Monday 25 April 2011

Do gaming consoles have pre-emptive multi-tasking OS?

Do gaming consoles have pre-emptive multi-tasking OS?: "
Wondering why games written for consoles and ported to PC's often seem to be system senstive where the entire game is affected by system peformance instead of just the graphics, which should be an independent thread / task in a game. In older multi-threaded games written for PC's, the graphics rate could be bogged down and yet have no effect on the games physics, which ususally consisted of one thread to sample controller inputs at some fixed rate, and a physics thread(s) that ran at some fixed rate to do the numerical integration to convert accelerations into velocties and positions of the objects involved, which in turn sent the positional update to the graphic thread. The frame rate in the graphic thread could take a hit on a slower system, but the core physics wasn't affected. In some of the newer games, it seems that the entire game can take a hit if graphics gets behind.
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Source : Google Reader

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