Anyone else failing to see a reason to go quad core?

[jmackay]

There is no way a developer is going to release a game which performs poorly on a C2d and only runs well on a quad. It may have extra features ('optimized') but C2D is mainstream now and thats where the money is.

I don't think anyone was saying games would perform badly on C2D, just it will perform better on a quad.

 

[Xilikon]

I don't think anyone was saying games would perform badly on C2D, just it will perform better on a quad.

It would be more efficient if games can spawn 4 threads or more. This will then get distributed between availables cores so a quad will process more but be also balanced so dual-cores can perform well for the mainstream crowd.

The main issue is trying to break up the game tasks in threads since syncing issues will crop out. Programmers need to change their mind on how to code to take advantage of parallel processing.

Anyway, about the dual or quad core debate, just pick whatever fill your needs after taking your time checking what is your usual things you do with the computer. Like many guys said here, if all you do is game, pick a dual core and overclock the beejezus of it

Personnally, I'm heavily into Folding@Home and one of their clients is a SMP client tailored specifically for quad cores so I can take advantage of it. I'm also keeping my setup for 2-3 years till Nehalem era before upgrading so it's a well planned upgrade (By changing the board only, I could upgrade to Yorkfield so it's not a big problem).

Nobody will tell you what to pick since it's your money and your needs so pick what satisfy your needs the most. This is the same thing as not trying to push dual cores to users who just browse the maze of tubes

 

[MrCrispy]

I don't think anyone was saying games would perform badly on C2D, just it will perform better on a quad.

Yeah, I think we are both saying the same thing - games will continue to run great on C2D, a few will shine on Quads. Writing multi threaded code is hard and not many developers will invest the time/money/skill to do so unless multiple cores become common. This is the same situation as with DX10.

However games do lend themselves well to parallelism because things like physics, AI, sound processing are relatively independent and can be pushed off on a separate core (which has been a design principle for consoles going back to the Amiga and now seen in the 360 and Cell). Big engines like Source, Unreal, Crytek will all take advantage of this and thus help all games based on them.

 

[PGHammer]

There is no way a developer is going to release a game which performs poorly on a C2d and only runs well on a quad. It may have extra features ('optimized') but C2D is mainstream now and thats where the money is.

That said, multiple cores are the future. Both Intel and AMD are looking into 16/32 cores as the next big leap. Slowly but surely compiler and OS technology will advance and in a few years 4+ cores will be standard.

So the decision is quite simple really - if you only build once every ~3 years, get a quad. If you spend any significant time with encoding, dev work, 3d renders etc, get a quad. Everyone else, get a E6750 and OC the hell out of it (assuming you are ready to upgrade next year). And if you got the monies, get a QX6850

And he didn't say that. He said (and both Blackstone and I have said earlier in the thread) is that few games even take advantage of more than one processor or core, despite the reality that virtual SMP has been around since the long-ago NetBurst architecture and Northwood-C. Despite Northwood-C and the Prescott follow-up, developers have largely *avoided* any sort of vSMP-optimized desktop-application development (would someone care to tackle why?).

 

[Monkey God]

developers have largely *avoided* any sort of vSMP-optimized desktop-application development (would someone care to tackle why?).

Because it requires a great deal more design, coding and testing effort. = $$$$$$$$$$$$

 

[Blackstone]

I do think eventually gamers will want four or more cores. I'm under the impression that the additional cores could replace, say, a dedicated physics processor. Carmack (id software) has said that he doesn't believe in dedicated physics processors for that reason.

I don't think any of these games coming out have the kind of physics features that really tap into what a quad can do. When I think about quad core and dedicated physics and whatnot, I'm thinking hundreds of boulders and rocks falling on the screen at one time, ect. Stuff that just isn't possible on one or even two cores. I don't think we are there yet. That is probably one or two years away at this point. I'm betting that advanced physics is going to be the selling point for the next wave of games.

If you just look at Unreal Tournament 3, it just does not look like a game engine that is going to benefit from four cores. Other than the graphical polish, which is GPU bound, I don't see where all that CPU power is going, since the physics don't seem that much more advanced than Unreal Tournament 2004--a game that runs well on a single core.

When the real quad core games come out, it won't just be a question of more FPS--you'll NEED four cores because you will be bottlenecked by the CPU otherwise. That isn't going to happen this fall. The graphics cards will be the real problem, like always.

GameSpot: What sort of hardware was the E3 demo running on? How's the battle to optimize the game going? Are you still sticking with the general rule that Crysis will run on two-year old hardware, albeit at lower visual settings?

CY: At E3, we were running on a [GeForce] 8800 video card and a dual-core Intel [CPU]with 4 gigabytes of RAM at very high settings. Not the highest, though! Most of the time, it was running smoothly.
Yes, we [are] progressing very well on optimization, and we will achieve our goal. Two-to-three-year-old rigs will run Crysis well, with lower visual settings still competing with the best games of two-to-three years ago.

 

[Manny Calavera]

I think a lot of the people starting these types of threads will quickly change thier tune,when games like UT3 arrive.And the many others that use its tech.

 

[ZenOps]

No need to wait for UT3, Unreal Tournament 2004 runs better on a quad than duals as is now (probably has more to do with the 2x4MB cache than having quad cores)

If you go to the CPU chart on Toms.

Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2400/266) 92.9 fps
Core 2 Duo E6850 (3000/333) 91.4 fps

So until the highly threaded games that take advantage of quads (or even duals) the bigger cache will probably be able to hold its own for quite a while. When the new ones do show up, the Quad will stomp the Duo even more.

Heaven forbid anyone is using a software firewall and active virus protection in their gaming machine, the Quad simply beats the Duo hands down.

 

[Miscommunication]

Well I know that for some, it's a question of what you've already got. Looking at my sig, I don't see a need to dish out another $266 + S&P just for another 10-15 frames on Crysis (if it turns out that way) for example. The only way where I personally, would open the wallet is if it makes the difference between playable and unplayable. If the game is "maxed out" and it's 50fps vs 70fps then it's not worth it for me. With double the watts to boot on my electric bill. 3Ghz C2D is enough at this point imo, more about the GPU still. And yes I'm stuck at low res 1280x1024.

 

[DeFex]

you know multi tasking running several programs at once
WIndows
anti virus program
anti spyware program
all the other crap

not to mention the programs you like to run,
browser,
email,
monitoring programs,
IM etc etc.

Then when you run a serious program it has a whole CPU to its self, ot if it can multi thread even better.
If you do music multi tracking it is AWESOME. VSTi instruments are shared between cores and you can run a LOT more tracks.
If you do rendering it is quicker.
If you do encoding it might be quicker, i do not know. i dont watch reruns.

and you can run a game server, and the game itself, and fold on the remaining cpu cycles.


if you only run a non multitasking OS such as MS-DOS and run 1 game on it, then you will not have a better experience with quads.

 

[idiotekniQues]

i love photoshop cs3

www.simplyathos.com

although most of my shots are pretty much in-camera with standard digital darkroom manips like curves and some selective color.

 

[interested]

A lot of people in this thread are going to be very dissapoined when they realize that they wont be able to do as much as they thought they would with the extra 2 cores.

Now i did not read all the messages on this thread, but i did see more then a few people state that they think they will be able to burn a DVD, play a video game, extract files, encode video.... etc.. etc.. all at the same time.

well i have news for you, you could have twenty cores and still not be able to do all that at once on a typical PC.

Reason being is that most of these people will still only have their system running of one hardrive, and that harddrive will not be able to keep up with all those processes requesting data from it.. Even if you had single raid 0 setup its still to slow to do all that, your still going to get bogged down by a PC's weakest link which is the harddrive which has to supply all the data for all these activities.

Thus if you really want true multitasking your going to have to invest in some serious multi raid setup with server grade harddrives and server grade raid cards, otherwise forget it.

Just go ahead and try and burn 3 dvd's simultaneously at maximum 18X speed on one harddrive alone, and see how well they turn out, while doing all the other things that were mentioned.

4 cores are great ( i also just ordered one), and so is abundant cheap DDR2 RAM, but dont think its going to give you that much in terms of multitasking when the biggest weakness is and always has been Harddrives speed, bandwidth, and latency.

That is untill we start getting an affordable supply of fast solid state drives running on a bus with lots of bandwidth.

 

[firewolf]

Well I know that for some, it's a question of what you've already got. Looking at my sig, I don't see a need to dish out another $266 + S&P just for another 10-15 frames on Crysis (if it turns out that way) for example. The only way where I personally, would open the wallet is if it makes the difference between playable and unplayable. If the game is "maxed out" and it's 50fps vs 70fps then it's not worth it for me. With double the watts to boot on my electric bill. 3Ghz C2D is enough at this point imo, more about the GPU still. And yes I'm stuck at low res 1280x1024.

That works for you, why should anyone need to upgrade from a 3.1GHz C2D, that's a great chip.

But for people with outdated tech, planning an upgrade, I think Q6600 is the way to go, I'm getting one to replace my Opty 144 soon.

 

[PGHammer]

A lot of people in this thread are going to be very dissapoined when they realize that they wont be able to do as much as they thought they would with the extra 2 cores.

Now i did not read all the messages on this thread, but i did see more then a few people state that they think they will be able to burn a DVD, play a video game, extract files, encode video.... etc.. etc.. all at the same time.

well i have news for you, you could have twenty cores and still not be able to do all that at once on a typical PC.

Reason being is that most of these people will still only have their system running of one hardrive, and that harddrive will not be able to keep up with all those processes requesting data from it.. Even if you had single raid 0 setup its still to slow to do all that, your still going to get bogged down by a PC's weakest link which is the harddrive which has to supply all the data for all these activities.

Thus if you really want true multitasking your going to have to invest in some serious multi raid setup with server grade harddrives and server grade raid cards, otherwise forget it.

Just go ahead and try and burn 3 dvd's simultaneously at maximum 18X speed on one harddrive alone, and see how well they turn out, while doing all the other things that were mentioned.

4 cores are great ( i also just ordered one), and so is abundant cheap DDR2 RAM, but dont think its going to give you that much in terms of multitasking when the biggest weakness is and always has been Harddrives speed, bandwidth, and latency.

That is untill we start getting an affordable supply of fast solid state drives running on a bus with lots of bandwidth.

It seriously depends on how they run their applications. What you did was illustrate an example of a non-CPU-bound application or process (it's I/O-bound): if you have an I/O-bound process or application (such as disk or image-burning), all the GPU horsepower and processor cores in the world won't help if your I/O is dog-slow. Howerver, if you already *have* a decently fast SATA hard drive (and it doesn't have to be even SATA 3.0; SATA-150 drives, such as the DiamondMax 8 and MaxLine II, though dating back to 2004, are still decent performers for desktop duty), then an example of something that can take advantage of multiple cores (and that, in fact, takes advantage of vSMP today) is *Microsoft Office* (when multiple applications or even multiple copies of the same application in the suite are in use) dating back all the way to Office 2000; if you run any two (or more) Office applications at once (especially if Outlook is one of them) I would seriously consider a Q6600 now that prices are actually *reasonable*. (The same recommendation applies if you instead use any of Microsoft Office's competition such as OpenOffice (or even Sun StarOffice).) Serial-computing (running a single application at a time) may be all well and good for a dual-core system; however, running multiple decently-sized (or even scarier, indecently porky) applications at once is what calls out for quad-core processing power. While typing this reply, I've had WMP 11 running in the background, along with eMule and uTorrent and two IMs, along with WLOC and the odd Outlook mail session; most folks with Core2Duo computers consider this load *too heavy* (never mind that I have a mere P4 2.6 Northwood-C). Given a Core2Duo (or especially a Q6600), the load would likely go up (in the case of the Q6600, way up).

 

[ZenOps]

If you have a lot of Disk-IO intensive tasks, what will probably be the determining factor is how often you shut off your computer.

With Vista, the disk prefetch (smartdrv) will load as much into memory as possible, and take it away as programs need actual RAM. This is great for people with 4GB or more (most quad users will probably have 4GB or more) As long as you never shut off your computer, the system will have less and less disk I/O's. Its probably why in Vista, the actual shutdown button is now secondary to the standby button which is the preferred method of leaving a computer off overnight or for a few hours.

But you can pretty well be assured that a good chunk of the bundled programs in Windows XP and Vista are highly threaded (designed for multicore) and will recieve an appropriate speed boost as more cores are added. Not that anyone really complains about how slow Internet Explorer is, but its nice to have instances of media player and some Java pop up 4x faster. PDF's are an absolute joy with dual and quad cores.

But yes, (re)encoding DVD's (video editing) will definitely be limited by the speed of the harddrive(s). If that is what you primarily do, then Duals or Quads are probably not high on the list. But really... Thats the one appplication that actually needs really high IO, even image editing is not all that disk intensive.

 

[jeenam]

Seems most people who post on these forums are gamers.

For those of us who work in the IT industry, one word.

Vmware.

'Nuff said.

 

[stoney_titan]

Two words: OLD THREAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

/unsubscribe

 

[DeFex]

i love photoshop cs3

www.simplyathos.com

although most of my shots are pretty much in-camera with standard digital darkroom manips like curves and some selective color.

its funny to watch some plugs that used to take ages (radial blur for example) on big images. they use all the cores and go very fast, then if you have some of the older plugs that used to impress, the seem so slow using 1 core.