IANAGameEngineProgrammer, but I'd say it all depends on how you do the 'publishing' part. To do this in a performant way you need a language that supports pointers, so all you need to do in the thread safe part of your code is to swap two pointers (current and new). I'd assume the thread sync overhead once a frame becomes negligable (is there a good analysis for thread sync overheads on current x86?).