How many quad core enabled games do you know?

If you play a duel core game then will it automaticaly switch two cores to the game and the other two to windows etc.

Or will it spread windows over all four cores so two of the cores end up with half of the back ground apps and the game?
 
8igdave said:
If you play a duel core game then will it automaticaly switch two cores to the game and the other two to windows etc.

Or will it spread windows over all four cores so two of the cores end up with half of the back ground apps and the game?
Click to expand...

you can choose how it does it, i think by default it will dedicate cores to the 3d apps though.
In task manager you can right click processes and set their affinitys, basically choosing which cores they can be run on, so if you want one thing using core2 just click it off core1, and the major other processes off core2, its handy for dvd-converting whilst playing games etc, or rendering :)
 
It's not quite as simple as 'this thing uses that core'.. each application (process) has multiple threads which each do their own processing, i.e. one thread for physics and another thread for game logic, or there could be 10 threads for physics and 5 for game logic. It all depends on how the game is coded.

Windows will automatically allocate each thread to an appropriate core depending on the load of each one and switch them about as necessary.

So generally all of your cores are used by everything at some point. Games that support multiple cores are just games that have multiple important threads, and hence can use more than one core at any given moment. Depending on the workload at the time both threads may end up on the same core or they may not. It doesn't really make any difference. I think the switching happens very quickly and all the time (although I'm not sure about that).

Note that there isn't much point in setting affinity for anything other than compatibility - windows is more efficient than choosing it yourself afaik. Although if there's any benchmarks that say otherwise I would be interested to see them ;)
 
Zogger said:
It's not quite as simple as 'this thing uses that core'.. each application (process) has multiple threads which each do their own processing, i.e. one thread for physics and another thread for game logic, or there could be 10 threads for physics and 5 for game logic. It all depends on how the game is coded.

Windows will automatically allocate each thread to an appropriate core depending on the load of each one and switch them about as necessary.

So generally all of your cores are used by everything at some point. Games that support multiple cores are just games that have multiple important threads, and hence can use more than one core at any given moment. Depending on the workload at the time both threads may end up on the same core or they may not. It doesn't really make any difference. I think the switching happens very quickly and all the time (although I'm not sure about that).

Note that there isn't much point in setting affinity for anything other than compatibility - windows is more efficient than choosing it yourself afaik. Although if there's any benchmarks that say otherwise I would be interested to see them ;)
Click to expand...

It can be handy when rendering/convert dvds like isaid, so that it doesnt utilise over 1 core, meaning the other core is still fully available(well nearly) to start a new task on :)
 
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