Trion Worlds announced in a recent “Letter to the Community” that its flagship game, “RIFT” will soon have multicore support.

Lead engineer Dan Hollinger, who works for Trion Worlds and goes by the online name “Snedhepl”, said “this is the biggest technical change we can make to ‘RIFT’ without rewriting the game from scratch.”

What is multicore? And what is a core, anyway? Carmel resident Michael Seals, who works for an Internet security company called OPTIV, explained:

“A core, or processor, carries out instructions. It does one instruction, then when it runs its course, the core then proceeds on to the next instruction. In the past, computers only had one core. Then computers later had two cores. Now, computers have one core with multiple processors. For instance, each of the computers in the normal household has four processors, which means each computer can handle up to four instructions at a time.”

So why does this matter to “RIFT”? Hollinger explained in a letter to the “RIFT” community how it matters:

“When ‘RIFT’ was designed, it included a program called DirectX9 (also known as DX9). This allows our game to talk to your CPU and graphics card. Unfortunately, DX9 is showing its age and it was designed with single-core computers in mind. Nowadays, multiple core computers are the norm. Soon, ‘RIFT’ will have true multicore support, which will allow us to use all the cores on your computer without throttling your CPU and graphics card.”

Hollinger wrote a layman’s terms example:

“To put it in a non-technical way, imagine you were designing a vehicle to transport people from CPUville to Graphics Card City. The people are the rendering instructions. To get people to Graphics Card City, we’d make a bus. It can transport the most amount of people given that the road from CPUville to Graphics Card City is a one-lane road. Several years later, the road from CPUville to Graphics Card City has been upgraded to a four-lane highway. Is a bus still the best choice? Well, think about it: It takes time to load up a bus full of people. It takes time to accelerate and change lanes. So, maybe it’s not the best choice, so we switch to cars. Yes, you’d have to dictate where people park once they get there, and you need to dictate how they get there. They might even crash (yes, I’ve been dying to make that joke here). But with cars, you can load them up quickly and get them zipping down the road. Multicore support is like that, only the cars are the speed and the lanes are the cores.”

Release date of multicore support is currently unknown.