The programs I’ve been working on are in C#, though I’d be interested to try other .NET languages. In each, I processed thousands of entities allowing each to rotate and bounce around a window. Different methods of splitting up and dealing with this work in parallel were experimented with.

Rendering, which was performed separately and was responsible for a fair amount of overhead, could be simplified or rearranged to increase overall frame processing time. However, as the graph below (from my first program created) shows there was a noticeable difference between using one and multiple threads. I’m using a dual core CPU on my laptop, and with the application limited to a single core the gain was far less significant; I hope to see whether using a quad core CPU would offer a further gain in the near future.

Although not shown, using 32, 64 or even 1024 threads caused far less of a performance hit that I had expected. The time spent creating the threads at the beginning of the program was notable, however, as was the increase in memory requirements.