Hyperthreading, Worth it for gaming?

[Xone]

Really confused lol, still cant decide if its worth getting A i7-860 or 920 with HT or just go for the i5-750. In 2-3 years time will it be likely that hyperthreading is used for Gaming and is it worth Getting a Hyperthreading CPU Now or just get the 750 and ramp it to 4ghz? I'd rather not pay a lot more just for the HT but if its worth it down the line then maybe its worth paying it now?

CPU Will be used purely for gaming purposes.

 

[Th3D0n]

Not yet since most games dont even use 4 cores!

 

[maddness]

not much in it for games at the moment

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...re-i5-750-core-i7-870-processor-review-8.html

 

[Pete.Dakota]

I love how FC2 got worse - ha!

What's the likelihood of future games utilising HT?

 

[Deleted member 66701]

What's the likelihood of future games utilising HT?

Zero to none? Games just aren't coded that way - and neither is there a need for it.

 

[Rroff]

Depends... things like AI processing, physics, etc. can be spawned off onto other threads which can make the game a bit smoother (less spikes when entering new areas, etc.) and sometimes higher performance.

 

[Subtlesnake]

Games don't take advantage of more threads because parallelisation is a hard problem to solve.

But in 5 years when we're at 16 or 32 cores, I things will be different - they'll have to be.

So hyperthreading, far from being useless, should provide some level of future proofing. Though, if you overclock an i5 to 4GHz it should be good enough for several years, until the many-core CPUs (and I imagine the next generation of consoles) arrive.

 

[JonJ678]

I was under the impression that hyperthreading was the main argument for P55/X58 over 775?

 

[setter]

Running an i7 rig at the minute, ive noticed no difference in games with my current gtx 280 compared to my previous q9550 at 3.8ghz, but with x58, i have the option of either sli or crossfire, with the p5q dlx p45 board, if i ever went crossfire, that meant a drop to x8 per pcie lane, that was ok with older graphics cards, as new cards come out, they take more advantage of pcie 2.0, this is where the x58 chipset kicks in, even the new p55 chipsets cant offer full blown sli/xfire, no different from the s775 p45 board iand cpu i had before.