GDCE2010: Parallelize your Games with Intel Threading Building Blocks

By Michael J Huelskoetter (90 posts) on August 18, 2010 at 3:35 am

Here at Game Developers Conference Europe 2010 Dr. Mario Deilmann from Intel talked about "Parallelizing Games with Intel Threading Building Blocks". As I followed his tech talk and took some pictures of his presentation it's time to summarize his speech and what you as a developer can learn from Mario's session.

1. Functional decomposition of games is limited as it doesn't scale properly on n-core systems. That's why you should decide to follow the tasks model as it scales on dual-, quadcore  and n-core machines best.

2. If you wanna extend your C++ based games to parallelism you should consider using Intel TBB as it does thread management, scales on available hardware threads properly, support nested parallelism and many things more.

3. Clicking through our Flickr gallery of Mario's presentation help you to understand Intel TBB and its functionalities better. So learn about the fundamental principle of Intel TBB and some details about the TBB task scheduler (which supports task stealing).

4. If you want to know the differences between the traditional parallelizing of games and the Intel TBB approach then Mario's presentation is suitable, too.

5. More things to learn by Mario: possible effects of task-to-thread affinity, that you should use Intel TBB's parallel memory allocators, that using the Intel TBB's parallel_for() construct is a 2-step process, that there are more Intel TBB parallel loop patterns which can be used and that you can use Intel TBB's low-level API to implement useful threaading patterns.

And if you don't believe that well-known game developer companies use Intel TBB already you can be convinced quickly.

Video tip: If you belong to those people who'd rather watch TV than reading an article you should give our video interview a try...

Categories: Events, Game Development, Parallel Programming, Software Tools
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