Technology is vital to every single MMO that we play and is also almost completely invisible. When a game is running well, you don’t think about the technology underpinning that performance; you notice only when it doesn’t work. That’s all the more reason to have pieces like the most recent article about RIFT‘s past year in technology updates and its upcoming multicore support:Â because you wouldn’t know about the hard work that goes into these systems if no one ever pointed it out.
The new multicore processing will allow the game to perform faster and more reliably on modern CPUs without unnecessarily throttling the computer’s GPU. As the article explains it, it’s a bit like changing from a one-lane road to a four-lane highway, allowing faster overall travel by sending more individual bits of information. While the multicore support is still in internal testing, a public beta of the new technology (and performance improvements) is planned for sometime in the near future.
