As expected...

[dBTelos]

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=34916

Quad core is useless for games

[Sphere]

dB,

This is quite interesting, since Alan Wake, UT 2007, Crysis and a few others that slipped my mind, have all said(developers)...can retrieve links if you'd like) that indeed all 4 cores will be utilized and of great value.

Whether this is lip service to market the *quads* is another story. On my part, there's much anticipation for these chips, but I've been on the bleeding edge of technology beofore and been burned, so I think I'll build a conroe rig around the 8800GTX(assuming that's what it's going to be called) and be smart about the situation to see how it materalizes.

Sphere

[davidhammock200]

Agreed. Fully using dual core will take awhile. ;)

[dBTelos]

Are there any benchmarks as of late showing how helpful a second core actually is?

[Sphere]

In *real world* gaming, I have yet to see useage of more than one core. I'm going off of my G15 keyboard which shows how much each is being used.

With that said, if they(game devs/programmers) can't utilize 2 cores, how in the hell are they going to use 4?

Sphere

[dBTelos]

"how in the hell are they going to use 4?"

Hardware is moving a lot faster then software. A new GPU is released every other day, can't say the same for any type of software.

[SuperSix]

Agreed. Fully using dual core will take awhile. ;)

It's all epenis status right now. BUT if you do rendering, or serious number crunching, Quad core is indeed useFULL.

I think that once devoplers see the value, they will code for it, but let's not forget that there's a huge installed single-core base that's currently paying their bills.

It's time for the software developers to take advantage of the platforms available, and unless the company has some major foresight, they will continue to code for the largest profit-base clientele..

[davidhammock200]

It's all epenis status right now. BUT if you do rendering, or serious number crunching, Quad core is indeed useFULL.

I think that once devoplers see the value, they will code for it, but let's not forget that there's a huge installed single-core base that's currently paying their bills.

It's time for the software developers to take advantage of the platforms available, and unless the company has some major foresight, they will continue to code for the largest profit-base clientele..Hopfully, Vista will be able to properly manage mulitasking in a multi-CPU system,
as IMO most software developers are not going to commit the resources
until there is a much larger installed base.

[Slartibartfast]

I think it's a tad misleading to say it's "useless" though. I mean, yes, in a single-threaded game (or any app) the performance benefits of adding cores/cpus is negligible, but any SMP advocate will tell you that once you've gone multicore you won't go back - everything is so much smoother.

I mean, I like installing windows updates while burning a cd and playing a game :)

[Dave65]

Hi all,I have had some experience with this in Flight Sim X and have been through this.
FSX is a demanding sim,on the box it says you can run this with a 1 ghz cpu and a 32 meg video card,yeah right,well this sim has POed many in the sim community,my dual core 170 Opty was no match for this sim,not even @ 3ghz,had to have all settings to the very lowest just to make it flyable.
I just got C2D E6600 and a 680i MB and now I can use this sim with decent frame rates with settings more than half way to full,I haven't tweaked it much,waiting on my ST85ZF power supply,but here is an article from the guys who developed or worked on this sim,quite interesting read,he talks about the dual core cpu.

http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=121&topic_id=369614&mesg_id=369779&page

[uOpt]

I posted longer articles about this on other forums.

But basically:

There are two kinds of multithreaded programming:

1) split up the program into different different tasks and do different tasks on different CPUs

2) split up individual tasks so that all CPUs can work on the same task, (hopefully) carefully synchronizing which part of the data structures for that task they access currently

Number 1) is what games do right now. Only Valve has announced to go to 2) next year.

Number 2) is much more valuable in general and for games in particular.

You see the problem is that when you run "out of CPU", meaning your framerate suffers from lack of CPU time, then it is almost always one single task in the frame computation that for whatever reason needed more time in this frame and trails. If you have only one CPU per task you are back to a one-CPU system for the remainder of that frame.

[Skott]

Its going to take the game developers a while to utilize the multi cores in the way they want or hope to. Considering it takes on average a good game 18-36 months to be made Intel and AMD can crank out alot of muli-cored procs in that time now that the multi-core door has been opened.