Intel technical marketing engineer Brad Werth delivers this week featured video, discussing an informative set of slides on "Optimizing DirectX on Multi-Core Architectures" put together by Intel Applications engineer Leigh Davies.

Referring to Amdahl's Law, which states that "the amount of speed up you can get from a parallel processor is limited by the portion of that work which can only be done serially (or what portion of your game has to run on only one processor and only one core at one time)," Werth notes that for games, that portion of work is generally rendering.

He goes on to advise that developers maximize portions of rendering that can be moved off onto other cores, minimizing aspects of rendering which must be done serially. "You need to be testing this and analyzing it during development. You want to be able to know whether each of the changes you make are in fact optimizations or not in terms of your balance of graphics computations and CPU optimizations."