Supreeme Commander - Dual Core Vs Quad Core?

Stonedofmoo · 29 Jan 2008 at 08:55

Supreme Commander - Dual Core Vs Quad Core?

I notice a lot of threads in here about dual vs. quad core chips for gaming and one of the games that comes up time and again is SupCom taking advantage of Quad core.
I would actually be very interested to see some benchmarks that back this up.

The reason I say this is I play Supreme Commander and now Forged Alliance with a lot of people at mini lans and the performance when including AI opponents is always pretty shocking (terrible SimSpeed)

Now we have hosted both games on dual core machines at 3gig and quad core Q6600 machines at 3gig and have not seen any difference whatsoever, and that includes using the Core Maximizer utility before someone mentions it (of which the code is built into FA anyhow)

Maybe the difference is seen elsewhere but does anyone have any conclusive proof that SupCom runs faster on a Quad core chip over a Dual core?

The reason I ask this is I'm at a point where I can afford to either upgrade to a Wolfdale E8400 or E8500 and would overclock to 4gig plus, or I can get a Q6600 and hope to reach over 3gig.
I believe the Wolfdale would be much better for hosting games on as FA would make much better use of 2 faster cores rather than 4 slow ones... but then I could be totally wrong so I need your help finding out the facts

What have everyone else found, any online reviews or information? :cool:

Indy500 · 29 Jan 2008 at 09:00

Gamespot's benchmarks showed a Q6600 beating an X6800 dual by some margin. There was another site (forgotten the name) that did a benchmark with 2 exploding ACUs on screen (or 1 ACU and 1 nuke) and thousands of units which also showed the quad to be quicker.

It has to be said that on the 2nd-4th cores usage was only around 50% of each core...

Edit: I'll add from personal experience, having used 2 different dual core machines (X2 and Core 2 Duo) and a Q6600 machine, that the Quad is much smoother in game.

FreeStream · 29 Jan 2008 at 09:36

I want to see a 4Ghz+ Wolf Vs a 3.6ghz Quad.

As for FS-X a quad is useless but I want to play SC again

JeffyB · 29 Jan 2008 at 11:33

Heres a review using a quad, they disable cores to show how it would play on single, dual and quad core systems.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwNiwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

Combat squirrel · 29 Jan 2008 at 11:48

I play it a lot and when I got my quad core it was easly WAY smoother than my dual core, but then I also got 8GB ram which im sure helped as well, rams well cheap at the moment, get more of that as well

something_totally_different · 29 Jan 2008 at 13:00

when i was beta testing supcom there were problems implementing the correct code for multi core usage and it was only using around 50% of the secondary core on a dual core setup. now the game will use as much cpu power as you have available but remember, YOU ONLY GO AS FAST AS THE SLOWEST PLAYER!

so in multiplayer mode, quad core or not, 8800Ultra SLI or not, if someones on with a single core, your game will tank.

sosrandom · 29 Jan 2008 at 13:50

^ How does that work surely that only happens if they're hosting? or is it just bad coding?

something_totally_different · 29 Jan 2008 at 14:00

sosrandom said:
^ How does that work surely that only happens if they're hosting? or is it just bad coding?

neither, in fact the games unique in that it uses peer to peer technology based on the bit torrent system for multiplayer gaming. much more robust, far less desync and drop outs and minimal bandwidth usage.

technically no one is the host. sure 1 person starts and launches but no one is actually the host.

Shocky-FM · 29 Jan 2008 at 14:07

Havent noticed any difference in supcom between dual and quad core but I don't really get too the point of having huge amounts of units.

something_totally_different · 29 Jan 2008 at 14:25

Shocky-FM said:
Havent noticed any difference in supcom between dual and quad core but I don't really get too the point of having huge amounts of units.

then your a noob rusher or your not doing it right,

sosrandom · 29 Jan 2008 at 14:45

^lol, and Yes SupCom is far to easy to just build massive armies when playing on the easier modes and in Single player. I used to have like 50 turrets all bunched together until I built an army big enough to steam roller over everything

SameSuspect · 29 Jan 2008 at 14:50

i still do that today lol i love it. having it on its hardest setting tho, which i find that on small maps, the orig game the ai was harder than fa :confused:

im about to go from a e6600 at 3.2ghz to a e8400 @ 4+ghz. will post back on how much change i get

Stonedofmoo · 29 Jan 2008 at 15:47

JeffyB said:
Heres a review using a quad, they disable cores to show how it would play on single, dual and quad core systems.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwNiwsLGhlbnRodXNpYXN0

Brillant, just the kind of link I was looking for!

Quad core it is.

JeffyB · 29 Jan 2008 at 23:07

NP, quad is deffinately the way to go if supreme commander is your game. Going to have to dig it out again, i fancy doing some zerging

HighlandeR · 29 Jan 2008 at 23:27

Stonedofmoo said:
Maybe the difference is seen elsewhere but does anyone have any conclusive proof that SupCom runs faster on a Quad core chip over a Dual core?

There aint any proof and imo its cos there is not much difference if any.....

I digged thru the coremax threads with benchies and well no one really mentioned much, theres lots of feelings/expressions and opinions with people saying oh yes its a lot smoother but never saw figures exactly.

I think were still waiting to see a game to really make use of quad.... it hasnt happen yet frankly.

Indy500 · 29 Jan 2008 at 23:40

Hmm, according to Hardocp XP is quicker than Vista...

something_totally_different · 30 Jan 2008 at 02:05

HighlandeR said:
There aint any proof and imo its cos there is not much difference if any.....

I digged thru the coremax threads with benchies and well no one really mentioned much, theres lots of feelings/expressions and opinions with people saying oh yes its a lot smoother but never saw figures exactly.

I think were still waiting to see a game to really make use of quad.... it hasnt happen yet frankly.

according to Chris Taylor supcom was built with multicore systems in mind. you can also see the performance benefit to supcom via its /perftest function which is an in game benchmarking tool to measure CPU and GPU combined performance.

Stonedofmoo · 30 Jan 2008 at 07:58

sr4470 said:
Hmm, according to Hardocp XP is quicker than Vista...

Yeah I saw that, but the test was done in early 2007 when Vista had not recieved any performance patches, and it was also done on 32bit Vista with only 2gig of RAM.

You really need 4gig of RAM and 64bit Vista to get the best from it, Vista can eat most of that 2gig RAM on it's own

HighlandeR · 30 Jan 2008 at 22:00

XanderThal said:
according to Chris Taylor supcom was built with multicore systems in mind. you can also see the performance benefit to supcom via its /perftest function which is an in game benchmarking tool to measure CPU and GPU combined performance.

Yeah in game benchmark.... its a lot different in game, also yeah its built with multicore in mind but its clearly not a very optimised engine. If anything more ram helps out SC more I reckon.

Its not another crysis but almost imo, Coremax tool really helped it somewhat but the gains were still small in most cases.

In a crunch it would be nicer to have a quad core for that one game just to have that feeling in the back of the mind saying its as good as it gets, but after owning 3 Q6600 riggs and countless nights on SC I dont reckon theres much benifit, my 3rd/4th core was frankly not doing much coremax helped though but not as much one would expect.

Id say a fast E8400/8500 would proove just as good and faster then a Q6600 but since no ones run conclusive benchies in game scores its hard to say.

Hardocps benchies dont match up most of the other SC benchies around the net..... so I suspect something odd not only that its old and wasnt using the maxcore tool.

Jezza101 · 31 Jan 2008 at 11:15

Also, anything based on the Unreal 3 engine gets good gains on 4 cores, but after 4 apparently it tails off. So if you like UT3 etc, might be worth investigating?

Epic's Tim Sweeney explains:

Q. How will Unreal Tournament 3 use multiple cores on a CPU? Does it take advantage of Quad Core CPU's? If so, how/what task is assigned to each core?

A. Unreal Engine 3 is a transitional multithreaded architecture. It runs two heavyweight threads, and a pool of helper threads.

The primary thread is responsible for running UnrealScript AI and gameplay logic and networking. The secondary thread is responsible for all rendering work. The pool of helper threads accelerate additional modular tasks such as physics, data decompression, and streaming.

Thus UE3 runs significantly faster on CPUs which support two or more high-performance threads. This includes dual-core Intel and AMD PC CPUs, the Xbox 360 (which sports 3 CPU cores and 2 hardware threads per core), and PlayStation 3 (with 1 CPU core running 2 high-performance hardware threads per core.)

Beyond two cores or hardware threads, UE3 performance continues to scale up, as the additional threads accelerate physics and decompression work. However, not all scenes are performance-bound by such things, so there are diminishing returns as you go beyond 4 cores. By the time CPUs with large numbers of cores are available - thinking 16-core and beyond - we'll be on the start of a new engine generation, with some significant changes in software architecture to enable greater scaling.

Personally im a bang for bucks kinda guy but having used a quad at work I just love how nothing ever slows down any more. Gone are the days of a virus scan or desktop index crippling your system. I think we are approaching a point where it looks like the way to go. But each to their own of course