Intel touts quad-core for gaming, again

San Francisco (CA) - At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Intel is repeating a mantra that it has said for several months - quad-core gaming is just around the corner. At the company booth in the Moscone Convention Centre Expo Hall, representatives told TG Daily that extra processor cores could allow for more realistic physics and particle effects. The cores could also make computer-controlled enemies smarter by enhancing artificial intelligence.

If all of this sounds familiar, you would be correct. Intel has been hawking the benefits of multi-core and quad-core gaming for several months and at last fall’s Intel Developers Forum, the company said that quad-core processors could help physics calculations. Intel’s Dan Snyder told us that all of the desktop game demos were running on quad-core systems.

Supreme Commander’s chaotic battle scenes look much better with quad-core processors, according to Intel.

One of the demos was of Supreme Commander, a game that eerily resembles the classic "Total Annihilation" game from the mid-1990s. The game is your classical real-time strategy game where you build units and try to conquer the enemy, but multiple processor cores greatly enhance the experience, according to Intel reps. As you add more processors, the game can scale up to let players control up to 1000 units on each side. During our demo, we noticed that the units had fairly decent artificial intelligence which takes out some of the micro-management that is common to these types of games.

While there were some nice game demos at the Intel booth, the company didn’t introduce any new hardware because it typically saves up hardware announcements for IDF, CES or CeBit.