For this week's featured video, Game Creators CEO Lee Bamber describes how the company approached Intel about obtaining logos to use with their Windows Vista and Direct X10 game creation tool, FPS Creator X10, only to come away with the goal of integrating multicore support with its software.

Game Creators picked three software-slowing areas to target with multicore, the first being artificial intelligence: "The problem was that when we had a hundred characters rendered into the scene, the CPU slowed down on a single core because there was just too much AI processing going on. We spread out the AI calculation across all the cores, which brought our speed back up... so we could have a hundred characters running around a confined space, and we also got our performance back."

The team then accelerated line mapping, having found that with a single core, calculating all the shadows in a scne with lots of light could sometimes takes up to 180 seconds. "When we otimized with multicore technology on a quad core, the same thing took 53 seconds. So, [there was] a dramatic reduction in the waiting time to be able to go and play the game."

The third area Game Creators focused on was video capture. The studio wanted players to be able to capture footage to share with their friends and actually incorporate into their game-making process for cutscenes, but as soon as the feature was added, the game slowed to a crawl: "What we decided to do was get a separate core, and [we] said that core is just going to be video capture. That core sits there, and then captures the game which was on the other cores. The idea is that when you switch on video capture, the game doesn't slow down. So, you can capture the video at full frame rate, and you actually get a cool video at the end of it that you can use during your game-making process."