Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands uses up to six CPU cores

Printer-friendly versionSend to friend

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands is the latest part of the PoP series. The game is currently developed by Ubisoft and will be released for PS3, Xbox 360 and other consoles on May 18, 2010 (North America) respectively May 20, 2010 (Europe). The PC version is scheduled for release on June 8 (NA) respectively June 10 (EU). PC Games Hardware interviewed Alain Dessureaux via mail in order to get information about the technology The Forgotten Sands is based on. According to the Lead Programmer the game will utilize up to six CPU cores and offer nice Screen Space Ambient Occlusion although the Scimitar engine is still a DirectX 9 renderer.

So, what is our time to change to many core to play the games, it's sound like Price of Persia The Forgotten Sands will start the new programming engine to use 6 core CPU, will it give performance to a console when we play to it? this is a couple intervewing from programers with PCGH.

PCGH: How many cores are supported and what is the expected performance gain from 2, 4 or even 6 or 8 cores? What different systems run in separate threads? What kind of scheduler do you use? Does your engine profit from SMT/Hyper threading or do you recommend turning it off for maximum performance?

Alain Dessureaux: Our engine will use up to 6 cores to maximize performance depending on the machine, but the minimum is 2 cores. We have a lot to process per frame, considering the graphics features in the game, the physic and ragdoll, etc. The engine had to be optimized to support 50 enemies at the same time. We achieve this by distributing the work among as many threads as we can run concurrently. The highest gain will be seen, when moving from dual (2) to quad (4) core. Additional cores will be utilized if they are available.

PCGH: Will PoP: The Forgotten Sands offer an advanced physics simulation where physics do not affect visuals only but are used for gameplay terms like enemies getting hit by shattered bits of blown-away walls and the like?

Alain Dessureaux: We have some advanced ragdoll code running in the game. For instance, it is possible to kick an enemy and provoke a sort of "bowling pin” effect: as he is falling down, the enemy will collide with other enemies, and take down the ones closest to him. This allows the player to handle combat against multiple enemies (up to 50) without being overwhelmed.

PCGH: Do you utilize self programmed physics libraries do you decide to implement Middleware like Havok, ODE or Physx? Do you even plan to offer support for Physics, calculated on the GPU (GPU-Physx)? What is your personal opinion about this alternative?

Alain Dessureaux: We are using Havok as our physics engine, powering breakables and it has allowed us to use ragdolls for the first time in a Prince of Persia game! The physics is calculated on CPU, and the GPU is used at its full capacity for rendering purposes.