What top games benefit from quadcore vs dualcore?

Can people list games (good ones) that are known for a fact designed to benefit from quadcore cpus?

 

supremme commander 1

 

Any console ported games

 

+1 for the laugh i got from that comment.

But seriously, Battlefield Bad Company 2 really enjoys running on a quad core, and im pretty sure it wont hurt to use a quad in Battlefield 3 either.

 

Microsoft Flight Simulator X

 

>Grand Theft Auto IV
>Top Game

Pick one.

 

Battlefield : Bad Company 2 is the most quad-core profitable game I have ever seen. That's why I get MUCH MORE FPS than what is on the Notebookcheck site : they use a i5-520M and with higher settings I get +- the same FPS that are written there ( I have a 5730 ).

 

Dawn Of War 2
Dragon Age: Origins
Prototype
Mass Effect 2 (faster loading)

 

Crysis 2
Team Fortress 2/Counter Strike: Source
Shogun 2
Civ V
StarCraft 2

 

King Arthur

 

I disagree on that one. The CryENGINE is NOT CPU-hungry, it is GPU-hungry. Crysis 2 barely uses 50% of my CPU...

 

not their new engine...they written it around cpu support.. for example my friend has a laptop with a 5730 and a i7 and he gets better fps then me at same settings

 

It is because of the console-derived design of the game with CryEngine 3. Most consoles still use their unique CPU to help power most of the game's graphics over the GPU (which all three of them at the moment are considered outdated really). Therefore, I think Crytek followed suit with the PC porting. I also believe BC2 also does the same thing when DICE developed it for both PC's and Console's like what TexasMan said earlier in this thread, almost 95% of all Console-derived PC ports uses massive loads of performance from the CPU and if there is any enhanced graphics added into the port just for the PC, then it will also utilize the GPU as well. However, the GPU usage is not as much as if the game was made on the basis of the PC first and taking advantage of the constantly improving PC GPU's.

 

Mafia II

I think.
GTA series also?

 

Most RTS games should have more CPU use.

 

When I play mafia II on my 2ghz intel t7300 its always on 100%, but it still plays decently (1280*800 on normal- high detail), atleast a lot better since I upgraded my 8600m gt to an ati hd4670, because it was unplayable before.

Empire total war is also quite cpu hungry, but more during loading maps than during battles.

AC 1 and 2 also consume 90%+ of my cpu all the time.

But its possible that these games just need a faster dual core then neccessarily a quad core.

 

empire total war for sure.
havent tested shogun2's cpu usage but imsure its up there too.
also nba 2k11 uses quad's

 

No one else thinks some of the responses in this thread are hilarious in that the questions seemed to have zoomed over their heads? A few I see who do get the question responded with some jokes, haha. But others, zooom!

The title says dual core vs quad core, not asking what games use lots of CPU. You can design any game to use lots of CPU, big deal.

Have a game that uses multi-threading properly now that is a difference. BC2 has an emphasis on multi-threading, that game can use all 8 logical cores on a i7 Quad with HyperThreading. trvelbug mentioned Empire Total War, yes it uses a lot of CPU. But it's abysmal for multi-threading. That game was not very efficient with multi-threading, which hampered some of it's performance issues. ETW was the first in that series to have MT support, and it wasn't patched for it until patch 3 and it still was a shoddy job. All source games have multi-threading support. Maybe Crysis 2 doesn't use as much CPU as you expect, but again, CryEngine3 has excellent multi-threading support. Blizzard SC2 has awesome MT support.

GTA seems to use a lot of CPU, but it seems to me, crappy quadcore, MT support, it does have MT support, but doesn't seem very efficient about it. Or rather the game's multi-threading seemed to also be ported from PS3 to PC, so it's not optimized for PC QuadCore support. The game doesn't scale as well as it should as you provide more threading for the game. It's just plain sluggish. So yes, uses lots of CPU, crappy MT support. Maybe it's bullet physics? I've read on BulletPhysics forums their multi-threading support was primarily for the SPUs which are on the PS3 Cell Processor. Maybe at the time it wasn't done right for PC which supports 64 bit and double precision (BulletMultiThreading is single precision 32 bit in GTA).

I would agree, it seems some games still just want to brute force their way with CPU, which would depend on high clock speeds and may be better on a dual core or single core with very high clock rates. But there are a few games out there that are CPU efficient considering quad core is becoming the standard fairly quick now. I would expect all major games from this point onward to have proper MT support, if they don't, then you shouldn't give them any money for it, that's just shoddy and pathetic work. So if you are asking should you upgrade to a quadcore for gaming, I'd say yes. Quad core should be standard for PC Gaming now.

 

this is a picture of resource meter while running etw last year. it clearly shows the program using multiple cores. sure it may not be as optimized as bc2 but it still benefits froma quad more than a dual core.
afaik the newer patches has made it even more optimized for quads.
fyi

 

For a strategy game like ETW, that MT support is shoddy. 3 cores parked? That means Windows decided it doesn't need to use all the logical cores and parked 3 of them to save on power. Wow, that's horrible. The Total War series to me are an enigma. They run horribly on PC. They have become a benchmark for how beastly a PC Gaming rig. But that's because you often need a beast to run it on high settings, nevermind the AA and DOF and other post processing. The enigma part is that, these are PC exclusive games. It's truly pathetic. There is more crap going on in SC2 and SC2 shaders etc look better too, and yet it runs so much better. Granted total war series have hundreds of units running about, it's still not an excuse for their level of PC support.

I recently read an analysis of the performance of Shogun 2. The legacy of crappy PC optimization for PC exclusive game continued on with Shogun 2. The way it uses resources often makes no sense.
http://www.dasreviews.com/das-latest-greatest/shogun-2-performance-analysis/
Creative Assembly is a weird company. Dedicated to PC Exclusive games yet cross platform developers do a better job at PC optimizations than they do.

 

@laptopfan

i think you are misreading the op. it is not what games are quad core optimized, it is what games will run better on quads than dual cores.
as much as etw and shogun 2 are not as quad optimized as bc2 or other games, they will still run better on quads than duals.

 

Most new AAA titles will run better on quad core than dual core, period.

 

ok bro, w/e u say lol

Crysis 2 GPU & CPU Performance Test > CPU Performance - TechSpot Reviews

 

RTS games usually benefit from more processing power pretty well

 

However it does say:

" With the aid of HyperThreading, the Core i3 540 managed an average of 56fps."

So I think it's just optimized for four threads and not necessarily "CPU Hungry". But definitely an advantage to have a Core i CPU or Core 2 Quad (or AMD equiv). The Core i3 (dual core with hyperthreading) and Phenom X6 (six cores) are reasonably close performers. Those results are also with "Extreme Quality" graphics which would definitely tax the CPU and GPU more. I'd be interested to see it with the graphics level one level down (whatever it's called).

 

To be honest, the Arrandale i5/i7's are really good CPU's if the program running is coded with HyperThreading. However, most games don't implement in HT, thus the games don't take the advantage of the two virtual cores in the Arrandales. Therefore, it is often better to have a dedicated quad, because you will always have 4 dedicated (physical) cores for programs to take advantage.

However, looks like Crysis 2 does take advantage of HT, so technically our Arrandales are running like a quad. However, most games don't, so we are always run with at least 2 threads and get eaten for breakfast from the Clarksfields/Sandy Bridge Quad lot.

 

I'm curious how the "hyperthread cores" work though. Because even with apps/games that are known not to be multi-threaded, or no more than two threads, all 8 of my "cores" are active and similarly taxed according to Task Manager.

 

that's because the os takes such tasks and shuffles them around between different cores rather rapidly (faster than the cpu graph gets updated).

that's to let individual cores cool down.

started with vista, wasn't like that on xp.

 

if thats the case then every program under win7 is multithreaded.

 

So in essence the OS is taking over multi-threaded tasking as well?

 

no. it can't multi-thread a single-thread task. but it does just shift it around on the cpu. that doesn't mean the single-thread task that on a quadcore is limited to 25% of the possible performance suddenly scales to 4x more. it just means that instead of one core at 100% and the other 3 at 0%, you'll see 4 cores at 25%.

it has some impact on the cpu's heat distribution, that's about all.

 

Like an earlier poster said, Games on ps3 use the SPUs on the cell to offset the dated hardware. By pulling more out of the 7 core processor, you off load tons of calculations and smaller blocks of an engine onto the cell, relieving alot of the stress the GPU normally handles, unlike on the pc side of things were generally speaking the gpu handles most of the games functions. Thats not to say that pc games aren't using the cpu to its full advantage, like other posters have mentioned. Its just generally speaking that most people now will have atleast a dual core and a mid range card, so developers go for that when designing a game for the most part, keeping in mind more the GPU because most people on pc might have a good GPU and not CPU, so to ensure an equal gaming expereince for all users, they rely mostly on the GPU.

 

Not sure that's entirely accurate. Shuffling tasks around to different cores incurs major cache-miss penalties, so Windows tries to keep single threads on the same core whenever possible, as they don't all share the same L1 cache.

An Intel CPU has an integer and a floating-point unit and generally you can only use one or the other. With hyperthreading, they've basically added a second instruction decoder and state counter, so you can run a thread on the unused unit of the CPU while the other is busy.

Even more so, they try to keep tasks on a single core because that's where your Turbo Boost comes in. It can shut down the unused cores and ramp up the speed of the one core that's executing all the code.

 

shuffling tasks around once each 100 million instructions it processes is not noticable, and then still happens at 20 to 40 times a second.

but yes, turboboost and all that matter, but they still work if there's only one task on the cpu (that doesn't matter if the task gets shuffled around, it's STILL only one task at the same time. only taskmanager gets irritated as it's too slow at updating and averages)

 

So then how come my four "virtual cores" show activity about as much as my real cores do? Shouldn't those be idle unless it's activated with hyper threading?

 

Windows manages those as well, and will generally put appropriate tasks on them. Windows knows about hyperthreading

 

do you have some links that show such info?