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Will Future Games need faster CPU, or more "Cores"?

Antx777

Antx777

Antx777

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Was just wondering, as a Quad 9650 owner, that in the future, near and far, will games be requiring more actual "megaherz speed". IE: "4.8Ghz Recommended". Or will a moderatly slower processor like a Quad 2.6-3.0 with FOUR cores be more of use to game developers?. (so in fact with four cores you'll get 12Ghz - i guess)
:)

~Ant
 
We're moving away from speed to more cores, so personally I think the emphasis will be on multiple threads.

I fully expect improvements to still be made to single cores though.
 
the way i think CPU's will go is towards the same route as GPU's. GPU's are immense number crunching things which can out perform CPUs considerably on certain tasks. what needs to be done is bring both the pros of CPUs and GPUs into 1 awesome processing unit.

yes i know intel are moving towards that, but they arent fully utilising it yet. if anything, it wouldnt surprise me if nvidia or amd/ati do it first.
 
Far Cry 2 apparently sees a significant improvement from running on a quad core CPU.

If that's anything like what Crytek said for Crysis though, it's rubbish and Intel are just paying them to say it.
 
Meh people were saying the same thing a year ago with amd 6000+ and intel e6600 at 3GHz vs the Much more expensive (then) q6600 at 3.2GHz, maybe in another year who knows. In a year and a half Ill get Nehalem and new ram ect.
 
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reflux said:
Far Cry 2 apparently sees a significant improvement from running on a quad core CPU.

If that's anything like what Crytek said for Crysis though, it's rubbish and Intel are just paying them to say it.
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I really hope not.... cos too me farcry 2 looks awesome perhaps better looking then crysis and if it runs super fast on multiple cores then cant wait frankly !

I just hope its not a badly optimisied game/engine and makes good use of hardware thats been out for 2-3 years already unlike all the previous top end pc games :)
 
HighlandeR said:
I really hope not.... cos too me farcry 2 looks awesome perhaps better looking then crysis and if it runs super fast on multiple cores then cant wait frankly !

I just hope its not a badly optimisied game/engine and makes good use of hardware thats been out for 2-3 years already unlike all the previous top end pc games :)
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as far as i know the guys who made far cry 2 have reused only 2-3% of the code from crysis

to me that means they have left 6-9% of the game code exactly the same, and have made cosmetic changes to everything else.


few games use multiple cores and its only a matter of time until shops dont sell dual cores anymore... can you still buy a single core pc from the high street etc?

people think a 3ghz processor is always faster than a 2.9ghz processor regardless of everything else.. and they will also think that a dual core is twice as fast as a single core and same for a quad core..

mabye a few would look at benchmarks but that wont make a difference
 
platinum87 said:
as far as i know the guys who made far cry 2 have reused only 2-3% of the code from crysis

to me that means they have left 6-9% of the game code exactly the same, and have made cosmetic changes to everything else.


few games use multiple cores and its only a matter of time until shops dont sell dual cores anymore... can you still buy a single core pc from the high street etc?

people think a 3ghz processor is always faster than a 2.9ghz processor regardless of everything else.. and they will also think that a dual core is twice as fast as a single core and same for a quad core..

mabye a few would look at benchmarks but that wont make a difference
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Is it not :eek:
Damn salesmen... always sell me crap :D
 
tbh I sell it with that line also.... but purely cos I cant be bothered a lot of customers do ask me whats this dual core and I aint got the 20 minutes to explain too them the differences so just say its twice as fast, hence the 2 cpus part.

Its far easier and quicker too get rid of a customer frankly lol
 
think of it like this

first came dual core

now we have high clocking dual cores

then quads

so then i7

then once that matures we could be seeing 3.5GHz@stock quads that go 4.5GHz+ as an average overclock

these are just guesses

who knows 5 years time we may be seeing 6-8GHz Quads
- how much use to the average user any of that would be though is another matter
 
I cant see processers getting past 4Ghz, main stream. They will improve in performance due to the chip arcutecture but the Ghz wont improve much due to heat produced. I cant see them getting much past 8 cores either, unless they reduce the ghz of them, again due to heat issues.

If theres a groundbreaking development in cooling, this could have cause all change :)
 
VARDY said:
the way i think CPU's will go is towards the same route as GPU's. GPU's are immense number crunching things which can out perform CPUs considerably on certain tasks. what needs to be done is bring both the pros of CPUs and GPUs into 1 awesome processing unit.

yes i know intel are moving towards that, but they arent fully utilising it yet. if anything, it wouldnt surprise me if nvidia or amd/ati do it first.
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Nvidia, AMD/ATI.... What makes you think that, Intel have apparently have an 80 core prototype, although its apparnelty even more cut down than Larrabee. Pretty sure Intel will have the first massivly parallel processor. If you consider Larrabee itself, its basically a bunch of Pentium (think back to Pentium 75's not P2 P3, or P4) strapped together upgraded to 64bit with a bunch of extra features to help it work as a GPU.

Nehalem brings back hyperthreading with a vengeance, its a lot better at hardware sharing than P4's hyperthreading.

Or you can look as Sun Microcomputers, they already have beaten intel/amd/nvidia with Niagra. The second generation Niagra2 is able to process 64 "integer" hungry applications very efficiently, its only limitation is that it can only run 8 FPU instructions at a time. But then a lot of software is integer based for speed. Of course Sun's processor is a Sparc chip, so its no good for windows :P
 
Ninja Please! said:
I'm hoping more cores. I read somewhere that we will probably never see higher than 3.2 stock clock speeds, so...
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P4 already made 3.8Ghz, and with intel learned a lot about fast switching transistors, now with their "3d" transistors they will be able to make faster parts once that tech goes main stream.

In theory there wouldnt be much to stop them releasing a 3.8Ghz "stock" processor based on either Core 2 or, i7 right now, both designs easily run 4ghz+, but they would fast ever increasing power draw issues again just like P4.

A 3.3Ghz i7 is already on the roadmap for a May release :), and so are plans for a 6 core part (12 if you include hyperthreading).

As for CPU's being replaced by GPU's, that would massivly increase the transistor count on the GPUs. While GPU's are great for parallel processing of very simple in order instructions, they are hopeless at out of order code, and general purpose CPU's still have a lot to offer, Thats just Nvidia talking. If you listen to intel, they would say that GPGPU's are only a stopgap measure, with larrabee being a more forward looking idea, which brings a large array of modified pentium pro cpu cores to provide the computing power for graphics/physics/scientific etc, combined with a cut down x86 machine code/programming. Im not going to try and predict the future, but I doubt the main CPU is going anywhere, anytime soon.
 
Developers will be forced to learn how to code for multithreaded applications since probably in two years there won't be any dual-core processors in the market and developers then would see the way technology is taking and follow suit. l
 
Antx777 said:
(so in fact with four cores you'll get 12Ghz - i guess)
:)
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4 core never gets you 12ghz, it gets you the ability to run 4 tasks at 4ghz each. 1x12ghz is much easier to design programs for, but is harder to build hardware that is power efficient, while 4x4ghz is easy to build the hardware, but takes much more programming, as you have to try and split the program down into separate tasks, and often that simply isnt possible.

Take a simple program, that simply adds 1 to a variable and then loops back to start, you cant run it across multiple cores concurrently as the loop cant continue until after the variable has been increased.

On the other hand, from a games point of view, you can use 1 core to handle realtime dolby trueHD sound encoding! (wouldnt that be nice), 1 core for managing the 3d engine (combined with a powerfull GPU), another core for ai, another core for physics etc etc etc.

And if (when?) real time ray tracing becomes a reality, multiple cores can work on the same image a lot more easily than the current raster based 3d engines. And im pretty sure the Unreal 3 and Unreal 4 engines are getting better at making full use of many cores.
 
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