Just curious if Skyrim will ever support it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynft6QkhLzw
Apparently, Skyrim can utilizes quad-core cpu, though not 100%.

Quad core is fully supported. Just not utilised.

Indeed, the issue is that one core is being hammered and the rest are lazing around doing not very much, waiting for the hammered core to catch up.

The wonders of DX9 for you

Just because the game utilizes 4 cores does not mean it works properly. The game doesn't touch a single hyperthreaded core. That's not a symptom of improper utilization, that's a symptom of simply not SUPPORTING quad core configurations.

The game works properly (and is fun to play) on a computer with four cores, just like it does on a computer with six core or with two cores. What's more, Bethesda will help you get the game running on your computer with four cores, provided it meets the other system requirements. Therefore, the game fully supports quad core processors.

If the game did not support quad core CPUs, then you would not be able to play the game will on quad cores, and requests for help running the game would be met with a 'we do not support this computer configuration, please buy a computer than meets the minimum requirements'

Treating a quad core processor like a dual core processor is not a method of support. Just move on, you seriously don't belong in this discussion.

To get any real use of 4+ cores in the game they'd likely have to rewrite large portions of the engine, with possible repercussions for how scripting, physics and other stuff work unless they want those to become a bottleneck, and that might require altering the scripting language if the current system assumes a non-parallel environment, which would lead to rewriting the game's content too and testing it all over again. All while they're struggling to make the current code work properly.

No, they will not do that at this point in the game's development cycle.

It is if it works. It does work - quad cores can not only run the game stably, they can run it to the level of performance the devs suggest gives a good experience with the game. And I'd agree with them. Quad cores are fully supported.

You are talking about utilising four cores, which is a valid discussion point, but nothing to do with support.

translation: I'm cheap and only have a dual core and am crapping on quad core owners because quad cores are not needed in 2011.

Who, the developers? I expect they have quad core machines. I have a 4c/8t CPU personally.

It actually seems to work for me. I get about 40-60% load spread over my eight processor threads (i7 920). Disabling HT or forcing affinity for only two cores doesn't seem to do anything for performance though. Maybe Skyrim is intended to utilize up to 8 cores and I'm one of the few it works for?

Just set the affinity of your Skyrim executable to one, two, or whatever cores via the task manager and you will see how much performance you gain/lose.

On my system (Core i5 2500k) I saw areas where going from singlecore to dualcore simply doubled my fps. The third core added another 30-50%, but going to full quadcore didn't do anything. But I'm sure there will be times where four cores will be at advantage over three.

So yes, Skyrim definitely supports and uses up to four cores on a quadcore CPU.

It's a common misconception that a 2.8 GHZ quad core would run 90% faster than a 3 GHZ dual core if it were just used properly. In practice the dual core will run up to 7% faster most of the time.

Not every task can be parallelized, most of the time you need the interim result before you can continue with a calculation. On http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer, the programmers know beforeheand the number of threads they are allowed to use and they optimise they tasks and algorithms accordingly. This can't be done for PCs and their many available processors or the short-lived tasks of a video game. You'd complain again when the game runs like crap on anything with less than 6 CPU cores. That said, remember that the game is optimized for a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_%28processor%29.

Of those tasks that can be parallelized, the majority is already running on a 512+ core processor - your GPU. You aren't really asking Bethesda to let this stuff be done by your 100 GFLOPS CPU instead of your 1000 GFLOPS GPU, are you?

The CPU does stuff like physics, collision, scripts and AI and and otherwise is busy loading information from the disc and providing a constant stream of raw data for the GPU. You can manually set iNumHWThreads=4 in the [General] Section of the INI, and the game will spread its CPU load more evenly, but that's it. There is only so much CPU power required by the game, and if two cores can do that work easily, four cores will be even less busy. The only thing this will accomplish is a slightly lower electricity bill and a bit more FPS-stability when there are sudden CPU-loads ingame. Don't do it if you want more stability for other programs running in the background (e.g. virus scanner or email program).

Huh? This game and the Fallout series were developed for the 360 and PS3 which are multi cored (3 and 7 equivalent). In fact they off loaded a lot of the rendering to the extra cores (shadows) to compensate for the older slower video cards in hthe consoles.

Calling the PS3's SPEs "CPU cores" is stretching things a bit far. While they're definitely more than stupid number crunchers, many of the things actually done on them is stuff you'd run on the GPU if it hadn't been old on the console's release day in Europe. See page 51 of http://www.guerrilla-games.com/publications/dr_kz2_rsx_dev07.pdf, for an example. About the only thing among those a sane programmer wouldn't try to have off the CPU is the scene graph traversal for generating render tasks.

I don't think this is actually happening. The only http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/onloaded-shadows-moving-shadow-map-generation-from-the-gpu-to-the-cpu/ to doing this I've seen suggested it'd take an Intel i7 core a significant fraction of a second to generate one low-res image asynchronously, and even if the consoles' PowerPC cores with their tweaked vector instructions beat x86 at arithmetic to some degree, they are not http://uk.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-590/architecture.

As JOG detailed above, plenty of assumptions were likely made in making this game run as it does on the Xbox 360 and PCs, and those assumptions might not stretch far past three cores.