Newer games and Quad-Cores

B

brunner

n00b
Joined
May 14, 2006
Messages
17
I'm currently using a e6700 (overclocked to 3.4ghz), and 2 X 8800 GTX. While my framerates in most games are very high, I notice that some of them feel a bit jittery. I'm curious if upgrading to a quad-core would make those games feel smoother.

Doing some research with google, I've seen some claims that even the q6600 makes games like Assassin's Creed, MOH:Airborne, and Stranglehold feel smoother. Unfortunately, none of the major websites seem to have done quad core vs dual core comparisons with those games. So I'm hoping that I can get some advice here. It'd be great if Hardocp could do some tests for us since they're really great at measurig real world performance instead of just benchmarks.
 
Only the games that support more than two cores... of which there are more now than before but still not many. At the very least the quad cores (I have the Phenom 9500) do take a little bit of the processor time off the two that your game might use, but it really isn't noticeable.
And I completely agree that there needs to be a comparison with various games to see if 4 cores does any better than 2... just like there are with video cards comparing SLI, Quad-SLI, and whatever else with combinations we have now.
 
Yeah, I want to see some real world differences and not just benchmarks. Obviously, the dual-cores perform about the same as similarly clocked quad-cores in benchmarks but some gamers claim that new games like MOH:Airborne and Assassin's Creed run more smoothly with quad-core. Unfortunately, I only have a dual-core right now so I can't do any testing.
 
Hi brunner,

First of all about the stuttering / jittering. Ever since I've up upgraded to a dual-core I've noticed that quite a few games have this jittery effect, and I believe it's simply caused by older games not being fully compatible with the new technology in dual core CPUs. You can improve this, however to some extent - If you open up task manager and select your game's process, set it's Affinity to one core. Basically this forces the game to run only on one core and will sometimes reduce stuttering because it can't switch between them as much. But there are many games that are still jittery and there's nothing you can really do.

About quad cores - I'd recommend you wait to upgrade to a quad core. Just stick with a faster dual core like the e6850. Most newer games are multithreaded, but you're going to see "diminishing returns" with a quad core CPU. (For example, see this article: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000942.html). With a quad core you will probably not see an improvement in many games at all, and you'll see a decrease in older games that only run with one core. It's simply because if you have an e6700 clocked at 3.4GHz, but you go to a q600 clocked at 2.4GHz, games will only be using 1/4th of your CPU and have a lot less GHz per core. Even a game like Crysis will probably struggle to use all 4 cores. IMO quad cores are only beneficial to programs that "parallel" well like 3D editing or video encoding.
 
For gaming, quad's not worth it.

I've got a Q6600 @ 3.2 GHz (lower-than-stock voltage, the heatsink is the Noctua NH-U12F, very quiet and max load temp is <55C in an Antec P182). It's amazing. But...for gaming, almost nothing uses the multiple cores.

The real benefits of quad are media editing, encoding and rendering. Also, extreme multitasking is nice.
 
Neuffy said:
For gaming, quad's not worth it.

I've got a Q6600 @ 3.2 GHz (lower-than-stock voltage, the heatsink is the Noctua NH-U12F, very quiet and max load temp is <55C in an Antec P182). It's amazing. But...for gaming, almost nothing uses the multiple cores.
Click to expand...

I agree. And It's good to see some real-world benchmarks, Danny Bui. Even though some new bleeding-edge games may show up to a 13% improvement with 2 to 4 cores, you're going to see a much larger performance decrease in single-threaded games that IMO makes the switch not yet worth it. Quads are just clocked too low.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top