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Software Engineering

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    But any game has a fragile dependence on being able to complete all the computation for the next frame in time to render it with reasonable frequency. Even if your 4 threads are synchronized correctly, it may be impossible to render in a timely fashion, and there's no benefit in a game which is computationally correct but unplayable due to lag and stutter. Commented Jan 7, 2015 at 17:52
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    @Useless: That's not really true. You can for example buffer frames or simulation data to hide any stutter, and there are concurrent designs that are more consistent. Getting all your processing done in X time and requring exact synchronization of that processing are different matters. Commented Jan 7, 2015 at 18:37
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    "a software architecture which depends on independent threads running with specific timings is extremely fragile" Which is exactly why I can't imagine a game that doesn't run at all with 2 cores, but reliably works with 4 cores. Even with 4 cores, the timing will be unpredictable, so the race condition would occur too, even if less frequently. Commented Jan 7, 2015 at 19:50
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    @svick of course. But the question asks "is it possible?" not "is it sane?" Commented Jan 8, 2015 at 3:20
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    Any code with this kind of "race conditions" is flat-out broken, no matter how many cores you run it on. (Especially since there's absolutely no guarantee as to what else is running on the system.) I seriously doubt this to be the cause, given how easily it would trip the game even on a hexacore system... Commented Jan 8, 2015 at 16:04