GCDC’08: Intel Tools – turbo for your gaming software

By Michael J Huelskoetter (90 posts) on August 15, 2008 at 2:02 am

When Intel‘s Jérôme Muffat-Méridol and Basher Khan talk about „Intel Tools – Accelerate your PC Software Performance“ during GCDC‘08, they will present two things. First: which Intel tuning software can you use in order to optimize your gaming apps for Intel platforms. And second Jérôme and Basher will focus on Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) showing the huge advantages of this C++ based library for multi-threading purposes without the need for writing the code yourself.

In terms of tuning tools there‘s a variety of helpful applications that you can use for your own projects, and the most of the software is free. Amongst the Intel Tools you‘ll find C++ compilers, threading analysis tools and libraries.

But let’s get to talking about the Intel TBB. First good news: for evaluation and non-commercial purposes its absolutely free of charge. And there is even more good news: Intel TBB is open source so that you don‘t have to buy a licence if you don‘t need commercial support. Just use it and optimize your applications.

But there’s a couple more things which are quite convincing:

  • Due to its task-based approach Intel TBB is more efficient than a lot of other comparable development suites available on the market. This means that developers can accomplish more in less time.
  • Gaming apps and other software scale perfectly when they‘re designed with the help of Intel TBB, because multi-threaded apps use available processors seamlessly.
  • With Intel TBB you can write cross-platform code that is able to run on nearly every system on the market. So it doesn‘t really matter whether you design your gaming app for Microsoft Windows, Linux or Mac OS X. In addition there are nearly no limitations in terms of other threading technologies such as Win32, POSIX and OpenMP.
  • Intel TBB is a real diet for your applications as it allows slim coding compared to software which is based on native threads. A code reduction of 50 percent and more is really possible.

So, if you‘re convinced now that Intel TBB is the answer to all your optimization questions consider attending Jérôme‘s and Basher‘s tech session on Monday, 18. August, 11:30 am, room B. Or invest 35 bucks and go buy the compelling book of James Reinders talking about the Intel TBB in depth.

Categories: Events, Game Development, Graphics & Media, Parallel Programming, Software Tools
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For more complete information about compiler optimizations, see our Optimization Notice.

Comments (2)

August 15, 2008 5:33 AM PDT


Paul Horn		 I thought that the GPU meant a lot more than the CPU when it comes to gaming. Why should anyone care about the CPU on gaming? Not trying to be mean, but really, the games are GPU-limited, not CPU limited. A good example is Crysis.... an Intel dual core CPU at 3 gigs is fine with a card like the new ATI stuff at the high resolutions. Quad core doesnt buy anything because its GPU-limited. COD4 is the same way.
June 27, 2010 10:49 PM PDT


CC		 If that is the case, why don't you just buy an Atom processor and a high end GPU card?
nope...i don't think that will work huh?

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