Originally posted by: Jeff7181
This is old news. Well... the 81.26 drivers aren't old. But there has been an 80.xx series driver out for at least a month now that makes use of dual cores. The driver offloads some stuff that the GPU normally handles to the second CPU core, freeing up the GPU to do other things. So in cases where you're already CPU limited, these drivers shouldn't make much difference. But if you're GPU limited, they should make a difference.
Actually, all of the above information is incorrect.
The previous release 80.xx beta drivers have had no dual core improvements, despite rumors to the contrary.
The current set do not work like people would think they would intuitively either.
For the example of doom3, I tested by installing the drivers and then running benchmarks in various configurations with the doom3 process either allowed single or dual cpu affinity ( to separate any performance improvements that were just from the updated drivers and not directly from dual core functionality itself ). Interestingly, regardless of system settings, the doom3 process with dual core enabled used 100% of both CPUs.
The improvements were as follows :
1600x1200, High Detail, 4xAA - 42 to 48.7
640x480, High Detail, No AA - 119.6 to 142.8
640x480, High Detail, 4xAA, windowed - 103 to 119.3
What's of interest here is that the performance improvements vary to a quite small extent from situations where it is definetly GPU limited to situations where it is almost exclusively CPU limited.
What was also kind of interesting was that AOE3 demo showed absolutely no improvement and continued to run at a mediocre 29fps (@1920x1200 max detail).
Aquamark increased from 80,944 to 88,324*
* Testing method was a little bit different here - aquamark refused to allow affinity setting on it's process ( cheat prevention ? ), so I ran prime95 torture test at normal priority on the second cpu to simulate single cpu.
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