• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Quads finally coming into their own?

a quad has far more benefits than just gaming alone. those that keep saying a dual core is better for games are just sore that they spend more money for a wolfdale dual core than purchasing the 65nm q6600.
those guys need to learn that the clock speed race ended a long time ago and its all about multi-threadding for now and the future.
 
The 6 core one is which i ment, the other 2 cores inside the PS3 are used for other things like OS yeah? (i know the cpu used comes with 8).
It has ONE main core with 6 SPE cores that comes with it.
7th SPE core is disabled for yields. 8th one is reserved for OS. XBox360 has 3 MAIN cores.

So, yeah, saying PS3 has 8 cores is stretching it. Even 6 is not really correct. ;)

GTA IV is just badly programmed, not gonna repeat that again, everyone knows. It was so even on console level.

Without going fully into to Cell architecture it is fairly accurate to call it 6 cores in the PS3 (6 cores that a game can use that is, the actual chip is 7 cored).
 
Without going fully into to Cell architecture it is fairly accurate to call it 6 cores in the PS3 (6 cores that a game can use that is, the actual chip is 7 cored).

mmm I dunno I would not really call the 7 SPE's "cores" as they're just too specialized. Quad core in terms of the OP and in general are referred to the more generic cores, IMO.

And, without going fully into Cell architecture, I believe games cannot just "use" the SPE. They don't run generic code, and even PC programmers have a hard time coding in dual/quad core. SPE's only execute vectorized fp code and I don't think this qualifies as a "core" in our terms.
 
Actually GTA was made for 3 cores on the 360, then ported to 6 cores on the PS3 and then ported to the PC (3 threads again afaik).

The 360 CPU has two threads per core, so effectively six threads are available to the programmer.

Its got more horsepower than people give it credit for, same with the PS3's CPU. Their bottleneck is elsewhere.

The Euphoria engine loves CPU power, and dual cores can run it well if some of the more intensive cpu settings are dropped a bit.
 
dx11 means nothing in terms of quad/dual core and multithreaded gaming. Its simple its very hard to split gaming into separate threads. its fairly easy to split the physics, the ai and the graphics drivers, the audio and a few other bits into separate threads, but its very very very hard to further subdivide the power draws into further threads. Physics as a separate thread, yes, physics as 2 threads of itself is a completely different matter entirely. Now the problem is theres only so far you can go sticking entire sections on separate cores as the power draws, AI, physics and the 1/2 others might need more than is available on one core, as it can't separate out a new thread for a new core, new cores are useless.


GTA doesn't need quad cores, it doesn't need 1gb memory for textures either, the fact that neither console has 1gb of memory should hint at that. Theres some major failures with their port, some major things missing and some major design flaws. The power it needs yet it looks fairly poor, lots of poor quality textures, lots of popping in and out, lots of crappy shadows. Its just a really poor port and using it as an argument as to why we need quads isn't valid, in any way at all. Neither should you buy hardware for a single game unless you play it all the time. I can understand if WOW was a computer killer and needed a 4.5Ghz quad core and you did play it for 3 hours a day, buying a comp for it makes a little sense, likewise if you use photoshop with massive pictures every day 8gigs mem would be worthwhile. If you'll play gta, probably once, then forget about it for 4 years then buying a quad just for it is rather silly.


There will be few games and far between that need quad cores, Supcom isn't the start of things to come, its simply different to 99% of games out there, its a huge database with a fairly simply 3d interface, most games simply aren't like that at all, RTS's, and only a very small percentage of RTS's are cpu intensive, always have been and always will be. Supcom wanting a quad(or more) has no meaning, it doesn't indicate all games will need similar power eventually, most games aren't massive databases constantly crunching numbers.

It will probably be a long, maybe a very long time before you really see games using multithreading in the true sense, IE physics part of the engine being able to generate new threads itself and spread its load. IT was fairly easy to separate the physics from the ai and the sound/gfx, there was no reason they ever had to be in the same thread, but being there was only one core it was simply easier to generate one thread in one .exe , it was never necessary. So they've split that up, it was a piece of cake, the next step for true multithreading is going to take ages and few games will do it. Things like Supcom, because each unit can be taken individually fairly easily will be the first and maybe only types of games to do so easily.

A lot of the leading people in the industry are saying those that can really program WELL in true multithreading are very very rare and need to be truly exceptional. The average programmer isn't capable according to the most respected people in the industry.


How many games have you made then? You could teach these armchair programmers a thing or two I bet!!
 
There is already threads touching on this like a few bellow this.

BY THE TIME a Quad is properly use and needed there will be far better Quads.

The Q6600 is old hat 65nm Non Native (2 Dual Cores bolted together) Tech, hungry on power, runs hot and no SSE4.1

To worry about it over 1 complete POS of a Badly Console Ported game is dumb IMO.
 
Last edited:
How many games have you made then? You could teach these armchair programmers a thing or two I bet!!

wow, i remember in all of that saying the highest people in the industry are saying this, not me, but thanks for assuming I'm a multimillionaire running one of the biggest gaming developers, I guess thats a compliment.
 
If you only upgrade every 1-2 years then you should go Quad/I7.

I dont doubt for 1 min that Larrabee will not fail to own every resource you have to atchieve max performance.

Its all heading in one direction. intel own fastest interconnect/memory architecture atm. And are pushing software rendering on the x86 cpu. And the Larrabee is going to be xxx86 cpu for rendering.

Intel want you/us to go SMP on both cpu and gpu with their guidance, so they have the best hardware solution. both integrated and plug in.

Intel have one if not the best mass manufacturing capability in the world.

Im sure it will become obvious a year+ from now.
 
The Q8200 is cheaper than the Q6600 just now on OcUK.

Is it significantly better being 45nm technology?
 
The Q8200 is cheaper than the Q6600 just now on OcUK.

Is it significantly better being 45nm technology?

Yes Cooler and more Extensions but I think the Q8200 has less Cache.

Its not a top model like the Q6600 was aimed as at launch, you need compair it to a Q9000 Series.
 
Cheapest Q9000-series chip is over £200 though. :(

Yes but were Q6600's not nearly £1000 at launch ? (read that in this forum, TBH I never took much notice of that CPU)

You have to compare apples to apples and the Q8200 is low end and the Q6600 is not.

£200 is nothing for a good CPU, years back a good high end Socket A AMD cost £300-400.
 
mmm I dunno I would not really call the 7 SPE's "cores" as they're just too specialized. Quad core in terms of the OP and in general are referred to the more generic cores, IMO.

And, without going fully into Cell architecture, I believe games cannot just "use" the SPE. They don't run generic code, and even PC programmers have a hard time coding in dual/quad core. SPE's only execute vectorized fp code and I don't think this qualifies as a "core" in our terms.

It's not a core in the traditional sense no, however the methedoly of development for the Cell is similar to developing true parallel programs for the normal x86 multi-core setup, so in that effect you can think about it as a core.

Perhaps the better term to have used would have been "thread", but even that does not accurately describe how the Cell works.
 
Yes but were Q6600's not nearly £1000 at launch ? (read that in this forum, TBH I never took much notice of that CPU)

You have to compare apples to apples and the Q8200 is low end and the Q6600 is not.

£200 is nothing for a good CPU, years back a good high end Socket A AMD cost £300-400.

It is when your on a strict budget for someone else. :) Thank you though. Have things to keep in mind.
 
I was tempted by quad core this time around, but I went for a cheaper and high-clocking dual instead. I might swap it out for a quad if I find one going cheap that will do around 4.5Ghz on air (...a big ask really). Alternatively I might just wait a year or so for Westmere before I go quad.
 
Q6600, £230-250 on launch, £1000 , not quite. As Mikehunt said the most expensive socket A chip was probably the 3200+ which wasn't more than £200.

I'd actually pay money to see him post something close to factually correct.
 
L4D seems to keep all my four processors reasonably busy...

it uses up nearly all of my dual cores, and plays very well. lowest fps i have seen is 30 and usually its 60+ a good 80% of the time, i was surprised it plays so well with my old processor when i first played it.. seeings as source games rely a lot on CPU power.

goes to show even dual cores arent dead yet for most games, however when 6 & 8 cores come out, you can expect the same as when the transition from dual - quad reared its head.. by that i mean the 6 core and 8 core wont clock as well as the quad, at least not at first.. then there wont be any games that support the 6-8 cores for a good year after their release tbh.

Now though is definately the time for quads.
 
Back
Top Bottom