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One whole core just for a game.

WatchTower

WatchTower

WatchTower

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I may be a plonka but with a dual core can you have everything running on one core and have a whole free core just to run a game? If so wouldn't this make a the CPU appear to give as much grunt to the game as a hell of a lot faster single core.

Sorry I never used dual core so don't know much about how it works.
 
The single core on its own would at the same as the equivilently clocked single core processer (assuming its the same cache)

At the moment Dual cores only really come into their own in multitasking, its a hug boost even in general browsing and flicking between small programs, let along when you get into intensive programs.
 
I think he was implying that if you have 2 cores, can you make 1 for *nothing* else - no antivirus, system tray, windows, msn background proccesses, so it is solely for a game 100% - which would make it better than a single core as there's no other proccessaing going on.

Sadly I don't kno the answer :p
 
These other activities use so little of the CPUs time when you're idling in Windows (just look at task manager, your CPU usage will likely be around 2-3%) so having a second core exclusively for games playing will hardly make any difference to a similarly clocked single core CPU.
 
It is possible to do this via the Task Manager.

What you'd have to do is right click each process -> Set affinity -> Select core to allow process to run on.

It comes in useful when running an antivirus scan while gaming, but not much else since processes use very little of the processor's time.
 
Etaque said:
It comes in useful when running an antivirus scan while gaming
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No it doesn't because Windows will have already seperated the anti-virus and game from being queued for execution on the same core anyway. It does this automatically. For instance, if you got a bunch of background processes using <5% and you've got a game using >80% then the game will be able to get CPU time whenever it wants without fail.
 
NathanE said:
You can't do this and nor is it recommended that you do it manually. Windows balances the load of each thread and process across the available processing cores.
Click to expand...

Theoretically so. In practice however the likes of NFSMW plays appallingly with both cores sharing the load, even with the hotfix installed and operational it makes very little difference. Only option is to set the affinity manually.
 
NathanE said:
No it doesn't because Windows will have already seperated the anti-virus and game from being queued for execution on the same core anyway. It does this automatically. For instance, if you got a bunch of background processes using <5% and you've got a game using >80% then the game will be able to get CPU time whenever it wants without fail.
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Yup. I have actually tested this. I got F-Secure Client Security to run a full system check (AV and Spyware), then loaded up CS:Source. Played happily away whilst the AV worked with no slowdown. The only thing that did cause slowdown was loading the map due to intense use from the AV.

The other time I ran prime on one core whilst playing - didn't even notice it.

I NEVER set affinity manually, because as NathanE says, windows does a better job than you.
 
WatchTower said:
I may be a plonka but with a dual core can you have everything running on one core and have a whole free core just to run a game? If so wouldn't this make a the CPU appear to give as much grunt to the game as a hell of a lot faster single core.

Sorry I never used dual core so don't know much about how it works.
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What you say is not the way it works, I can't back it up with eveidence why but a dual core isn't faster than a single core when running a game.

It can however be faster if the game is designed to make use of a dual core, Quake 4 got a patch recently making the game faster with a dual core.

A dual core CPU is good if you want to do some intensive stuff like encoding/decoding and play a game at the same time.
 
trojan698 said:
Theoretically so. In practice however the likes of NFSMW plays appallingly with both cores sharing the load, even with the hotfix installed and operational it makes very little difference. Only option is to set the affinity manually.
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Yes of course. As I've said in other threads, if you have a game that is incompatible with SMP systems then one of the best workarounds is to just set its affinity to one core.

Generally only old games and games made by EA have this requirement. Games based on modern engines should not have any problem running on an SMP system. Whether they take advantage of it however is quite another matter ;)

Dutch Guy said:
snip
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Actually a dual core CPU will be faster in games with even the "lightest" of background tasks running. You don't need to be doing intensive video encoding to see the benefit of dual core in games. Just load up some P2P software and set some downloads going, have some music playing, and if you've got a multi-monitor setup have the TV playing on one of the monitors. I believe this is fairly typical load that the average casual gamer will have running in the background whilst gaming. I know I certainly do... Anyway the point is, if you've got all that stuff running in the background the game will still be completely smooth. Whereas on a single-core PC that is less likely to be the case. The "minimum FPS" figure will almost certainly be lower, at the very least.
 
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NathanE said:
Actually a dual core CPU will be faster in games with even the "lightest" of background tasks running. You don't need to be doing intensive video encoding to see the benefit of dual core in games. Just load up some P2P software and set some downloads going, have some music playing, and if you've got a multi-monitor setup have the TV playing on one of the monitors. I believe this is fairly typical load that the average casual gamer will have running in the background whilst gaming. I know I certainly do... Anyway the point is, if you've got all that stuff running in the background the game will still be completely smooth. Whereas on a single-core PC that is less likely to be the case. The "minimum FPS" figure will almost certainly be lower, at the very least.
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I believe you, the only thing I remember is when the dual cores were just released the benchmarks were in favour of a single core running at the same speed, then again during the reviews there will not be running a lot of other programs.

I never thought about it that much as I thought that I rarely do two things at once, but if I count in downloading, music, distributed computing etc. it becomes quite interesting, I see an upgrade to dual core in my future :)
 
Another thing to point out, in terms of games, is that a single core will be faster-clocked than a dual-core at any price point.

In terms of bang-for-buck, single core is still best for games, although I don't doubt that will change in a year or two's time.

/pats 3.05 Ghz of single core and tells it everything will be OK and he isn't getting replaced any time soon :) poor little guy is getting worried with all this talk of dual core... ;)

e.g. At the £250 price point, you can have 2.4 Ghz, 1MB cache of single core, or 2.2Ghz of 512kB of dual core. For games, the single core is going to be much faster in almost all current games.
 
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Jimbo Mahoney said:
e.g. At the £250 price point, you can have 2.4 Ghz, 1MB cache of single core, or 2.2Ghz of 512kB of dual core. For games, the single core is going to be much faster in almost all current games.
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Yes, but what NathanE says is that if you have other programs running in the background that will slow down a single core while it will not slow down a dual core system.

If you have a optimised system with no unneccesary services and tray programs you are right, but with a lot of crap running a dual core system (might be) is faster than a single core system.
 
I've been after a good dualcore video transcoder thats free, the DivX coder as supplied at v6.1 is supposed to be dual threaded but it only uses 1 core.
Nerovision only uses 1 core too.

Using only 1 core may be good if you want to do something else at the same time but not if you want 1 thing doing more quickly.
 
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