Quad-core vs. current dual core for gaming

Ive been looking at these quad-core processors vs. Dual core and seeing many ppl feel they wont have that much of a big difference in gaming, and only certain games if any. With Quadcores soon coming out for laptops, is it gonna be worth it? Basically, do you think Quad core will rele have any drastic improvements for gaming in the next, maybe 2 to 3 years or is it just gpu?

 

Simply... No. Until quadcores become more energy effecient there is absolutely no reason to put one in a laptop. Also, graphics cards will have to become more powerful as the CPU is not the bottleneck for a vast majority of systems when gaming.

 

2 years, definitely. 1 year, possibly. Even crysis is SAID to have a drastic improvement going from dual to quad core, though it's probably at most a 20% performance increase at high settings with an 8800GTX. But even in 2 years I doubt many games will come out which will give the 40%-50% performance increase the core difference should yield.

Also, it's important to note that the bottleneck for games right now is the GPU. As in, you're much better off with a 2.4 C2D with a 9800M than a 2.4C2Q with an 8800M. Note that neither of those setups are coming out any time soon.

 

Yea, i figured it was the GPU that was the bottleneck derelict... and considering ill be purchasing a laptop that i will need and will be upgrading the GPU during the next four years (D900, so QPU up is possible) i was possibly gonna get one with the quad core... since a few resellers already have it out covered under warranty... this way it would DEF last the next 4 years with less bottlenecking in the future. even tho i kno its still prolly overkill and the E6700 would suffice just as fine as the Q6700 for laptops

 

Unreal Tournament 3 will be one of the first games to take advantage of multi-cores.

It will even use one of the cores for physics calculations if you do not have a separate PPU (like PhysX card)

This goes for the PS3 multi-core "Cell" CPU as well.

 

If you buy a SLI notebook don't handicap yourself with a lower CPU, it WILL negativly impact your fps. Buy the best CPU you can afford, and lets face it, if you can afford a SLI notebook why skimp on the CPU? I would recommend at least a Q6700 if you go the new 95W CPU or go a E6700 CPU if you go dual core.

 

well... so far my dream lap is Q6700 and 8700Sli ... it'll only set me back in the 4 grand mark!! so... im gonna have to strip down the price somewhere...

 

Well Quad-cores aren't necessarily going to make things more pretty or allow you to run at higher resolution. The benefit of quad-cores is improvements in physics and in AI, both of which will likely get their own thread/core. Obviously though, games will have to be programmed to take advantage of quad cores to see the benefit. Games designed for 1 or even 2 cores won't see much benefit and may in fact see decreased performance if it thrashes (jumps back and forth around different cores making caching inefficient).

In any case, there is no plans for a mobile quad core processor from either Intel or AMD in the next year. Even with Nehalem in H2 2008, there still may not be mobile quad cores, since the return of HT may mean that a dual core with 4 virtual cores may provide the best performance/watt.

 

Ok as a person who has had a quadcore PC for 6 months now there is absolutly no perfomance gain in any games at all. Its all clock speed and physics is never going to run well on CPU anyways they arn't designed to do massivly parrallell floating point calculations which is what physics requires. To give you an idea 1 care at say 3Ghz can support say 100 objects doing proper physics calculations in real time so with 2 cores you can have 1 running teh AI & everything else and one core doing 100 objects worth of physics upgrade to quad core you can get 300 objects. now a PPU or graphics card can support about 10,000 thats a big diffrence and is why they are now making PPU's and Nvidia and ATI are making their cards able to take the physics load off the processor.

Ok my numbers might be a bit out but teh scale is about right. When it comes to physics calc CPU's suck at it just like they suck at graphics. Anyone run 3Dmark 06 & seen what happens in teh CPU render tests? for me i get 2fps at 640x480 on a quad 3.2Ghz. So that proves how bad they are at graphics and physics calculations are very similar.

So basically if you want teh best gaming perfomance quad core isn't going to help but dedicated processors will, if you can get a secnond gfx card like SLI 8700s then when the games start supporting it the physics will be run on that anyways not the CPU.

Currently the only reason to get a quad core is for rendering, encoding movies, proffesional Design apps & if you feel teh need to run 2 games at once :s

 

You will might see a slight increase in FPS if you ONLY have 1 GPU. If you have 2 x GPU (i.e. SLI) you will see an increase in FPS if you have a more powerful CPU..i.e faster.

So let's recap...

1 x GPU = none to minimal FPS increase with increased CPU
2 x GPU = minimal to moderate FPS increase with increased CPU

You can look at the M590KE with it's athalon CPU and dual 2 x 7950 GTX's vs. m9750 vs D901C. The higher the processor with the SAME 2 x GPU setup results in increased FPS in realworld gaming.

Most people won't have to worry about it, since they can only have 1 GPU.

I plan on swapping out my X6900 for a Q6700. I have benched my machine in games and marks. I will post the results on the Sager forums of what the changeout actually did for my FPS.

 

In the next few years, definitely. Ideally, for games developers, they would have one super fast core, but thats not very efficient, so they are beginning to adapt to multi-core processors. i think intel were very smart going into multi-core processors, rather than super high clockspeeds.

the downside is that it is more time consuming, and expensive, to create games to take advantage of dual/quad cores. its becoming more commonplace for developers to now create games that work better on multi-cores. right now, dual core is doing okay. no games are optimized for quad cores currently. one of the chief developers at massive games (World in Conflict, Ground Control 1,2) doesnt believe quad cores make sense right now. having said that, in several years, quad cores will most likely make up a greater amount of the CPU market, and im sure some developers will optimise for it.

the multi-core thing is the main problem right now with the PS3. techincally, yes, it is much more powerful than the Xbox360. However, it is much more difficult to create any games that can take advantage of this. it is pretty difficult to write for 2 or 3 cores (xbox360), never mind 7. it will be extremely expensive to create games optimised for 7 cores, which is why there is no discernable advantage of the PS3 yet.

 

Not everyone even has dual-cores yet, let alone quad-cores. They start at $300, produce more heat, show a big improvement only in optimized stuff like Handbrake, Maya, and tech demos.

 

Your right, not everyone has dual cores, but when it becomes the main market, all of technology is swept/forced to go along with it. Just like Vista is being pushed and XP stopping production. MOST ppl have Dual cores, well whoever bought within the last year or two. and most average comp. users will be buying often the way technology goes... For example, my desktop i bought 5 years ago.. i think? all i kno is the P4 3.2 ExtremEd. was the NEWEST thing out for Desktops. now that im buying laptops, im already seeing quad cores just starting... i skipped a whole generation of dual cores Gettin back on topic, its all about future security, for ppl like me who will be using their computer for the next 4/ maybe more years, is it worth it to go rite to quad in laptops? especially wen im gonna be upgrading Gpus and dont want them to get bottlenecked eitha.

 

C2D motherboards do work with C2Q chips, so i'll upgrade when it's the standard. I've got a E6850 (3GHz!) in mind for a build right now.

 

I hope not for a laptop! i thought of that idea already. It got shot down due to the fact that its 1333FSB meanwhille most laptops i kno only cover 1066, so basically the E6850 will be slower since the lower multiplier is only multiplying the 1066 rather than the 1333 thats its shown... someone correct me if im wrong plz
ps. props to WuJen on that one! hes where i learned all that fancy techno-babble...

 

Like everyone else has said, a quad core processor won't really be beneficial for another few years. Few games now take advantage of two processing cores, let alone four...Supreme Commander is the only one I know of at the moment. The challenge is in writing programs able to take advantage of multiple threads of execution; in the language Java (and maybe others), the current thread is selected non-deterministically (with an effort to give them all equal time). So then the programmer has to write it so that any are able to run at any given time...it's mind-blowing how aware you have to be of the thread's dependencies on each other.

In my opinion, Intel had to go into multiple core processors, given that the Pentium 4 was kind of an awful idea. It had really a high clock speed (which appealed to the "bigger" [faster] is better idea), but didn't actually do tasks much faster since it had a long instruction pipeline. It would appear to do individual instructions faster, but they were smaller, more insignificant instructions. Then you had to do more of them anyways to accomplish the same thing as a processor at a reasonable clock speed...plus it ran super hot.

 

no your right. The only quad core capable laptop atm is the D901C. It's limited to the Q6600 or the Q6700 95TDP processor's i.e. G0 stepping.

Perhaps the Asus C90 could do it also but I haven't seen anyone try it in one atm.

 

I might be nit picking, but the XBox 360 is actually has a 6 threaded CPU. It's a tri-core and dual threaded per core. The PS3 of course has a single core, dual threaded PPE, and 7 SPE although 1 is used for system functions and not the actual game.

 

Errrm, I was talking about a P35 motherboard desktop.

 

And to nitpick a bit further, there are other reasons why the PS3 isn't more powerful. All of its 7 cores are very weak individually, with one being on the level of a 360 core (which is also stripped down a lot compared to a PC CPU core), and the remaining 6 are very specialized, meaning they're weaker still when it comes to most general purpose computation.

It's not just that the PS3 has a lot of cores to keep track of. But they're also terribly inefficient at many tasks.

 

This will probably be true for the forseable future. Even with more games adding Havok Physics to their games, games in general will be very very GPU dependent. Only will having equal GPUs will a quad core show more performance over a dual core. Other than that, money towards the GPU will by far get you the best performance differences for your buck.

Which was why that period was dominated by the lower clocked Athlons.

I like the direction Intel is going now. Two dual cores stuck togethor rather than four cores on a single die for Quad core ability. Their move towards a 45nm process. Someone at Intel is doing a good job.