UT2k4 / D3 Capped @ 50% CPU Util on intel HT???

A

acidfr33k

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 3, 2004
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73
Has anyone noticed??

I have 2 monitors and I have the task manager running on the second screen while playing UT2004 and Doom3, and it never shows over 50% utilization for the game.. the rest is idle!!!

Can the games not even handle HyperThreading?? (both logical CPUs at 50%)

HELP!!!
 
Indeed, if you disable hyperthreading it will show 100%

nature of the beast.

edit: Other programs do the same thing see: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/9188
It has to do with running an intensive single threaded application and how it gets measured by task manager.

==>Lazn
 
Any performance change?? I'd be shocked if my system were stunted to 50% of what it could do..
 
Nope, it is a measurement problem, not a performance problem.

If you set affinity for the game to one processor, then what you will get is one processor running at 100% and the other basically idle (this might slightly improve performance) but the overall will still show 50% CPU utilization.

Remember you do not actually have two procesors, so both running at 50% is really the full ability of the CPU. All hyperthreading does is let mulitple threads take advantage of what would otherwise be wasted cycles, so it just improves efficency, it doesn't add any actuall performance. (though improved efficency has a measured performance advantage)

==>Lazn
 
ROFL....

I paid good money for that HT crap and now it's not working!!!!!

/me goes to complain to intel

*the preceeding was not serious*
 
Thanks..

now doom3 : RoE still crawls to ~20fps with my 3.8Prescott, x850xt PE in big rooms, but that's another story..
 
acidfr33k said:
Thanks..

now doom3 : RoE still crawls to ~20fps with my 3.8Prescott, x850xt PE in big rooms, but that's another story..
Click to expand...

Wow, what settings are you running it on. Are you in Ultra settings or something. That card is a beast and should handle any game you throw at it.
 
Mysogonist said:
ROFL....

I paid good money for that HT crap and now it's not working!!!!!

/me goes to complain to intel

*the preceeding was not serious*
Click to expand...
No, from what I understand it's working perfectly. The game probably can't access both (virtual) CPUs at the same time.
 
Icheb said:
No, from what I understand it's working perfectly. The game probably can't access both (virtual) CPUs at the same time.
Click to expand...

Don't know of any games that are actually designed to exploit multiple CPUs virtual or not right now, it makes it much more complicated to create and to test. With HT your CPU is only as "strong" as it is with it off, it's just better at splitting its workload. If you're just doing one thing (like playing a game) you get a smallish improvement from turning HT off in the BIOS.
 
if you really want to see 100% just toss in a copy of quake 3, there was a way to enable multi-threading in the console. This was the last game I know of to have support for multiple CPU's

lets just hope these dual cores change things fast
atleast Epic has gauranteed the next unreal engine will do it
 
BigTaf said:
atleast Epic has gauranteed the next unreal engine will do it
Click to expand...

I think that's good news...but on the other hand it speaks of what the game's system requirements might be...
 
Lazn_Work said:
Nope, it is a measurement problem, not a performance problem.

If you set affinity for the game to one processor, then what you will get is one processor running at 100% and the other basically idle (this might slightly improve performance) but the overall will still show 50% CPU utilization.

Remember you do not actually have two procesors, so both running at 50% is really the full ability of the CPU. All hyperthreading does is let mulitple threads take advantage of what would otherwise be wasted cycles, so it just improves efficency, it doesn't add any actuall performance. (though improved efficency has a measured performance advantage)

==>Lazn
Click to expand...


I concur
 
Well Epic was talking about supporting dual core chips.

They basically said that writing a gaming engine to run multiple threads is a very difficult proposition. So they are basically going to be using the second core for AI, physics, etc..Which to me, technically isn't making the engine multi-threaded, but just off-loading specific tasks to a second core(cpu) if it is present.

There was a recent inteview about this somewhere...

Oh yeah, every time I enabled SMP support in Quake3 it either crashed or was quite a bit slower than usual.
 
If you're still using Windows 2000, you may want to consider upgrading to Windows XP, it has special optimized scheduling for hyperthreading.
 
High 11x8 or 10x7 even! Does well until you get a couple of the crazy new imps in the room :) drops to 20fps..

Lazy_Moron said:
Wow, what settings are you running it on. Are you in Ultra settings or something. That card is a beast and should handle any game you throw at it.
Click to expand...
 
hardwarephreak said:
Well Epic was talking about supporting dual core chips.

They basically said that writing a gaming engine to run multiple threads is a very difficult proposition. So they are basically going to be using the second core for AI, physics, etc..Which to me, technically isn't making the engine multi-threaded, but just off-loading specific tasks to a second core(cpu) if it is present.

There was a recent inteview about this somewhere...

Oh yeah, every time I enabled SMP support in Quake3 it either crashed or was quite a bit slower than usual.
Click to expand...


Heres the quote from the article your talking about

AnandTech: The new Unreal Engine 3 is designed for multi-threading, and will make good use of dual core CPUs available when games on the new engine come out. What parts of the game will benefit/be improved, thanks to multiprocessing? What will be the parts that will benefit the most?

Tim Sweeney: For multithreading optimizations, we're focusing on physics, animation updates, the renderer's scene traversal loop, sound updates, and content streaming.We are not attempting to multithread systems that are highly sequential and object-oriented, such as the gameplay.

Implementing a multithreaded system requires two to three times the development and testing effort of implementing a comparable non-multithreaded system, so it's vital that developers focus on self-contained systems that offer the highest effort-to-reward ratio.
Click to expand...

either way i look it thats good news, anytime you can take even parts of cpus workload your going to get a performance increase. With current Development tools the concensus is it is very tough to right games to use multiple threads effeceintly. Im just happy that the games are finally giving us something. This means you could also dual a dual-dual core operton system for some kick ass gaming finally :)
 
Scali said:
If you're still using Windows 2000, you may want to consider upgrading to Windows XP, it has special optimized scheduling for hyperthreading.
Click to expand...

Yes it does. The HT Pentium 4's weren't around when Windows 2000 was the OS of choice.
 
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