How many CPU cores do games need? bit-tech article

[Sayso]

bitech/custom pc = fail...i really have given up on both after some incredibly bad reviews and overclocking tips.

 

[c.ruel]

When I built my computer around Christmas I ummed and ahhhed over going for a dual core or a quad core. I mainly use my computer for web browsing, watching films and gaming at lower resolutioins. In the end I went for a triple core phenom II 720BE and a 512mb HD4850 and just 2 gigs of ram. Everyone seemed to tell me that it wouldn't play games very well and generally just wouldn't be very good. I was shocked at how well it did everything I needed it to do. This review seems to indicate this, it seems that hardware is far ahead of software. I discovered this with Fallout3 which tends to crash if you have more than a dual core processor.

 

[mcast123]

I need more cores! not for gaming though.

 

[HangTime]

Shame there's no benchmarks for heavily threaded games like GTA4 and SupCom, but it pretty much confirms what I thought, no real benefit (for gaming) from more than 3 cores.

 

[HangTime]

more games will be segmented over cores with each core doing 1-2 parts of a game.

1 for ai
1 for physics
1 for sound/gfx processing.

The problem is that all threads are not equal. Even if you split everything out, 1 thread for networking, 1 thread for input etc, you end up being bottlenecked by only a couple of very demanding threads while the others are just sitting around waiting for it to catch up.

To properly utilise a 6-core processor over a 4-core processor you'd basically need to have the 3 most demanding threads maxing out cores 1-3, AND then having the 4th+5th+...+nth threads combined being more demanding than those, which is pretty much unheard of in gaming.

What tends to have is you have something like this (made up numbers, using 100 as the base for the most demanding thread, which maxes out core 1):

Thread 1: 100
Thread 2: 70
Thread 3: 20
Thread 4: 8
Thread 5: 4
Thread 6: 2
Thread 7: 0.5
etc

And so you can load up cores 1 and 2 with enough threads to max them out, and then have core 3 handling everything else including background processes.
On a 4/6 core cpu obviously you would spread the lesser threads out across them. But the problem is that you can't spread out thread 1, so you will always be bottlenecked by whatever core that thread is running on.

 

[Lleot]

This article just goes to show how much insanity there is in the pc gaming community who make up stupid 'facts' to make themselves look good. "Battlefield bad company 2 NEEDS a quad core because it is a 360 port", "Anyone gaming needs a quad core", "6 cores will boost your frames even higher" And other unsubstantiated bull. FACT: Any high clocked dual core chip is more than enough to run modern games.

 

[Trox]

whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat ? i found bc2 to have stuttering pausing etc on a core 2 duo soon as I went to quad (at the same clock speed) all that went.

They clearly have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to that game.

never liked bit tech anyway think their hardware reviews are shallower than a puddle.

Your system must have been screwed up if you were stuttering and pausing on a C2D, or underclocked.

 

[easyrider]

i bought a 1055t so i can game and still do other stuff.

i can play a game and transcode some of my missus cam corder footage at the same time and not even notice it while gaming

I guess your encoder doesn't use 100 % cpu power?

 

[Speed]

I discovered this with Fallout3 which tends to crash if you have more than a dual core processor.

You are joking right? Utter rubbish!

 

[arknor]

I guess your encoder doesn't use 100 % cpu power?

you know in task manager you can set a programs core affinity right? you can choose what cores a program has acess to most encoders let you choose how many cores you want to use anyway.

give encoder cores 0-3 give the game 4-5 simples

 

[easyrider]

you know in task manager you can set a programs core affinity right? you can choose what cores a program has acess to most encoders let you choose how many cores you want to use anyway.

give encoder cores 0-3 give the game 4-5 simples

I was just pointing out that I was bored of your pimping HEX core post's

What do you do about more important things like HDD access?

In fact post your Harddrive setup please.

Thanks

 

[Dark_Angel]

Okay - both of you 2 need to meet up in real life with your PCs and benchmark for the weekend. It'll settle it that way.

 

[xdantespardax]

What about fast racing games like Split Second and Blur? Wouldn't they benefit from the extra cores? Split Second has some crazy action going on sometimes with all the destruction etc. Isn't a lot of that like physics calculations which the gpu wouldn't do but the cpu would?

xdantespardax

 

[arknor]

I was just pointing out that I was bored of your pimping HEX core post's

What do you do about more important things like HDD access?

In fact post your Harddrive setup please.

Thanks

i have a ramsan i canabalised from work