Mirror's Edge is a console port scaling with more than two cores on PC. It even scales quite a bit with a dedicated physx-processor, which means, that there's not too much unused cores left in the system.
Eh?
The game does not scale appreciably with 2 extra CPU cores yet it scales dramatically with a GPU or a PhysX card. Clearly NVidia is taking the piss.
Now, of course you could fill those remaining cores up with physics calculations, but how to control the amount of processing time?
Huh?
Cores are ~ idling
If, in some game, I turn on MSAA, the performance hit varies with the scene depending on a variety of factors. There's no pre-determined "limit of scaling" programmed-in to MSAA. It goes as fast as it can. Why would CPU effects-physics be any different?
Let's say 2 cores run the effects physics and graphics at 7fps, while 4 cores can run the same at 30 fps, with GPU doing the effects physics, it runs at 60fps. That would be credible and indicate genuine worth.
But if 2 cores and 4 cores hardly differ in performance then it's quite obvious that we're being marchitectured. No surprise, of course.
The CPU should be maxxed. What else is the game doing? Since the game is able to run on a dual-core PC, the extra cores are
genuinely spare.
You simply cannot sell a PC game running decently only on quad- or octacore machines.
So you think running only decently on 8800GT or better is reasonable?
As it happens this is a non argument, because these are just effects physics, like god rays or bloom in graphics. Atmosphere, not gameplay.
See above. I have difficulties imagining how to effectively control the FLOPS used for physics. The obvious solution would be a slider for the amount of pieces some stuff would break up into, but AFAIK every instance of this slider would have it's own set of pre-tesselated geometry to work on, i.e. pre-defined breaking points.
If the game engine was designed properly it would detect the frame rate and adjust. Same thing goes for graphics effects, game engines should be dynamically scaling effects to framerate.
edit:
As to how scalable physics are in Games, just look at the link you've given above: A 9600 GT achieving a mere 10% higher Fps-Performance than the might 8600 GT. Physics does not even scale that well within Nvidias Geforce-GPUs - and there rather with clockrate than with number of cores.
Incompetence in software/hardware is no defence when the convenient, marketing-driven, end result is that CPU performance on 4 cores is useless.
Jawed
