A lot of people do not know what kind of gains they are looking at if multithreading is done right either.. some believe it will only double their speed because they have a dual core processor.. *and in fact if that was all that's done it would be true.
But... it just so happens that I have a video of parallization at its height.
Here are 16,384 creatures using 800 pipelines at 1 Ghz, of a video card to simultaneously jobfind, pathfind, animate, and still have enough power left to render, shade, and so all those video card things.
*And they are hauling stone... I honestly take it as a sign for dwarf fortress.
http://download-developer.amd.com/GPU/videos/Froblins.H.264.HD.136MB.mov"16,384 characters calculate the shortest path to their goal, while avoiding each other, obstacles and congestion.
Character color corresponds to the goal type (Blue - sleep, Green - Mine gold, Red - Pick mushrooms, Beige - Drop off treasure at pagodas).
Characters form lanes, avoid collisions and move smoothly past each other.
Characters react to dynamically placed obstacles/hazards and alter their global path
Froblins dynamically update their paths to take into account newly available goals. "
Wow.. sounds like a cure for every single fricking annoying dwarf trick at once....
No getting near creatures, no running into closed areas because they already pathfound there, no being stupid, and it happens at well north of 60 FPS for 16,384 of them.
And here we are getting frustratingly low FPS with 50 dwarves.
I renamed mine from .mov to .flv so I could play it in gom player. I would recommend you do the same since quicktime sucks!
* the demo uses 3,000 froblins for most of it so they are less crowded when showing off rendering features, to see 16,384 frobllins skip ahead to 6:40ish