athlon 64: why is it's poor multitasking ignored/downplayed?

[Lithan]

This thread was started because of problems running multiple DAOC Accounts everydae. Before calling someone an idiot, maybe you should read the thread?

 

[slurmsmackenzie]

cainam..... you seem to know what you're talking about. simply because you offer the most practical evidence\ to personal slander ratio in this thread. being that as it may......

i plan on encoding movies (pirated.... so fvcking what) and playing pirated games at the same time. is that truly where hyperthreading shines? i would love to do other cpu intensive tasks while i encode. if the difference is minimal, i would prefer to go the cheaper and easier upgrade path of amd as opposed to intel. i can always start an encode after i go to sleep. would you recommend HT for me, or would you save the 40 - 50 dollars and go amd? if i went intel i would feel obligated to go lga775 as opposed to 478, which i find to be a lil out of my range. if the difference were substantial, though, i'd bite the bullet. i'd really appreciate some feedback on the subject. thanks

 

[KDKPSJ]

Originally posted by: Lithan
This thread was started because of problems running multiple DAOC Accounts everydae. Before calling someone an idiot, maybe you should read the thread?

Oh.. I am really sorry. Honestly, I've never read the whole thing, but only from somewhere starting to talk about HT. So, I wrote about my HT experience (by hoping A64 would do better). I've never meant to write anything related to the post earlier (including multiple accounts thing). So, is that a reason HeroOfPellinor being an axx to me? Did I write any support about multiple account DAOC is legal or something similar? I just meant to write about HT, that was all.

Added: Oops.. I actually read the whole thing before I wrote the first reply, but didn't care much about DAOC. I only cared about HT issue. lol.

 

[glugglug]

BTW, if I lower the priority on the RthDribl demo to Below Normal, IE pops up and renders the MSN page in 2-3s. But having the processes at 2 different priorities is pretty much cheating for this purpose.

I tried making an app that uses windows multimedia timer API to try to force context switches once every ms, but it doesn't seem to make much difference, like Windows switches right back to whatever process had control before the multimedia interrupt. 12s total for IE to load and render the MSN page with the app I made running in addition to RthDribl, vs. 16s with just RthDribl -- I was hoping for a more substantial difference.

If Mythic really wanted to support people playing in 2 windows at once, all they would have to do is add a single line of code in a multitasking mode feature. Just Sleep(0); after each frame is rendered if the "multitasking mode" is turned on to yield the CPU to the other process, and the 2 instances of the game would run perfectly smooth together. Maybe if you e-mail them they will add this?

The app I made is here. When it asks for the number of milliseconds put 1.

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: slurmsmackenzie
cainam..... you seem to know what you're talking about. simply because you offer the most practical evidence\ to personal slander ratio in this thread. being that as it may......

LMAO! :thumbsup::beer:

i plan on encoding movies (pirated.... so fvcking what) and playing pirated games at the same time. is that truly where hyperthreading shines? i would love to do other cpu intensive tasks while i encode. if the difference is minimal, i would prefer to go the cheaper and easier upgrade path of amd as opposed to intel. i can always start an encode after i go to sleep. would you recommend HT for me, or would you save the 40 - 50 dollars and go amd? if i went intel i would feel obligated to go lga775 as opposed to 478, which i find to be a lil out of my range. if the difference were substantial, though, i'd bite the bullet. i'd really appreciate some feedback on the subject. thanks

well, here's the thing. if you doing 2 tasks, say playing a game and encoding a video, the game should play just fine. the encoding process however would likely take alot longer:

"For the multitasking scenario, we chose to run Norton AntiVirus in the background while using Windows Media Encoder 9 in the foreground to convert a 30-second AVI clip to a high-quality WMV file. We report the time it took to run just the video encode by itself and with NAV running in the background. The results show that Intel's Hyper-Threading clearly pays off. The Pentium 4 took about a minute less time to run the multitasking test than the Athlon 64 FX-51 systems did".

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in PC Magazine.

in the above example, a small, 30 second clip took amost a minute longer on the amd64.

but hey, you're playing a game right? perhaps time not be a concern? if you do it after you go to sleep, i doubt it would take any longer on the amd or the intel. so these issues might not even be relevant.

in the end, it's up to you. i've never had a problem with choice, as i stated earlier, it's just i would like all the information (not just the good), so that a person has all the information available to make the right choice for him/her.

you just have to decide how important saving $50 is to you, and how important it is for you to run background tasks quickly and/or smoothly; mind you, this issue only seems to come up when you run cpu intensive tasks - not listening to mp3s while browsing the web

other than that, this a64 setup is stable, overclocks well, and is probably about 10% faster than a comparably rated intel setup. with the latest bios (9/21 iirc) the chaintech vnf3-250 is a great board for the money, and matched with a low price/high o/c a64 chip it offers alot of performance for the $ in most things. the dfi lanparty ut nf3 250gb has also proven quite stable, offers a few more features (hardware firewall, gigabit lan, firewire, etc.), looks better, has tons of bios "tweak" settings, tho it's about $50 more then the vnf3.

personally, for my use, despite the hassle i'm leaning towards replacing this setup with an intel, but that's just me.

can't say i agree with the "pirating" part, but that's just me, too.....

Originally posted by: glugglug
BTW, if I lower the priority on the RthDribl demo to Below Normal, IE pops up and renders the MSN page in 2-3s. But having the processes at 2 different priorities is pretty much cheating for this purpose.

I tried making an app that uses windows multimedia timer API to try to force context switches once every ms, but it doesn't seem to make much difference, like Windows switches right back to whatever process had control before the multimedia interrupt. 12s total for IE to load and render the MSN page with the app I made running in addition to RthDribl, vs. 16s with just RthDribl -- I was hoping for a more substantial difference.

If Mythic really wanted to support people playing in 2 windows at once, all they would have to do is add a single line of code in a multitasking mode feature. Just Sleep(0); after each frame is rendered if the "multitasking mode" is turned on to yield the CPU to the other process, and the 2 instances of the game would run perfectly smooth together. Maybe if you e-mail them they will add this?

The app I made is here. When it asks for the number of milliseconds put 1.

i didn't try the priority thing with rhtdribl, but i did try that with daoc, and it not only failed to improve the performance, but actually dropped it as well as causing stability issues.

setting the task priority to "background" caused both instances of rthdribl to run very poorly, rather than just he second instance.

 

[slurmsmackenzie]

thanks, cainam.....

the pirated material gag was just a jab at that other fella. just being an ass, that's all. <looks around> anyways. thank you. i think the cash would be a substantial factor. it's unfortunate that amd doesn't put as much emphasis on encoding. it seems to be a very popular hobby these days. i'm only 1 year into my computer enthusiasm phase and i already do it regularly. but i think price will win out in the end. thank you again, cainam.

 

[Markfw]

but hey, you're playing a game right? perhaps time not be a concern? if you do it after you go to sleep, i doubt it would take any longer on the amd or the intel. so these issues might not even be relevant.

I think you hit the nail on the head for me ! Since when I am playing a game, and I don;t encode that much, the times when I do, my game is smooth, I get done hours later, and who cares, so long as it finishes before I quit playing.

Now if I were pirating movies in the background to make money and when it finished I wanted to start another encode, THEN it would make a difference to me.

DISCLAIMER: THE LAST COMMENT WAS NOT APPLICABLE TO ANYBODY HERE, JUST A POINT I WAS TRYING TO MAKE.

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: CaiNaM
setting the task priority to "background" caused both instances of rthdribl to run very poorly, rather than just he second instance.

Don't know what is different about your system to cause this. On my 3500+, both instances of rthdribl run completely smooth as long as both are the same priority. If they are different priorities, whichever one is lower becomes a slideshow.

Also, "background" is not one of the priority choices.... are you referring to Low priority in Task Manager or are you talking about the system control panel setting (which you want to avoid it will undo the registry hack..)

 

[CaiNaM]

Originally posted by: slurmsmackenzie
thanks, cainam.....

the pirated material gag was just a jab at that other fella. just being an ass, that's all. <looks around> anyways. thank you. i think the cash would be a substantial factor. it's unfortunate that amd doesn't put as much emphasis on encoding. it seems to be a very popular hobby these days. i'm only 1 year into my computer enthusiasm phase and i already do it regularly. but i think price will win out in the end. thank you again, cainam.

well, as i mentioned in an earlier post, i think that's a major reason we'll see a push to s939 and dual core processors. an actual dual core would outperform any "hyperthreaded" intel cpu, and won't have the complexity (nor quite the cost premium) of a dual cpu solution - all the strength of the current a64 and then some, without the weaknesses.

Originally posted by: glugglug

Originally posted by: CaiNaM
setting the task priority to "background" caused both instances of rthdribl to run very poorly, rather than just he second instance.

Don't know what is different about your system to cause this. On my 3500+, both instances of rthdribl run completely smooth as long as both are the same priority. If they are different priorities, whichever one is lower becomes a slideshow.

Also, "background" is not one of the priority choices.... are you referring to Low priority in Task Manager or are you talking about the system control panel setting (which you want to avoid it will undo the registry hack..)

my first comment was regarding the task manager priorites (caused stability issues w/daoc).

my second comment was regarding the sys control settings (setting this to "background" caused both instances of rth to run "choppy", but equally).

 

[Excelsior]

Originally posted by: Lithan
Heh, macs don't get to be called computers. They are neon toasters with internet access.

End your life.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

LOL. Okay, how about this? Save the money you'd waste on an overpriced Intel CPU and MB and build two AMD systems....one just for encoding. Now you can do two things at full 100%!!!

 

[flexy]

***
Here at work we run Linux on our server boxes. On the AMD systems we are capable of loading the PCI busses to the max (and I mean maxed out) driving 2 x GigE cards as fast as PCI will go. Then we have 12 x 10K RPM SCSI drives going flat out. The boxes are serving around 5000 simultaneous transactions at a rate of 2000 transactions per second, multiplexed across about a dozen worker threads, and the user level responsiveness is just fine.

Then I come here and read about how on Windows that a few text-based IRC jobs are going slow whenever someone listens to some music, and I'm suddenly thinking, WTF?"

***
LOL..classic

 

[KDKPSJ]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor
LOL. Okay, how about this? Save the money you'd waste on an overpriced Intel CPU and MB and build two AMD systems....one just for encoding. Now you can do two things at full 100%!!!

Duh! You still don't see my point, do you? Yeah, that's what I am actually trying by getting A64 And that's why I even put myself into this topic to know if A64 would be good enough for my use! And duh again, you never read my reply anyway, I can't get two system because my school is strict about that! (And my room is already full. No space for any more comp) Therefore, I have to pull out everything from one fast system.

BTW, I believe Intel is not that overpriced unlike before anyway. And also mobo using Intel chipset is pretty cheap as well, and overall better than any of chipset for AMD. Especially, if you think about A64 system like I do, the price level between Intel and AMD is about same, so there's no point anyway.

 

[glugglug]

Something I noticed about RTHDRIBL: It multitasks perfectly smooth on my machine with other CPU-intensive processes -- I can play games while it is running and they are smooth. It is the NON-cpu intensive processes that it effects, like IE, most likely because they do very little work before yielding the CPU back to it - which pretty much agrees with how Kylef said the stuff works. (Even though other apps, like DAOC, don't work the same for some bizarre reason; or do they -- I haven't tried DAOC with the registry key change).

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: everydae

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor
LOL. Okay, how about this? Save the money you'd waste on an overpriced Intel CPU and MB and build two AMD systems....one just for encoding. Now you can do two things at full 100%!!!

Duh! You still don't see my point, do you? Yeah, that's what I am actually trying by getting A64 And that's why I even put myself into this topic to know if A64 would be good enough for my use! And duh again, you never read my reply anyway, I can't get two system because my school is strict about that! (And my room is already full. No space for any more comp) Therefore, I have to pull out everything from one fast system.

BTW, I believe Intel is not that overpriced unlike before anyway. And also mobo using Intel chipset is pretty cheap as well, and overall better than any of chipset for AMD. Especially, if you think about A64 system like I do, the price level between Intel and AMD is about same, so there's no point anyway.

I'm not denying that for specific circumstances the P4 with HT is the better choice. I'm just saying that for the other 99.9% of us, the Athlon multitasking capabilities are more than ample. It's only under those very specific circumstances that HT really makes a difference.

 

[AnnoyedGrunt]

Hi,

Has anyone talked about the Multi-tasking differences (if any) between WinXP Home and WinXP Pro? IIRC, only XP Pro supports multi-processors, so would that help its multi-tasking when using a single processor or are the two cases unrelated? I guess a better question would be, "What is different about XP Pro that allows it to support multi-processors, and would that improve it's multi-tasking capability?"

Also, is there a way to make a program always use a low priority so you don't have to set it every time you start it up? I'm currently making all my CD's into MP3's, and if the recording program is set to "normal" priority, my XP1800+ performance takes a complete dive. However, if I set the program to low priority, the speed of everything else is great and the recording doesn't slow down too much either. I'd like the program to always run @ low priority, but I'm not sure if there is an easy way to accomplish that.

Thanks, and good luck.

-D'oh!

 

[Lithan]

I believe you can flag the shortcut/exe you use to launch it. Been awhile since I bothered with that stuff though.

 

[Shenkoa]

In my experients, Intel simply does multitasking better with or withought hyper threading. I have seen it over and over again. I wont supply any super technical crap because this is only in my experients.

I have a P4 2A OC'd to 2.4

My friend had an XP 2000+, 2100+ and now a 2500+ oced to 2800+ levels. My P4 has shut down all 3 as far as OS multitasking go's, he will tell you the same. I reccomend XP's to clients cause of the price but they are NOT up to snuff with Intel as far as multitasking goes and I think its funny seing AMD fanboys saying that AMD is as good in that area and this is not the case. Not even with the XP Version 2.0 aka the Athlon 64 series. I agree as far as architecture goes, AMD's are superior but that is not a measurement of speed.

I have had a struggle with myself as far as AMD vs. Intel. Whats more efficient, whats more effective, whats cheaper and more stable, how they differ and how they compare. I get a head ache trying to figure out the best approach to CPU effectiveness.

AMD = Small Sports Car
Intel = Old Hot Rod

 

[Lithan]

I've used Athlon, Tbird, Xp, Barton, A64, p4c and p4b. They all multitask the same for me. In my opinion you are full of the dookie.

 

[jackace]

has anyone considered that it could be related to memory bandwidth????
only a suggestion and all i can come up with

 

[AtaStrumf]

To test this out we would need someone with a S939 to try it out. Hell I even think this issue is worth a full investigation. Can somebody alert AT staff about this so that maybe they can do an all out test???

 

[glugglug]

I have a S939 with 500MHz RAM, it multitasks much smoother than what cainam describes (although there are exceptions), especially after setting HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\PriorityControl\Win32PrioritySeparation = 0x24.

JackAce has a point in that depending on the working set of the apps running, they will likely be pushing each other out of cache and need to be pulled back in after each context switch. Even on a single channel system, however, this should take less than 0.25ms, which shouldn't be so noticable.

 

[CaiNaM]

you know.. i wonder what difference 1mb l2 cache and/or dual channel ram would make (tho i doubt it's bandwidth related; a64 with its on-die memory controller does not benefit from dual channel anywhere near as much as intel does)?. wish i could make that comparison... =/

at any rate, i made a short video (14mb) of how rthdribl impacts this system. if you want to d/l it, you can get it here.

here's another observation. right now i'm running the athlon64 @ 2.3ghz/230htt (10x230). haven't installed all apps on this system yet, so i'm using winmpg to convert formats. takes like 1 sec to load, and 18 seconds to convert the 35mb .mov file to a 14mb divx file.

with rthdribl loaded and running, it takes 4 seconds to load the app, and 46 sec. to convert that same file to divx. that's almost 3x as long. during this time, rthdribl, which normally runs 70fps give or take, drops down to about 40fps. i'll let you guys draw your own conclusions.

 

[HeroOfPellinor]

Originally posted by: CaiNaM
you know.. i wonder what difference 1mb l2 cache and/or dual channel ram would make (tho i doubt it's bandwidth related; a64 with its on-die memory controller does not benefit from dual channel anywhere near as much as intel does)?. wish i could make that comparison... =/

at any rate, i made a short video (14mb) of how rthdribl impacts this system. if you want to d/l it, you can get it here.

here's another observation. right now i'm running the athlon64 @ 2.3ghz/230htt (10x230). haven't installed all apps on this system yet, so i'm using winmpg to convert formats. takes like 1 sec to load, and 18 seconds to convert the 35mb .mov file to a 14mb divx file.

with rthdribl loaded and running, it takes 4 seconds to load the app, and 46 sec. to convert that same file to divx. that's almost 3x as long. during this time, rthdribl, which normally runs 70fps give or take, drops down to about 40fps. i'll let you guys draw your own conclusions.

I conclude, that people who enjoy running rthdribl while doing something else should get P4s.

 

[KDKPSJ]

Originally posted by: HeroOfPellinor

I conclude, that people who enjoy running rthdribl while doing something else should get P4s.

Wow.. amazing.. You still think people in the world are same. A lot of people love to do many things at the same time. Maybe you are capable to do only one job at once, but many people are able to do at least 3 or 4 tasks at once. And many (yes, many. Just surf the web, dude) take advantage from HT. Do you work for AMD, BTW? If you do, you should quit your job asap to help AMD.