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Regarding the clamping of the thread starter. I asked this often to myself. I watched a lot of in cockpit videos of modern fighter planes like the F-15, F-16 and F-18. My guess is that modern fighter planes have a clamping mechanism. For e.g. watch this video At 1:55 he pulls the stick to the left like crazy to end the turn. While pulling the stick left he is under a lot of G. You even see how he goes a bit to far to the right after centering but then back to center. The plane... perfectly... 0 degree roll. It's even more impressive when you watch F-16 videos. They have this small stick on the right. Look how tiny movements they have to do and how perfectly the rolls are. Does anybody know something about roll stability mechanisms in modern fighter jets?

@1: No I'm not a member of the ED team. I do other projects... at the moment nothing graphics related. @2: No. It should be totally possible. But I'm not an expert in flight simulation engine design. But in the end you have: terrain rendering, water rendering, entity rendering, sky rendering, sound rendering (I read somewhere that they use one thread for sound exclusively in DCS 1 for advanded effects like sonic boom, can somebody confirm this?), cockpit rendering, physics, networking... so nothing totally different from other game engines like Unreal Engine, CryEngine, Frostbite and what not. But a flightsim engine have to has a very good scaleable terrain/entity renderer because you have square kilometers of playfield. The DCS 2 demo videos I saw the last week where very impressive. The terrain looked good from every altitude. You even saw curvature of the earth. @3: The operating system kernel is clever. At least earlier in WinNT and since Windows Vista/7 again. As far as I remember they did a complete new task scheduler for Win7 based on WinNT. Something like this. So the engine, If there're enough hardware threads, could set affinity for heavy load threads which then run exclusively in one hardware thread. I dont know what DCS 1 or 2 does... will do. @4: Could depent on 2) based on how your game engine works. This topic on it's one is heavy science. You can spent years developing a bad ass engine... see Unreal Engine... Cry Engine... the cost-benefit ratio must be given for this. On the other hand engines like Unreal and Cry are very flexible engines. At least for now DCS is very aircraft concentrated. We got closer to the ground with the helicoper simulations and even closer with Combined Arms. So here things must improve. In the interview on mudspike Waggs mentioned something in this direction. So if you want to drive a tank over detailed terrain or walk soldiers. You need some addional things in your engine. If they would start today with a new engine the base facts didn't change. Multi-threading is nothing new. The only thing which could lead to an adapated design is the knowledge the developers gathered while developing DCS 2. @5: Didn't know about HSA. But yeah... the text content is not that new. At first we had GPUs which where fixed to rastering triangles. You had some register combiners to manipulate color. Transformation, Clipping, Lights and fog where baked. Then the vendors realized that it's better to have a more general GPU design. So the (nearly) general purpose GPU architecture combined with shader languages where born to be able to write SIMD kernel (vertex-, pixel-, geometry-sahder) for the GPU. This indead ended in CUDA and at the end in OpenCL. We created a parallel universe CPU | GPU. Companies tried to give developers tools at hand to utilize the amount of available CPU hardware threads with libraries like Intels Threading Building Blocks. The HSA article to me sounds like the next stage of Intels Threading Building Blocks. Yeah games will profit from it. But the developers have to adapt. For example on a playstation this kind of heavy multi-core programming is standard.

Dev here... At first I'm also looking forward to DCS 2.0 and all the new stuff. I try to give an answer why it's not easy to get a faster game engine by just adding more CPUs to the computer. In software development an additional CPU is not like an additional turbine on a jet. An additional available hardware thread doesn't just scale linear. This is due to the nature of the fact. It's more like you have ONE knife and plate in the kitchen and try to prepare two salads by adding a second person in the hope this will be faster. You have to share your knife and plate, clean it in between the sharing, store the salad somewhere.... well strange example. But it somehow explains the problem of resource sharing (knife/plate) and multiple threads (persons). The game engine has to be designed around multi-CPU. That said it's not always easy and efficient to just split the algorithmic tasks (example above) for multi-CPUs. The facades of the engine must be suitable for multi-CPU. So you could have one thread per scene graph traversal, object sorting, physics simulation, sound, data streaming from storage (landscape) for example. All theses tasks are suitable to be handled by a specific thread (hardware thread). And then there's the GPU. Currently every mainstream game/engine in the industry is build around potent GPUs... multi-GPUs. GPUs are designed to do really... really... r... fast raster graphics based on tringales. So at the moment in the area of graphics the only task of the CPU is to feed the GPU(s) with data (triangles, textures, shaders) in the most efficient way. Well of course we have multi-thread access to the GPU since DX11. But you would have todo a lot of stuff so that one hardware thread becomes a bottleneck for the GPU. GPUs on the otherhand are designed in a SIMD fassion. (single instruction multiple data => e.g. a single shader (kernel/instruction) transforms multiple vertices (data)). So they run many kernels (by shader units) in parallel on your data. Due to this fact you can just put one additional GPU in your system and it scales to some point because of more available shader units. But there're problems too. The GPUs also have to share data... ;) Until DCS 2.0 isn't released it's pure speculation how the engine is designed. You can do a lot of stuff if you have time and money. But the cost-benefit ratio must be given. In this sense Wagss statement: "CPU multi-threading is not being pursued as it will provide little if any gain". Cheers

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