Multicore optimization more common; an arguement for the Q9000 and future mobile i7 CPU's

htwingnut i´m really looking fordward to see how your new machine (np8662) performs with ARMA2 as I want to buy the same laptop but I don´t know which CPU choose, an P9700/P9900 or a Q9000 as the one that have LaptopNut.

I have played all the series from operation flashpoint trought Arma and Arma 2 with my desktop,so would be nice to play that game at my new laptop too.

 

I'll try to get as much done as quickly as I can. My check cleared and the laptop is in the process of being built and burned-in. I don't expect to see the machine for another week or so, and with Monday being a holiday...

 

well perfect htwingnut that way we can check too how much takes from pay to get the laptop at home. I´m planing to buy it from xoticpc ,any advice?

 

ARMA 2 is definitely playable on the NP8662 with the Q9000 but it depends on your expectations. I noticed the view distance is one of the main CPU killers (maximum view distance maxes out all cores) but this game plays at 1680 X 1050 resolutions with a mixture of high and normal settings at 35 fps. Occasionally you will see up to 40 fps. This is in the middle of a base with many vehicles, tanks, lots of soldiers, buildings, helicopters, trees and what looks like foggy distance.

I am very curious how the 2.85 Core2Duo will perform in this game at various settings. I tested out the benchmark and it is very intensive and is a real test (unlike GTA IV's benchmark). Some settings showed an average fps of 25 whereas other settings showed 30 fps. When you consider that I have not set anything to ''low'' and I am at native resolution, this is pretty good.

Also consider that GTA IV performs better on my laptop than this game does lol.

I am also downloading Microsoft Flight Simulator X Demo to test out.

I don't think there are any doubts that Quads are the future, the only reason why anyone has doubts about the Q9000 is due to its low clock rates.

EDIT: I just tested out the Microsoft Flight Simulator X Demo at 1680 X 1050 resolutions, all settings Medium High, Global texture resolution High and I was getting frame rates of 60 fps, I saw frames from 30-47 fps, 55 fps. The game is perfectly playable but it didn't look like it was using all 4 Cores

Cores 0-1 were being used from 89-100% but the other 2 were only being used 1-2% which is how they look when the standard OS tasks are being done in the background.

 

And that example with FSX shows why for a lot of, especially older games; a high clocked dual core is better than a low clocked quad, thats a very similar scenario to what you see with WoW. They take advantage of cores 1/2 but just dont make any use of 3/4, and the clock speed, not the core numbers becomes the important factor.

This is why until quads are necessary I stuck with a higher clocked dual core for my laptop

 

It turns out that they have released a seperate patch that amongst other things, adds multicore support but I don't know if the Demo can be patched to SP1 yet. I will download the update and see. I am liking this game so far so might buy it anyway.

According to the developers:

I did a quick check on WOW and apparently, there was a patch to allow it to take advantage of multi cores to some extent:

http://tinyurl.com/dc6pzp

I don't know how accurate these details are and I don't play that game or any other multiplayer / online modes.

 

Which is all good, and Im glad they've done this, especially on a modern, core intensive game, but the point I was getting at still stands; you've now seen first hand how having a higher clocked dual core can help in some games; there ARE games out there that are CPU intensive, yet aren't (and with older games, now likely never will be) quad core capable

This is where the common analogy comes from; and you've seen it yourself with the initial release of FSX.
That's before we even get into dual GPU setups; where a fast core is even more important

Please note I dont disagree, in the future quad will become the way forward, and will likely look in that direction for my next laptop in a year or two(especially as core clocks and efficiency will likely have risen by then), just I still think there is a justifiable position for a fast clocked dual core right now

 

This has been true of Operation Flashpoint, ArmA and now ArmA 2. Full view distance even in Operation Flashpoint on a modern system can cause a system to chug.

Regarding quads, I think there's pros and cons to a quad vs. fast dual core. It's just whatever fits your situation. The nice thing is that the CPU is upgradeable. Bottom line though, is regardless if one is faster than another in one game or another, if they're playable (i.e. always over 30fps) then it's a good CPU for that application (game).

I plan on putting a quad in mine probably in a couple years or sooner if the situation deems it necessary. I think we're on the threshhold of newer games utilizing multiple cores more efficiently now, and over the next year or so will probably see significant benefit from quads. But until then, I'll take a dual core since what I mostly play will be older titles with a few newer ones coming down the pipe.

 

I do agree about the higher clocked Dual in some games right now but it also depends on how much performance difference there is and this is part of why we will be comparing the Core2Duo 2.85 Ghz to the 2.0 Ghz Q9000, to see just how much difference this higher clock will make in those sorts of games you mentioned as well as the multicore ones.


I can only patch the full version of Fsx so won't be able to test unless I decide to get the full game.

 

It shipped today already! Wow! LOL. Long haul from California, so it will be here on Friday. I will make sure to be here to receive it otherwise I might have to wait over the long three day weekend before I can get it!

Hopefully I'll have time to configure and run some benches. I ordered it without an OS, so I'll have to do the install myself, but I plan on putting Windows 7 Ultimate RTM on it. Thank goodness Windows 7 installs so quickly.

 

Just downloaded arma 2 from steam. I play at 1920x1200 and have all settings on high (cant remember what view distance is, will edit next time i play). I get an average of 40fps, it dips to about 32fps when there is a lot going on (80 jets all flying at each other and crashing lol). I was wondering if anyone knows the purpose of the secondary resolution (cant remember exact name) that can be set at 200% of the native res. I tried it but it doesnt make any difference.

Blazin

 

Was your Q9000 over clocked?

I wonder what version the Steam download of Arma 2 is patched at.

 

WELL WELL very interesting news from both of you guys (LaptopNut and htwingnut)

htwingnut your waiting will be widely rewarded soon

For the moment I´m very impressed with the performance of LaptopNut NP8662 Q9000, it performs way better I first thought based on how this two games (ARMA2 and FSX) demand all the juice of the desktops CPU + GPU .

I think too that the future will be of course multicore and scalable software. Will be very interesting to see how well the P9700 performs with this two games and compare results. Will be nice if you share your game settings to make very real comparation between the two systems.

Is good to know that we have the oportunity,with this laptop, to swap CPUs so in a future could be a good idea to buy a quad coming from a dual.
Or maybe buying a Q9100 or Q9200 now with more ghz and cache, and trying to future profing more the system.Are those last CPUs supported by the BIOS? or we would need to flash the NP8662 Bios?.

Laptopnut you will make me very happy if you make a positive decision to buy FSX, as this game with the SP1 patch will LITERALLY fly with your QUAD.

Lastly, If I finally buy another CPU like a Q9100 or Q9200 I will post the results of my bechmarks using the same settings that your systems so we could compare results together.

 

Although the Q9100, Q9200 and the QX9300 are not officially supported in the NP8662, I have not heard of anyone having to flash their bios to recognise them. I think the best compromise of price, performance and TDP is probably the Q9200. I wouldn't expect significant performance increases from the Q9100 but I could well be wrong.

Regarding Arma 2, in the benchmark I get an average 30 fps but I notice that the real performance varies a lot between levels in the actual game. In some levels I saw 35-40 fps, other levels I saw 20 fps, 25 fps and a night time I saw the worst frame rates of 15 fps.

I am testing a scenario at the moment in the full version called ''Village Sweep'', my settings are 1680 X 1050, Visibility 1022, normal settings, AA disabled, AF disabled, post process high and quality preference high. I am getting frames of 20 fps, mostly 22, sometimes 24 fps and in many parts 30 fps. I can see a huge landscape, cows, lots of trees in the distance, village houses and can see into the distance kind of like in real life.

Another Scenario I am testing called ''Freedom Fighters'' is so far completely in the dark with heavy rain fall and lots of trees. I am seeing frames from 22-34 fps.

I notice that some areas of the darkened landscape I am getting 39 fps but others can go as low as 22 fps. I will test out Vsync or try a frame rate limiter tool later on.

Looking at Core usage it is not that high at all, at the moment I am seeing 43%, 39%, 48%, 76% on each core but I guess I am standing still lol.

Desktops equipped with i7 processors and twice the GPU power struggle with this game so I guess its performance on the NP8662 is pretty good considering.

''Blazin23'' has the same Quad as me and is getting really good frame rates at a higher resolution but his version was from steam and I wonder if his MSI has built in OC functions.


I wonder if a GPU overclock would improve performance in this game.

With the FSX game, bare in mind that I was always playing in 3rd person mode so that might have effected frame rates.

 

LaptopNut, I´ve found this at BIS forums and could be useful to improve the performance while playing ARMA2.

Command line tweaks:

-winxp : Use it in Vista/W7 to enable multi-GPU support, will disable use of D3D9Ex (a special Vista only D3D9 version)

-nosplash : Skip splash screens

-world=empty : Doesn't load as much for menu, starts faster

-maxmem=2047 : Allows game engine to use more RAM (2047 is hardcoded maximum atm, anything higher falls back to 2047).

-window : Windowed mode

-noCB : Turns off multicore drawing, slow down rendering but may resolve visual glitches

-cpuCount=X : Change X to a number equal or less than numbers of available cores. (2 seems to have the best results....even on quads!)


Right click the shortcut, properties, then add after arma2.exe

Example:

C:\Games\ArmA2\arma2.exe -nosplash -world=empty -maxmem=2047 -cpuCount=2

Couple of other snippets:

* Shadow setting 'Very High' usually offers better performance than 'High'
* Video memory setting 'Default' uses the value in Arma2.cfg. 'Very High' is 512mb, therefore 'Default' will actually be higher if your card has more than 512mb vram.
* Your terrain detail will automatically be lowered if Arma2 determines that you set your 'Visibility' too high.

With a couple of nvidia specific tweaks, under ARMAII's profile in the control panel, change max pre-rendered frames to 8, gives a nice performance boost. Disabling PhysX helps too. Both from BI's forums.

I hope this help to get the most from your system and hopefully from mine too (in a very near future )

 

Excellent stuff. I thought I was imagining things when I noticed some higher settings seemed to give better performance. I will give some of those tweaks a test and see if I get any improved performance.

 

Good list of tweaks redstone! I'll have to give those a shot!

 

The last update for arma 2 from steam was on August 14th, so i think it is the latest version. My Q9000 is running at 2075mhz, although i have overclocked my GPU (see sig) to 550/900 (stock clocks are 500/800). Also, I find that arma 2 does run better at higher settings, i tried lowering texture quality etc to medium (and also lowered res to 1440x900) but did not see much of an improvement in fps. However if I wack up the view distance then it starts to slow down.

Blazin

 

So you mean a 3.0ghz single core will give better performance than say a 2.2ghz dual core? I agree that a weak processor and good graphics card will not give great performance, but IMO the days of single core processors for gaming are over. (for new games, i have no problem with playing old games e.g. the Delta Force series on my 3.0ghz intel P4)

Blazin

 

No Arma 2 is mostly CPU dependant, but with tweaks it can run pretty good. However some levels are very demanding, the game isn´t very well optimized. I can run the game on 1920x1200 on my XPS M1730 pretty good and visuall good looking.

Being CPU dependant I still see people with far better system than my notebook run it worse than I do.

My desktop computer with a GTX 260 though runs the game very smoothly.

One clip from my XPS M1730 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkdRjOZsMXM

And from my desktop with a Core2Duo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEkBWP8oUDg

 

It's a big file, 2.6GB, but I'll download it overnight here at work and try the dmeo. I suspect the QX9300 @2.93 and 280M should breeze through it.

 

I tested out the FSX full version with the SP2 patch and I have noticed a huge performance jump over the Demo that could only support 2 Cores. Note that even when the Demo was only using 2 Cores, it was still perfectly playable.

I have all settings set to high and aircraft detail is on ultra at 1680 X 1050 resolutions and I was seeing maximum frames of 125 fps, most consistent frame rates were 60 fps, 85 fps and I saw core usage of 100% on some cores. Occasionally I noticed 100% usage on all 4 Cores. There are no stuttering or slow downs but I have not capped the frame rates so I would still expect a bit of this. Bare in mind that this was just a quick test in 3rd person views and I have not seen any other aircraft traffic in the sky yet but the landscape from the air looks CPU intensive enough. I noticed that this games initial settings are always a 20 fps frame rate cap until you change it. The Demo was the same. It looks like SP 1 was the patch that added multicore support because I see nothing mentioned about it in SP2.

I found the below site very interesting, it talks about parallel processing, on the fly texture processing and many other interesting facts in relation to the Microsoft FSX game.

http://tinyurl.com/lb326g

 

I don't know about you guys, but until today i have been playing gta4 without any updates (v1.0), but today i decided to update (as i am modding custom cars and it requires a newer version) to v1.04. Before I updated, my settings were 1280x800 res, texture, reflection, water, and texture filter all on high, and shadows on medium, draw dist. 25, detail dist. 32. This would give me about 40fps average.
However, after updating, it has changed my graphics settings to 1920x1200, texture filter on medium, everything else on high/very high, draw distance 28, detail distance 38, and this gives me the same fps! Before the update, the graphical memory limit wouldnt have even let me choose 1920x1200 res and high settings, but i guess now it has been optimized. Just wondering if anyone else has found this?

Blazin

 

Empire Total War (with multicore patch update) is also very CPU intensive as most of you know, that is another game that would be interesting to bench on the 2.85 Core2Duo. I get 35-60 fps on medium settings in that one at native res.

 

If you guys can find any games that would utilize four or more cores, lemme know, been dying to find something to use all the power of my beast.

 

You will want to test out Arma 2, Microsoft Fsx (patched to SP2(, Empire Total War on highest settings with the latest patches (that adds multicore support) and the obvious one is of course GTA IV patched to 1.0.40.

 

Oh right, GTA 4, I will need to try it out .

 

You should also try out World In Conflict. I saw over 75% usage on each core when I benched that game.

The following are what the devs mentioned about CPU scaling:

 

Yes WIC is a big one for the multi-threaded optimization, even just jumping 1Ghz in speed on a Core2 got me double the frames at better settings.

 

htwingnut did you received your new laptop yet? , I´m anxious to see your benchmark results , and well your gaming list at Gamespot is pretty impresive hehe.

Laptopnut, the performance of FsX is just what I need. I normally use with the FS base program some addons that I suppose are very CPU intensive, those addons are normally advanced planes with almost all the systems and avionics simulated that drain more CPU than graphics power. The thing that I don´t know is that if those addons use the avail cores in the same efficent way that FSX. How is performing your system now with the special tweaks? , any boost with the performance?

 

What special tweaks are you talking about?

If you are referring to Arma 2, everything I tried didn't make much difference but there is not much you can do when a game is so poorly optimised. It looks like many devs will get lazy on the optimisation and just increase the requirements to compensate for this.

Having said that, even with some of the slow downs, they are never major enough (so far) to make the game unplayable. The Core percentage use is never high in that game which is strange.

If you link me to these addons you use in Fsx I will test them, I am curious how they will effect performance.

I have noticed that the performance is already effected when I chose different aircraft so I would expect a performance hit from those mods.

For example performance is lower when I fly the Boeing 747- 400 compared to flying the smaller helicopters or any other smaller planes. The frame rates are still very playable at 45-50 fps though.

I have noticed that 1 Core is always at 100% usage in Fsx regardless, it seems they completely dedicate one Core to an important ongoing task so with a Core2Duo, that might have an impact on performance. I think this is what the Devs mentioned earlier on in one of my posts. It could be doing the landscape rendering as you fly.

 

yes Laptopnut, I was refering to Arma2 tweaks. It´s a shame that Arma 2 is so poorly made (at least the engine) ,its strange that your cores are not fully used with Arma2.... that sounds me that the program can´t use fully the hardware and that only means one thing.... poorly made.... hope with time... and patches.... the situation will improve.

The planes that I use most with FS are ERJ145 Pilot in Command www.feelthere.com and all PMDG aircrafts that you can find at http://www.precisionmanuals.com/ .

I use FS2004 and FSX , now that we are sure that FSX is multicore optimized, what about FS2004? , I think that is not multicore ready.

Other Flight simulator that I would like to test is Xplane, you can find it at http://www.x-plane.com/index_desktop.html , this one is newer in its version 9 so we have more chances that the software is fully multicore optimized. I think that the use of multicore systems with xplane is mandatory as this software make all the visual and physics (much more accurate and complex that the physics that we find at FS2004 and FSX) calc in real time.

EDIT: I found this at xplane webpage, under system requirements --> Of course, a computer with 4 GB of RAM, a quad-core processor, and 2 GB of VRAM can be used and X-Plane will take full advantage of it. CPUs with multiple cores are useful because X-Plane will use that second core to load scenery while flying. This eliminates the tenth of a second stutter usually associated with transitioning from one scenery file to another (which is still experienced when using a single-core processor).

 

I doubt FS2004 will be multi core optimised since I notice it is for much older OS, it will probably scale to multi cores which is not the same so I wouldn't expect any performance increase with that one.

I will give Xplane a test to see how well it performs.

You will be able to make a better choice as to what CPU to choose once you see how htwingnut's laptop performs, particularly in Arma 2 and Fsx at 2.85 Ghz.

From testing these games and seeing the results I appreciate the Q9000 even more now.

 

Yeah, this thread is very nice because we (all of us) can compare the results of completely identical machines with the only difference of the processor. And I think that this matter is of the interest of many people nowdays as the question is everywhere, what matter more... the GHz or the number of cores in a CPU ... . The results are coming, and this helps a lot making the final decision. For now,seeing your results, I think that I will be happy to put a Q9000 inside my machine.

Thanks for taking your time helping me to decide! . I think these tests will be very helpful to everybody.

 

I agree but I don't think there will be any such questions in the future with mobile i7 and / or higher clocked Quads that have been designed to run cooler in our gaming laptops. The only reason why anyone questions the Q9000 is because it is 2.0 Ghz.

Many simply underestimate the power of the Q9000 and are put of from having one in their laptop due to the clock rate. If not for that, I don't think anyone would question it period.

I just tested out the Xplane Demo but they don't do themselves any favours by disabling the joystick after 10 minutes and flashing up prompts every other minute. I know it was a Demo but I didn't get much testing done since it is not very straight forward to configure and when the joystick got disabled the plane just hovered in mid air without warning of why.

I can tell the game is not optimised for quad core but it scales to more than 2. I was seeing frames of 30 fps in 3D cockpit, occasionally 28 fps, 45 fps, highs of 70 fps and mostly 55 fps in the more 3rd person types of views. This was at native resolutions at very high settings.

It didn't run as smoothly as Fsx but it was without a doubt playable.

 

LOL I have never seen all of my VRAM being used, ever, just installed GTA 4, and it was only at 35 for draw distance, at 1920x1200, everything else maxed out, and it used my full memory. I have not patched up to 1.0.4 yet so im doing that as we speak.

CPU usage is only at about 30%, much less than I expected.

 

For RE5 I score 59.7 with two cores at 2.4GHz at same res 1680x1050 DX10 Vista 64, this with SLI though. A Quad Core would definitely be nice in my XPS M1730 but not possible Would be interesting to see an X9000 at 3.4GHz and 8800m GTX SLI scores in RE5.

1920x1200 DX10 56.8 FPS average.

 

the v1.0.4 patch worked miracles for this game. I couldnt even set my resolution at 1920x1200 (native) and have any settings above low and draw distance on 2 lol. Now i have everything on full and draw and detail distance at 35 and 40 respectively. Also, i find the graphics look soo much better since the new patch.. it actually looks noticeably better than the console versions

Blazin

 

I completely agree, as I have a dual-core clocked at 2.5 ghz (P7350) in my laptop (G51vx-rx05) and my friend has a sager with only a 2.0 ghz processor (Q9000); In our play-through of ArmA 2, he completely massacred my computer because of all the AI actions and ambient commands in the background with even a slower-clocked quad-core, compared to my higher clocked dual-core. With GTA4, it's just the same: I believe that quad-core cpu's are being optimized more with games, or the developers are lazy and producing poor ports.