Some things are worth the wait. And after a cursory tease 5+ years ago, RPG gamers are getting the payoff with the November release of Dragon Age*: Origins by BioWare.
There's a lot there to get excited about. The game is a blow-the-house-down stunner, full of epic battles, fractured heroes, intricate storylines, and rich visuals. For software developers, what might be even more intriguing is this: BioWare redefined its entire development process to take full advantage of multi-core chip architecture. With a little help from Intel.
Threaded Game Engine Helps Create New World In EA BioWare’s Dragon Age*: Origins
By mid-2005, a technology shift was fully underway: replacing single-core architecture with multi-core. For BioWare, this posed a very real dilemma. Already a year into developing Dragon Age: Origins, they realized it would be released onto a very different platform than most PC gamers had used.
As the saying goes, "change or die." So they changed. Working with Intel engineers and using Intel® development tools, BioWare went back to the drawing board and embraced parallelism from all sides (including understanding the pitfalls that are the bain of an ISV's existence). The results are speaking for themselves.
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