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[Alex Allen]

The physics dispatch in Source 2 is where you’ll actually see the multi-core benefit, but it’s easy to overstate how cleanly it parallelizes. The broadphase collision work—AABB tree traversal and spatial bucketing—is embarrassingly parallel, so Valve splits it across the thread pool using a task queue, and that’s where you get the scaling. The catch is the narrowphase contact generation and the solver itself still carry significant serialization; once you push past roughly a few hundred dynamic entities the thread scheduling overhead and the contention on the shared world state start eating the gains. From a hardware standpoint, this is why you’ll notice diminishing returns past 8 physical cores for Source 2 titles—the bottleneck shifts from raw physics throughput to single-threaded solver latency and memory bandwidth on the collision structures. If

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