Will hyperthreading grant any major boost to dual threaded games?

Intel has said that HT gives performance boosts of up to 25% while running multiple threads.

Can we expect the new generation of multi-threaded games to squeeze that kind of performance out of HT enabled CPUs.

 

I do not think it will unless you have a true dual core CPU.

 

HT will help a little due to the long pipelines of P4 and the penalties of a bubble in the pipeline. I'd say 25% is a bit exaggerated but it depends on the application.

 

the most real-world performance I've seen happen with HT is around 10%. And I've also seen some performance drops with HT enabled vs. it being disabled, mostly due to the scheduler and the fact that it's a shared pipeline between the two "cores" of an HT chip.

 

I did a rendering test with my Pentium 4 using Cinebench 9.5. I have a Northwood Pentium 4 3.2GHz with a 512k L2 and an 800MHz FSB - HT gives a 15% performance boost in the multiple CPU test when compared to doing it with "one" CPU (the Pentium 4 is only one CPU to begin with; HT only emulates a dual-core CPU). So, HT is effective in certain situations.

That said, if you're playing a game that can use SMP, then you're going to see a difference. I installed the dual-core/HT patch for Call of Duty 2 on my desktop - the difference is quite noticeable, I got considerably higher framerates. I would say a ~20% boost, give or take.

 

HT can be pretty good for multi-threaded apps, but finding them can be difficult, especially games.

 

yay. Thanks you for your experience chaz. I have a Prescott, which according to Wikipedia runs slightly slower for gameing. I hope that it's nothing noticable.

 

Check this out :

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2006/11/02/Multi_core_in_the_Source_Engin/1.html

 

One more question (for chaz)

about how many extra frames do you think that 20% was? 8? 10?

 

In Call of Duty 2 multiplayer, I was getting less than or equal to 30FPS. It was playable, but a bit choppy. With the HT patch, the framerates jumped to 35+ with the same settings/resolution, and on the same map. It was definitely noticeable and I was able to crank up the settings a bit without losing too much performance.

I was a little off in my last post; going from 30 --> 35FPS = 14.5% performance increase.

 

What kind of GPU were you using?

 

It was a 256MB ATI Radeon 9800XT. I also have 2GB DDR-400 Corsair XMS RAM. I believe the resolution I was using was 1024x768.