They're home PC users who love LFS for its racing simulation.. and the rest of the time just write emails and surf for good deals on Ebay

[edit2] The weather here sucks too. Most of the NYE fireworks here in the North end of Britain are cancelled/postponed due to high winds and wet, wet rain.

haha that just sounds funny;

'In the news today, Great Britain is delaying New Years due to bad weather'

hey it could be worse.. new years could be canceled and your stuck in 2006 lol

Quote from XCNuse :

new years could be canceled and your stuck in 2006 lol

Doesn't sound like a bad idea, actually! There's a few things I wouldn't mind undoing from this year!

Writing code that supports Dual core CPU is VERY hard so I believe based on my other pastime of MS flight sim, from what I've read its keeping both cores working together that's the problem, one core waiting for another to finish processing mean BIG lags and drops in FPS.

But yes if it can be done It could make a Huge difference to LFS

Have a Happy New year

john

It's going to be made more complicated when quad cores are about. If it does get coded into LFS, who knows how many cores we will have available to us? Can anyone say google core.

My question would be, why would we even need it? People on single core systems or dual core, running basically single on this game with high-end graphic cards are maintaining 100FPS or more during races.

I fail to see how multi-threading the game will add any more performance.

if im not mistaken... somewhere in these forums someone (maybe scawen himself) said that the flying barrier problem could not be fixed because it will cause a dramatic drop in frame rates. I know that we dont need multi-threading for graphics. i just think that this will enable the devs to raise the realism of the physics to the next level. Things like flying bumpers and mufflers and exploding engines, aswell as more precise physics.

... i always thought the graphics card was what gave you the greatest gain in FPS... not your processor. If you have a q6800 and a fx 5200 your frame rate will still suck.

its simple really ... with the pace of developemt s3 will be released at a time when multicore systems and multithreaded engines are the de facto standard and scawen wont have any choice other than to get lfs up to standards

I know Scawen has said that he would be looking at it (multi-core support) after S2 for sure (sorry don't have time to go link hunting).


LFS is currently FAR more CPU bound than GPU. This is a consequence of having decent physics as opposed to eyecandy over a spreadsheet (EOS for short, rhymes with POS!)

Yep I too recall Scawen mentioning that this would be something he'd look at further down the road - i'm pretty sure he said or at least implied S3 for it.

Quote from Scawen :

It can't be done very quickly. It would need the graphics and physics to be decoupled and run on separate threads. The method for doing this properly also brings certain other benefits, due to the interpolation between frames possibilities. In other words, the required changes lead on to other things, which should be done at the same time.

It would be about a months work, as a rough guess. I expect to do this some time, as multiple cores seem to be the way of the future. Actually I'm expecting to do this in a future version, after S2, when we could use the extra CPU time to do some things in higher resolution on more powerful computers, while maintaining physical compatibility with slower computers.

http://www.lfsforum.net/showthread.php?t=13982

the reason im asking this is because my laptop cant handel having a lot of cars on the sceen at the same time... it has 1gig of ddr2 ram so i doubt thats the problem. It has the xpress 1100 chipset and graphics from ati. full detail at 1280x800x32 will rarely drop below 30 fps. however when there are a few cars on the screen, im lucky to get 14 fps. i dumbed down the detal and resolution in the game and get higher framerates when alone but the same in with a bunch of cars. I have the turion tl-50. And im guessing its the low l2 cache, having only 256k per core, i dont think it can handle the heavy physics load. If i could run lfs on both cores, im guessing it would fix the problem completly. any thoughts?

Don't forget that multithreading works on single and multiple CPU systems. MS Word and Photoshop (among lots of other serious apps) are multithreaded. Most games aren't and I can only assume that's because most game programmers don't come from the right sort of background. Surely the ability to decouple the AI, graphics and physics engines would be a great thing to have. Prioritise whichever facet is most important to the game (any game, not just LFS) and take automatic advantage of all the available CPU horsepower.

Quote from stevewhite :

the reason im asking this is because my laptop cant handel having a lot of cars on the sceen at the same time... it has 1gig of ddr2 ram so i doubt thats the problem. It has the xpress 1100 chipset and graphics from ati. full detail at 1280x800x32 will rarely drop below 30 fps. however when there are a few cars on the screen, im lucky to get 14 fps. i dumbed down the detal and resolution in the game and get higher framerates when alone but the same in with a bunch of cars. I have the turion tl-50. And im guessing its the low l2 cache, having only 256k per core, i dont think it can handle the heavy physics load. If i could run lfs on both cores, im guessing it would fix the problem completly. any thoughts?

If reducing the graphics detail helps it sounds like that's one main source of your problems. The ATI xpress chipset isn't all that good at 3D processing. If you look at http://www.notebookcheck.net/M ... Benchmark-List.844.0.html you'll see it's pretty much at the bottom of the mobile chipset benchmarks list. 123 marks in 3DMark06 isn't going to impress anyone. Sorry.

Quote from AMacdonaldLFS :

MS Word and Photoshop (among lots of other serious apps) are multithreaded. Most games aren't and I can only assume that's because most game programmers don't come from the right sort of background.

It's more a problem of "syncing" between various threads and that traditionally, because of processor designs, single process games were more efficient.

Word, etc. are typically multithreaded so that the GUI doesn't just stop working when the main process does something time consuming and stops reading the incoming messages queue. Since most games use their own GUI, written under the graphics API, there's no requirement for this as it can be achieved through other means.

should be easy with the connections and support to intel, which exist (bmw)... Would just have to be done... And imho more people does have a dual or multicore CPU than win-vista...

Well, you can't really compare dual core support to Vista compatibility. It's not like not using the benefits of dual core is hindering LFS in any way from working correctly. Not supporting Vista would mean LFS wouldn't run on most of the newly sold PCs, and from a selling point of view it was a good decision from Scawen to do Vista support first, if that's what you're criticising.

Also, there is, imho, no immediate need for dual core support. LFS runs fine in rather high resolutions on a E6300 with a halfway decent graphics card. I've got a [email protected] GHz and a 7600GT. With all graphics settings maxed out and AA and AF overkill, I get an average of around 55 fps with a full grid of cars on 1680x1050 resolution and my fps rarely drop below 50 (even on rallyx courses). So it should be more than playable even on low end systems if the graphics settings are adjusted accordingly.

@stevewhite: what are your AA and AF settings? Do you have draw distance set to minimum and dynamic lod reduction to maximum?

my girl friends laptop has the 200m and a celeron 370 with 512mb ddr ram, and can play lfs better then mine. It just confuses me.

Quote from Linsen :

@stevewhite: what are your AA and AF settings? Do you have draw distance set to minimum and dynamic lod reduction to maximum?

no aa or af here. and draw distance is set to 80m... on my desktop i have an athlon 3400+ and an x800xl overclocked slightly (because the x800xl's cant oc for shit) and i get anywhere from 50-160fps depending on track and grid. Thats with 6xaa and 16xaf. res at 1280x1024 everything maxed out in lfs.

Quote from Vykos69 :

should be easy with the connections and support to intel, which exist (bmw)... Would just have to be done... And imho more people does have a dual or multicore CPU than win-vista...

Using existing software development methods and technology, effective, robust multi-threaded code is orders of magnitude more difficult to write than good single threaded code, suggesting it should be easy is at best naive.
Good multi-processor code is another few steps above multi-threaded code in terms of complexity and difficulty.

A reasonable analogy would be comparing a simple 2D sliding puzzle with a 2x2x2 rubik cube and a 4x4x4 rubik cube - orders of magnitude more complex.

Quote from Vykos69 :

should be easy with the connections and support to intel, which exist (bmw)... Would just have to be done... And imho more people does have a dual or multicore CPU than win-vista...

youre seriously underestimating the work involved in recoding a singlethraeded engine to a multicore one (and im afraid scwen is as well with his one month estimate)

Quote from stevewhite :

my girl friends laptop has the 200m and a celeron 370 with 512mb ddr ram, and can play lfs better then mine. It just confuses me.

That's a bit odd. Unfortunately, I don't know much about these things, but what people sometimes suggest in cases like this, is making sure there's no spyware and all other sorts of unpleasent stuff on your PC .

nah, its clean. I have tried everything... im just gonna put up with it. I put the graphics to the bare minimum. the absolute lowest i could and still got barely 20fps with a few cars. i only lose 10 fps from highest to lowest quality settings with out aa and af. and lose maybe 20-30 fps when alone and with others.

how many more fps does her computer get when you have all the graphics settings exactly the same?

from what i can tell, both Xpress 1100 and Xpress 200M both use integrated X300 GPU's, so they should be on par graphics wise.

do the two of you play any other games together? and if so, do you notice that she gets better performance than you in those games as well? if not though, you should download a benchmark, i'd suggest 3dmark2001 SE. it's really old, but it's closer to what's used in LFS than the newer benchmarks.