Is Far Cry Multi/HyperThreaded?

[MichaelD]

My gaming box is a dual Xeon, therefore Task Mangler shows four CPUs (two physical, two virtual).

After closing the game, I checked the Performance tab to see how high my CPU/mem utilization was and all four CPU graphs showed about 60-70% CPU activity, going up and down etc.

To me (the ignorant) this shows that Far Cry is Hyperthreaded. I am not doing anything in the background like Folding/encoding/etc.

?

*edit*
Added "Multithreaded" to title. I told you I was ignorant. Thanks Todd.

 

[Todd33]

Multithreaded is the term I think. Other than that, I have no clue

 

[MichaelD]

*sigh* Everyone's playing HL2 and they are not surfing the forums for "help people " threads.

 

[jiffylube1024]

I really don't think Far Cry is a multithreaded game (at least not heavily optimized for it) since performance is so much better on the Athlon64. Check Anand's latest high-end CPU roundup to see the P4 get smoked.

 

[BFG10K]

Most games have some degree of multithreading but I wouldn't expect it to be significantly high. Are you running anything in your system tray?

 

[UberL33tJarad]

no game is multithreaded. to multithread, the game must load as two .exe's where one logical processor works on one while the other works on the second. Far Cry is not. nor is Half-Life 2 nor Doom 3. no games gains from a processor having HT, just you with the ability to run two (or more) instances of the game or the game with background services going on.

multithreaded would be like two intances of Quake 3 loaded. i've opened 16 of them and each equally had an average 25fps. my 2600+ ran the hilighted instance at full capacity while the rest studdered using cycles when the first wasn't.

 

[AmigaMan]

Originally posted by: UberL33tJarad
no game is multithreaded. to multithread, the game must load as two .exe's where one logical processor works on one while the other works on the second. Far Cry is not. nor is Half-Life 2 nor Doom 3. no games gains from a processor having HT, just you with the ability to run two (or more) instances of the game or the game with background services going on.

multithreaded would be like two intances of Quake 3 loaded. i've opened 16 of them and each equally had an average 25fps. my 2600+ ran the hilighted instance at full capacity while the rest studdered using cycles when the first wasn't.

No, actually you're thinking of some sort of multi-processing application. You can do this on Unix/Linux machines I believe and have one process dedicated to a CPU in a multi-cpu environment. To spawn a thread is a simple thing and will work in-process. I was able to do that with VB5 applications back in my windows programming days and also in Java. ALthough with Java it's a little bit different I believe in that the java "thread" is not treated as an OS-level thread.

For simple proof of what I'm saying, open up Task Manager, click on the Processes tab, and make sure you have the Thread Count column selected. Firefox.exe is running 11 threads and javaw.exe is running 25 threads in my case.

 

[Todd33]

Doom III has multi processor support. I remember benchmarks where turning on the toggle in the console would boost FPS by like 50%. I think the developer has to code to two processors, otherwise you are just getting a small boost from the OS.

 

[tkdkid]

Originally posted by: Todd33
Doom III has multi processor support. I remember benchmarks where turning on the toggle in the console would boost FPS by like 50%. I think the developer has to code to two processors, otherwise you are just getting a small boost from the OS.

Kind of, you just have separate threads working on things, the os sorts out which processor works on them. For example, you can have one thread working on caching textures or displaying a map on screen, while the main thread is doing everything necessary to handle the UI.

 

[Nothinman]

no game is multithreaded. to multithread, the game must load as two .exe's where one logical processor works on one while the other works on the second.

Not at all, the closest thing you're describing is clustering or maybe multiprocessing with processes instead of threads. All an app has to do to be multithreaded is launch another thread to do something and that only requires 1 executable. UT2K3 was multithreaded, it did the audio decoding and playing in a seperate thread from the screen drawing, the performance boost was moderate on SMP machines. Q3 and DoomIII support SMP to a certain extent, I know the Q3 code was very preliminary and I believe it's even disabled in the last update id published but I don't know how good the DoomIII SMP support is.

 

[MichaelD]

Thanks very much everyone; this is quite the educational thread for me.

I MUST check out Doom3 on this box!!! I haven't loaded it yet since I built this Xeon box.

Far Cry must have some little bit of multithreading/multi-processor support b/c I have the same video card as before and my FPS is higher and in general, it just "looks better."

 

[drag]

Remember that hyperthreading isn't the same as a multithread or whatnot.

On a Pentium4 having hyperthreading can even lead to detrimental performance in some cases, although for most games I think it is a small boost. Pretty minor.

If you want the true benifits you have to go SMP or wait for the up and coming multicore cpus. The trouble is that the benfiits of SMP don't show up much in games, because they are all mostly single threaded, so a SMP machine may only benchmark slightly higher then a single CPU machine, even though the SMP configuration makes it much more capable in reality.

Quake3 had a SMP client, that was specificly designed to have 2 or more threads so that the cpu load could be carried out on more then one cpu, but it's developement was eventually stopped because the cpu/gpu's on regular PC's became more then capable of realy good quake3 performance and the benifits were negligable.