Introduction

In today’s article we’re continuing to take a look at Battlefield 2142’s performance with various hardware components; in Part 1 we rounded up a variety of high-end cards with the GeForce 7950 GX2 and Radeon X1950 XTX coming out on top, and now we’re looking at Battlefield 2142’s performance with the latest CPUs from AMD and Intel.

Since Battlefield 2142 is based on the same game engine as its predecessor, Battlefield 2, BF2142 has not been programmed to take advantage of multi-threading. This means that the second core found in the latest dual-core CPUs sits unused in Battlefield 2142. In our series of game engine interviews last month, we asked DICE senior graphics programmer Marko Kylmamaa a couple of questions about this and other topics:

FiringSquad: First, Intel and AMD are pushing dual core processors and within the next year four core processors are due to be released. How will DICE support this kind of tech in the Battlefield 2/2142 engine and will there be any need for special programming to fully support multi core CPUs in PCs?

Marko Kylmamaa: While a program geared towards a single-core machine may run fine, with some exceptions, and perhaps even somewhat faster on a multi-core machine, in order to realize the real performance benefits a careful attention has to be paid into structuring the code for the correct granularity in mind, to make it suitable for multi-core execution. With the introduction of the next generation consoles and the PC hardware, the whole industry is in a learning phase for understanding the differences between the traditional multi-threading approaches, and multi-threading for multiple cores. DICE is working closely with hardware vendors in making sure that all of the future titles make the maximum use of the available multi-core architecture.

FiringSquad: The 64-bit CPU has taken longer to really appear in mainstream PCs than some people expected. Do you think 64-bit CPUs will become more popular and how does DICE support it in their Battlefield 2/2142 engine ?

Marko Kylmamaa:One of the problems with harnessing the full power of 64-bit CPU’s is the lack of adoption of 64-bit operating systems. Due to this it’s difficult for the game developers to make full use of the 64-bit execution potential without providing a separate set of executables compiled for the different operating systems. The current Battlefield 2 technology has been thoroughly tested on the 64-bit architecture for guaranteeing a solid performance, and optimizations have been made where possible with such architectures in mind.

So basically Marko confirms that while Battlefield 2142 doesn’t take advantage of all the features found in today’s latest CPUs, it sounds like they’re working on integrating that in future titles. Unfortunately though it seems that won’t include Battlefield 2142.

In any case, we’re still eager to see how the game scales across various CPUs, so let’s get started!