CPU Is Hyperthreading worth it? ver.37

I was wondering if there's been any improvement on the Hyperthreading front. I know that in the past it's generally been understood that unless you do a lot of one specific task that benefits from HT is not worth it.

Thing is, with the new consoles being 8 core machines with regular x86 CPUs I'm wondering if it's worth considering a HT CPU for gaming. I know BF3 uses up to 8 threads, and in a recent review of the 4770k, they saw about an 8 FPS increase in performance at the same clock speed vs the 4670k.

All of EAs new triple A titles are using FB3 engine, including BF4, so I was wondering, if you were deciding, would you spend the extra for the 4770k?

This is the test I'm talking about: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i5_4670K_and_i7_4770K_Comparison/8.html

 

They are "8-core" in AMD sense, but they are not real 8-cores. It is much closer to Intel HyperThreading than to a real 8-core CPU.

Unfortunately, that won't change the fact that it is very hard to do correct multithreading, because unfortunately most stuff still depends on each other, so you will have hard time separating stuff in multiple threads, which could run in multiple cores. That is why you usually see one core being at 80-100% load, while the rest is at 30-50% max, or not used at all.

 

Thanks Faug. Y'know sometimes when I make a thread I end up answering my own questions too. Mulling through that review more, I see that in other games there's almost no improvement and in the benchmarks the results are the same as they always have been, benchmarks specifically designed for multithreading are higher, everything else is the same. The 4770k apparently seems to run hotter and doesn't clock as well either.

 

the AMD 8 core are far more than jsut * intels 4 + a little bit* - in a lot of integer applications, they are 8 real cores , im sure that certain fanboys will ofc argue otherwise. - as TPU have proven time and again HT in gaming (other than the odd case) is pointless - and in a number of cases actually makes for a SLOWER cpu.

 

Does not help that Intels 6 Core cpus are so far ahead in the tests that AMDs cpus do shine in thats why people question if AMDs cpus are 8 real cores. ( price is for a different argument )

Facts are 99% of applications can not use 4 cores let alone 6 or 8. I would struggle to list 5 things I use that can even push a 6 core Intel system, 0 games thats for sure, Theres a few photo and video editing programs that I use that can do so. Theres plenty of benchmark tests that can max out the cpus but thats all they are. Real programs with actual use of those cores are few and far between.

Differences shown in the tests techpower did have not been readily repeated elsewhere thats for sure. Anandtech ran there own tests and both cpus perform within 1fps of each other.

People have been saying that the fact the new consoles all use AMDs chips will help them is also selective memory, Same was said with Nvidia on the old consoles they gained 0 benifit.

 

It's more a question of price per performance... My 8 core AMD system takes equally long to compile the stuff I work on as the £50-£100 more expensive 4-core HT Intel processor (FX-8350 vs 4770K). But that's because I can use the 8 integer cores that the CPU has. If I want to do any floating point stuff (i.e. most of the other real world tasks) I'm back down to 4 FPU's that are slower than the Intel equivalent, so maybe Intel is again more cost effective.

In overall performance the Intel 6-Core will trash my 8-core AMD in any benchmark but the CPU is 3x as expensive, so not really comparable -- when you get into that territory you're comparing Intel 6-Core against AMD 16-Core Opterons -- while I don't have any benchmarks, for what I do I suspect the AMD will be faster, for any floating point stuff the Intel probably wins again.

(FWIW on my dual-core Hyperthreaded i3 system all cores have 100% load when compiling most of the time.)

Really, it depends on the workload, and I know too little about how games are written.

 

Thanks for the responses guys. Think I'll save the $ for the 9970. I'm not super thrilled by Nvidia's 700 line. Great cards, no doubt, but Nvidia must be on meth if they think I'm going to pay those exorbitant prices, and I've been an Nvidia customer for years.

If the 9970 comes out swinging at $500 Nvidia has no choice but to price match, then the price/performance argument might be worth having with Nvidia, but not ATM. I'll stick with my 7770.

Never really had much brand loyalty when it comes to video cards. My first real videocard was an ATI 9800 Pro, followed by a Nvidia 6800, then a 7800GT, then an 8800GT, followed by a 5770 which was quickly replaced by a GTX 460 despite liking that card quite a bit, then a 560Ti, then a 670.

OK that looks pretty nvidia stacked afterall But it wasn't really due to disliking ATI/AMD

 

With 9970 not on any release schedule except a vague q1 2014 waiting could be a long wait. That's the reason nvidia charge what they want. Also expecting nvidia to counter the 9970 with a 880 or something similar. AMD has given nvidia a holiday of sorts with gpus as they are pushing consoles leaving nvidia to pick up the market for high end single card solutions.

780 been out since may a new Gpu in January to feb would be quick but not unheard off.

 

I thought the 9970 was on schedule for a Sept. 25th launch, or are we just talking a paper launch situation?

 

The 9970 (it won't be called this though) is launched this month, will be available next month along with BF4.

 

Er 9790?

 

It's going to be called something totally different. But people call it the 9970 as that's what it would be called if they stuck with things

 

Oh I see. You sound like a man in-the-know

 

I was about to post a similar thread, but in the interest of keeping things tidy I've decided to bump this 18 months on, to see if there's any kind of consensus on whether things are moving on.

I currently have a 3770K in my rig which is solely used for gaming and general browsing/office apps. I have been offered a 3570K (which I know will hit the high 4GHz range on air) plus £70 in exchange for my chip, and I'm struggling to find reasons not to go for it. My 3770K is comfortable to about 4.5GHz before it starts to error.

My reason for asking is that a couple of games recently have started to list i7 chips as part of their optimal specs - I'm looking at you Witcher 3. However, if the game can't/won't use the logical cores the best of its abilities, then I'm basically just running a chip with unusable cores surplus to my requirements.

What are the general thoughts on this now we're well into 2015?

 

Well, I did some very light testing the other day and have found that hyperthreading no longer seems to perform worse in single thread applications.

In regards to gaming performance, I would think the potentially higher overclock of a non-hyperthreaded CPU would win out compared to more threads.

I suppose it depends how much that extra 70 quid means to you? I humbly think you wouldn't notice the difference unless you did the odd little CPU benchmark here and there. Plus, hyperthreading = HEAT.

 

I suppose that from my perspective it's essentially a free £70, because I'm unlikely to lose any tangible performance base don my workload. But I haven't done a lot of gaming or research on the topic lately so I wean't sure whether engines are starting to make use of logical cores yet.

I think I might just go ahead and take them up on the offer, I can live with the slight reduction in e-peen length

 

The only risk in doing that is getting a dud when it comes to overclock. You got a nice stable 4.5GHz OC 3770K, question is what will be the limit for that 3570K. But otherwise you won't lose much performance compared to the 3770K, especially in games.

 

I'm curious, does anybody know (or simly have a link to an explanation of) the reasons for games not jumping to 8-core already? I assumed it was a fairly hard technical ceiling, but then again, back when dual-core was dominant and quad-cores were a luxury, there was a lot of skepticism about games ever taking advantage of 4 cores. Now 4 cores are more or less mandatory for most high-end games. What changed? And why hasn't it changed again? Is it actually that it's tricky, or just that games developers aren't bothering until 8-core CPUs are more commonplace to make it worth their while?

 

If you look at tech reports cpu reviews there can be some difference between i5 and i7 in terms of the effect the processors have on smoothness of frame delivery / game animation. AMD lags way behind in this area. except of course in games where mantle is reducing cpu overhead. With mantle all CPU's perform similarly in terms of frame rendering times.

I would think that AI is an area that could be multi threaded with a thread per npc. Also I think pathfinding is another area that can be broken out into threads as you calculate multiple path options simultaneously. Maybe audio processing could be multithreaded as well as a game deals with multiple simultaneous sounds sources. Unfortunately I don't know enough about these areas to know if they can become burdensome enough to warrant multi threading.

 

Just bear in mind that the introduction of DirectX12 could turn the current gaming paradigm of 'a few (i.e. four) cores, faster clock speeds' completely around.

This is what supreme Commander does (just as an example).