How do you get a game to use a Dual Core Processor?

[canadianface]

I have an Intel Centrino Duo at 2.00 GHz and I'm not sure how it works...
Sorry for being such a tech ******, but when you have dual core on your computer, how do you get your games to utilise the double processing power? Or am I correct in even saying that , because I don't think any of my game make use of it at the moment, is it automatic or is there a way to set it? Thanks for the help whoever answers!

[Jaakko]

I would guess it should be automatic??

[Rajinn]

its automatic, if for any reason you doubt its work, press alt-ctrl-del and goto the process tab, find the process (ut3.exe) right click and click set affinity. 0 is core 1 and 1 is core 2.

[Entil'Zha]

Shouldn't the game be written to utilize it ?

[alcom77]

Anadtech wrote a next gen gaming article on UT3 and scaled the benefits of 2 cores over 1 and 4 cores over 2. The result:
2 cores have 60% avg performance increase over just 1 core
4 cores have 20% avg performance increase over 2 cores

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3127

[Ultron]

It's automatic. You have to specify that the game only uses -onethread in the shortcut to start the game and/or set it's affinity to one CPU or core in the Task Manager, to get it to not split threads between cores and CPU's.