HT in 2013 - next gen comming games

Araxie

Araxie

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Hi all people, im in the process of making a new machine for my little brother, the rig will be 90% of the time for gaming so im thinking in a 3570k or 3770k that a friend of mine are selling open box very cheap so price are not a real factor.. i know for actually gaming the way to go its the 3570k or 3770k HT off, but that rig will be untouched in a couple of years, (maybe for a GPU upgrade)... will be worth now bet for HT in future games with the arrive of the new consoles with 8 cores?? in other hand same friend have a open box 2700k that are offering me in 100$ cuz have no sale after a long time in the same case the 2700k worth future proof over the 3570k on 130$?..
 
I upgrade my rig about every 4 years. I went with a HT rig this time, in hopes it will offer more future proofing, and that warm fuzzy feeling.
 
Hey guys, is it true that HT doesn't help in gaming? I heard that "real cores" are actually better than hyper threaded cores. For example

8 cores > 4 cores 8 threads

This is assuming the same architecture and what not. I know there isn't an Intel 8 core, so it's hard to compare. But someone told me "real cores" is what you want if future games support multiple cores. Hyper threading is really designed for professional apps and OS usage....and "real cores" is what you want for gaming.

Please shed some light if possible. Thanks
 
Hyperthreading does not double the power of a core, it simply utilizes unused transistors in a pipeline to push annother operation through behind the primary one. It more efficiently utilizes wasted silicon, so if nearly all of the silicon is being used by the primary application, the extra logical threading is useless.
 
dukenuke88 said:
Hey guys, is it true that HT doesn't help in gaming? I heard that "real cores" are actually better than hyper threaded cores. For example

8 cores > 4 cores 8 threads

This is assuming the same architecture and what not. I know there isn't an Intel 8 core, so it's hard to compare. But someone told me "real cores" is what you want if future games support multiple cores. Hyper threading is really designed for professional apps and OS usage....and "real cores" is what you want for gaming.

Please shed some light if possible. Thanks
Click to expand...

well being no technical, the thing with HT its that the Physical Core have to lower the speed to work in parallel with the emulated or logical core, thats why keeping HT off have a positive impact in games as actual games are more dependant from 1-3 cores (rare case like Crysis 3 or Battlefield 3 are encoded for multi-threaded system, heck now are still games like Resident Evil 6 who are practically optimized for high speed dual cores processor ) so 4 physical cores at full speed present a more smooth gaming due to be capable of maintain a constant high framerate.. to let an example was the same thing with the lower speeds core 2 quad system vs the high speed Core 2 Duo. in that times 2 cores at high speed was much better than 4 cores at lower speed.. in the meantime the games evolve into more threads more cores will be needed and thats why i made this discussion at this point where its possible a better transition to games using 4+ cores. thats why i made this discussion next consoles are coming with 8 low speed cores and maybe HT in a future be able to work better with games..
 
Well I heard HT doesn't help in games. Virtual Cores just doesn't do anything for modern games, even if that game is multi-threaded. Real cores > Virtual Cores in gaming, as far as I know.

HT for professional apps and OS usage, sure HT will help no doubt.
 
Another interesting factoid: For hyperthreaded CPUs, Windows 7 will "park" half of the logical cores unless you have an 5+ threaded workload that fully loads the CPU. I'm pretty sure it's doing this to prefer loading up each physical core before going back and filling up the hyperthread cores.

Hyperthreading definitely helps when you have lots of threads running 100% load, but more physical cores is always better in that scenario.

Very few games can truly load up more than 4 threads, so it's best to get the fastest core speed possible in general. And the games that are CPU-dependent are typically poorly threaded, thus relying even more on faster GHz (sup Planetside 2). The games that are well-threaded put the bottleneck on your GPU. So in either case, prefer no hyperthreading with maximum GHz.
 
That could change though. The new consoles have 8 cores, so we'll probably see more games that will use 8 threads. You may well still end up GPU limited though, so having HT may not help.

HT does increase total throughput, but you have to have an app that can really use the additional threads. Not many PC apps, games included, can presently do that. The stuff we write at work can very happily fully load 64 threads, and we see improvements with HT on.

So basically it's a crapshoot. It's most definitely possible to write apps/games that benefit from HT. It's just that the majority of current PC games don't because they're aimed at an i3 or AMD APU.

All that said, if the price difference isn't important to you just get the i7. Try turning HT off if you need more FPS. Chances are it won't do a damned thing because if an i7-3770k with HT on isn't fast enough you're probably GPU limited. If HT actually does hurt performance you can always just turn it off on an i7. You can't turn it on with an i5.
 
Windows 8 has better implementation of HT and has a better working scheduler so stick with 8 or 8.1 for better use of HT.
 
Games with a reliance on large numbers of threads will come with the new consoles, the more the better at this point I say.
 
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