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Gaming: dual-core or bust

FoxEye

FoxEye

FoxEye

Caporegime
Joined
17 Feb 2006
Posts
29,265
Location
Cornwall
Funny thing: the more benchmarks I look at, the more difficult my CPU upgrade decision is becoming (out of p2 555, x3 435 or x2 255).

It seems that games developers are still hopeless at being parallel. Almost every games benchmark I'm seeing except Crysis show a difference of about 1-3 FPS between dual core and quad :o

In one review I looked at recently, the conclusion they came to was that p2 555 kicked ass, and x2 255 sucked, despite being absolutely neck and neck in many of the games they tested, again with x3 and x4 showing no advantage either.

Well, he did say he based that on overclocking potential, which is crazy when he benched all the cpus at stock...

I suspect we're going to have people jumping in this thread to justify their quad core purchase, but let's keep the focus on gaming and not folding here. Now correct me if I'm wrong here, but when someone says "modern games can use quads" what they really mean is, "there's this one game, out of hundreds, that gets 5fps more".

Because unless I fail at reading comprehension, that's what the numbers are showing me.

And you know what? That's really strange. The 360 has a triple core PPC cpu. So why wouldn't games which are ports of 360 games perform better on x3s than x2s? But again, the numbers don't show that. Weird!

All I can conclude is that developers for the 360 haven't mastered parallel computing either. Or games simply aren't good candidates for parallel applications? Or all the current generation devs grew up with C++ development instead of Haskell :P

Someone help me figure this out!
 
Look at reviews of game sthat use UE3 engine, and also Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil.

Games are using quads much better these days and this will continue.

I have a dual, by they way. An I3
 
to be honest would only go quad now if you try the beta for the new battlefield youll see things are going quad and the difference it makes in game.
 
ffallic said:
Look at reviews of game sthat use UE3 engine, and also Far Cry 2 and Resident Evil.

Games are using quads much better these days and this will continue.

I have a dual, by they way. An I3
Click to expand...

Which benchmarks are you looking at, mate? I've seen one (Anand), that puts the difference between an Athlon II x2 255 and the Phenom x4 965 BE at a whopping 7FPS (1680x1050), and others that put them literally neck and neck at that rez.
 
Once they get their compilers, engines and stuff running for quad you will start seeing a major change. A bit like moving from 8bit-> 16bit-> 32bit and soon to be 64bit it just takes a while for them and us to change over. You will start seeing more and more new games making the change till it becomes the norm.
 
Tbh I wouldn't go dual unless I need to save the cash. Quads are being used more and more in gaming and other programs, and having an extra two cores in Windows can help a lot too.
 
I think Intel have got it right with the i3 atm, most games are still mainly dual core optimised, with 3rd/4th threads doing minor stuff.

Yes there are games that gain a good chunk of fps when used in conjunction with a quad, but what you will also find is that once you up the res, start adding effects, and AA etc. the GPU becomes the limiting factor, not the CPU, and as such the duals/tri's/quads all give very similar fps.

As such the i3 dual core with HT works a treat for these situations, while not pumping out the heat, or sucking up the juice a fully fledged quad does.

As for use in windows, I went from a Q9550 @ 3.6 to an i3 530 @ 4GHz and honestly couldn't tell the difference from within a windows environment, if you think you can then its pure placebo.
 
people owning quads is becoming the norm now though and developers wont be oblivious to this so more and more games will take advantage of quad cores.

it would suprise me if the majority of games released in the next didnt run much better on quads.
 
HeX said:
As such the i3 dual core with HT works a treat for these situations, while not pumping out the heat, or sucking up the juice a fully fledged quad does.
Click to expand...

Having been a purely AMD person for a while now, the i3 is making me think twice. It looks much nicer than the ph2 dual cores, doesn't it.

Is there any chance of getting a semi-decent £50 motherboard on the Intel side tho? I've only looked into AMD motherboards so far :p
 
FoxEye said:
Having been a purely AMD person for a while now, the i3 is making me think twice. It looks much nicer than the ph2 dual cores, doesn't it.

Is there any chance of getting a semi-decent £50 motherboard on the Intel side tho? I've only looked into AMD motherboards so far :p
Click to expand...

The Intel H55 and P55 motherboards start at around the £67 mark AFAIK.
 
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I definitely grew up with C++, and compilers results are only so-so for multi-core use. There are brighter and cleverer programmers that can hand optimise for parallelism, but not me.
 
FoxEye said:
Funny thing: the more benchmarks I look at, the more difficult my CPU upgrade decision is becoming (out of p2 555, x3 435 or x2 255).

It seems that games developers are still hopeless at being parallel. Almost every games benchmark I'm seeing except Crysis show a difference of about 1-3 FPS between dual core and quad :o

In one review I looked at recently, the conclusion they came to was that p2 555 kicked ass, and x2 255 sucked, despite being absolutely neck and neck in many of the games they tested, again with x3 and x4 showing no advantage either.

Well, he did say he based that on overclocking potential, which is crazy when he benched all the cpus at stock...

I suspect we're going to have people jumping in this thread to justify their quad core purchase, but let's keep the focus on gaming and not folding here. Now correct me if I'm wrong here, but when someone says "modern games can use quads" what they really mean is, "there's this one game, out of hundreds, that gets 5fps more".

Because unless I fail at reading comprehension, that's what the numbers are showing me.

And you know what? That's really strange. The 360 has a triple core PPC cpu. So why wouldn't games which are ports of 360 games perform better on x3s than x2s? But again, the numbers don't show that. Weird!

All I can conclude is that developers for the 360 haven't mastered parallel computing either. Or games simply aren't good candidates for parallel applications? Or all the current generation devs grew up with C++ development instead of Haskell :P

Someone help me figure this out!
Click to expand...

The reason that you don't see much difference is that CPUs are such ahead in speed and tech now that games just can't keep up.

You can run ANY game on old c2d like e2200 or e4300 (OCed at ~3ghz) as long as you have enough gpu power and ram.

If duals were obsolete already both Intel and AMD won't be releasing new dual core CPUs just now (i3 / athlon II / pII 555 ).

On the other hand if you like to do a lot of stuff together ( having 40 ff tabs open, play music, DL, encode + game at same time ) as much as dual will still do it a quad will make the experience smoother when switching windows or running multiple stuff on dual monitors.
 
If building a gaming computer, I'd notice that games tend to be gpu limited, and that most are optimised for two cores, and go for a very overclocked dual core. Second hand 775 duals are going for under a ton now, absolute bargain.

I'm sure that more games will be quad core optimised soon, but they'll be written to expect at most a 2.66ghz nehalem quad core, and will in all probability still be gpu limited. I'm yet to see anything convincingly in favour of quad cores for computer games, though I haven't looked much.

I'd personally vote for an e8*00 series somewhere north of 4ghz as I have no personal experience with phenom dual cores. The nice side effect is that a 4+ghz dual core is stormingly good in windows.
 
The last e8400 on offer in MM was at £90 after haggling, the latest e8500 search found went for £90. So I guess the disagreement was over "bargain"?

Hard to justify why I'd buy an e8400 over an i3 at equivalent costs, I suspect benchmarks would think I was foolish.
 
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