No dual core love in 2015

[VirtualLarry]

You are already proven wrong in another thread because you dont seem to know what the different technologies are. No more FUD please.

I wasn't proven wrong. So I got my acronyms mixed up. But the facts are, SSD caching with a Z97 / H97 requires a Core CPU. Pentiums not allowed. I even linked to the thread here where another member was running into that exact issue.

Here, I'll even link you the thread again:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2408517

Please, point out in that thread, where it is FUD, when one of our members is having the issue, and experiencing the Intel artificial product segmentation limitation firsthand.

 

[wilds]

I would have purchased an unlocked tri-core CPU if Intel offered one; or an unlocked i3.

 

[VirtualLarry]

So because some users are willing to purchase an i7, people who could only afford a dualcore, who can still play the game with great framerates, should be artificially locked out?

By your logic, because I'm willing to purchase a Mercedes, anyone who has a car less than $35,000 shouldn't be allowed on highways.
By your logic, because I'm willing to purchase a 70 inch+ HDTV, anyone with a smaller TV shouldn't be allowed to access High Definition Cable. Only standard definition for people using less than 70 inches.

Can't help but thinking, if Intel was running the country, then that's exactly what they would do.

 

[2is]

So because some users are willing to purchase an i7, people who could only afford a dualcore, who can still play the game with great framerates, should be artificially locked out?

By your logic, because I'm willing to purchase a Mercedes, anyone who has a car less than $35,000 shouldn't be allowed on highways.
By your logic, because I'm willing to purchase a 70 inch+ HDTV, anyone with a smaller TV shouldn't be allowed to access High Definition Cable. Only standard definition for people using less than 70 inches.

Etc.

Your logic is extremely flawed from the start.

Please post the extensive data that shows they are artificially locked out.

By your logic, anyone who can only afford to buy a Celeron should also be able to play any game they want at a solid 60fps.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Please post the extensive data that shows they are artificially locked out.

By your logic, anyone who can only afford to buy a Celeron should also be able to play any game they want at a solid 60fps.

COD AW, Running FC4 with 2 cores using affirmity etc.

If you own any of the games its quite obvious.

 

[2is]

COD AW, Running FC4 with 2 cores using affirmity etc.

If you own any of the games its quite obvious.

Does setting your affinity in a game also limit the dozens of other processes running on your PC to those same two cores? Audio/video driver overhead? The windows kernel which is managing everything? Does setting affinity in task manager also castrate the cache of an i5/i7 to the level of a Pentium?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Does setting your affinity in a game also limit the dozens of other processes running on your PC to those same two cores? Audio/video driver overhead? The windows kernel which is managing everything? Does setting affinity in task manager also castrate the cache of an i5/i7 to the level of a Pentium?

Its not hard to monitor the workload on the 2 other cores. I can guarantee you it works on a dualcore.

Baytrail and Kabini are quadcores too, they can run it

 

[SlowSpyder]

Seems its by MS and Sony, to somehow make their consoles look better than they are.

You are already proven wrong in another thread because you dont seem to know what the different technologies are. No more FUD please.

Developers / Publishers are pushing for artificially high system requirements on their PC games to make Sony's and Microsoft's consoles look more powerful than they are?

You don't think that is FUD?


My guess is that a fast dual core very well may be able to play some of these games. The creators of these games realize that the majority of people who are using dual cores don't have one that is fast enough so they make quad cores of a certain performance level the minimum requirement.

 

[xthetenth]

Can't help but thinking, if Intel was running the country, then that's exactly what they would do.

Why? Selling people marginal chips for gaming use now means they'll be coming back sooner. There's some pretty good arguments for market segmentation as a means of maximizing profits even in a monopoly.

 

[tential]

Please post the extensive data that shows they are artificially locked out.

By your logic, anyone who can only afford to buy a Celeron should also be able to play any game they want at a solid 60fps.

No where did I state a claim on fps. They should be able to boot the game. Whether they are capable of achieving playable fps i don't care about.

I do believe you should read the post and answer the claims made in my post rather than putting words in my mouth. By my logic I mean.
I also believe you should understand what the actual issue is before responding to the thread. By my logic that is.

 

[Cerb]

they are however priced the same atleast with AMD you can get an affordable quad core that will run any game with a few fps less.

With intel cheap will get you garbage thats almost unplayable. My old pentium G3220 haswell was utter garbage totally unplayable while an ancient athlon II X4 from AM2 platform will destroy the G3220 in battlefield 3 with 64 player maps.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pentium-g3258-overclocking-performance,3849-5.html

Look at the frame time variance, compared to other CPUs. That was the 2nd hit from Google, searching just now. The i3 is far superior, but so is the Athlon X4 (A8/A10 type, not Athlon II X4), if to a lesser degree.

What smartphones again contains more than 2 cores? Few flagship models and what else? Apple is still with dualcores for example.

All the dirt cheap ones running a modern Android. Mainly because, aside from licensing the core, going quad may as well be free, as small as they are. Most dual-core ones will be faster, and by no small margin. Are you not just dying to have a <$100 quad core tablet (while many cheap phones are using them, it seems all the cheap tablets are, probably just for marketing)?

 

[ShintaiDK]

Developers / Publishers are pushing for artificially high system requirements on their PC games to make Sony's and Microsoft's consoles look more powerful than they are?

You don't think that is FUD?


My guess is that a fast dual core very well may be able to play some of these games. The creators of these games realize that the majority of people who are using dual cores don't have one that is fast enough so they make quad cores of a certain performance level the minimum requirement.

But why make the game fail to load then? It should be enough then to set a quadcore as minimum and then go from there. Why go the extra mile to artificially lock out anyone with less than 4 cores from even launching the game?

 

[Cerb]

I can think of only one thing, the game is design to always run at least 3 or 4 threads in parralel all the time, which it can't do on a dual threaded CPU. Nothing else preventing the game from even starting on 2t CPU comes to my mind.

With race conditions, that may break on an HT CPU, or future CPUs (one reason old games sometimes need to be pinned to a single logical core). Without race conditions, it will just be slightly slower on dual cores than quad cores.

Been running in dual core mode from my 3570K by disabling 2 cores in he BIOS , for older games and with xp it is faster than with 4 cores. By clocking to higher settings it become the fastest dual core.

Can't you get tools that will force those old processes to only run on a single certain core, instead?

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

There is no > 2 cores amd at that pricepoint.

What are you talking about? I just checked Newegg..... A dual core Pentium 3258 is selling at $69.99. A quad core Athlon 760K is $77.99. I'd say eight bucks is about the same price point. I'd probably go with the AMD at those prices even if it is indeed a "weak quad core."

I do love my 3258, but I probably wouldn't recommend it for a primary gaming build. Wonderful chip for a backup machine, though.

 

[MiddleOfTheRoad]

How are those 4-8 core AMD CPUs doing in the lastest quadcore requireed games? Specially compared to the old obsolete dualcore i3.

And remember COD AW?

They are pretty damn awesome when the game has Mantle support. The current AMD situation is a lot like 3D-Now! games back in the 90's. When you had 3D Now! support, you were rocking the frame rates back in the day. But we kinda choked without it.

 

[boozzer]

But why make the game fail to load then? It should be enough then to set a quadcore as minimum and then go from there. Why go the extra mile to artificially lock out anyone with less than 4 cores from even launching the game?

to keep up with the facade of their games being "next gen" crap looking games needing top end hardware with nothing to show for it.

 

[Lepton87]

With race conditions, that may break on an HT CPU, or future CPUs (one reason old games sometimes need to be pinned to a single logical core). Without race conditions, it will just be slightly slower on dual cores than quad cores.

Can't you get tools that will force those old processes to only run on a single certain core, instead?

I have to be blunt here, I have no idea whatsoever what a race condition is. Well, to be fair the term isn't altogether unfamiliar but connecting it to the subject at hand is beyond my out-of-the-box thinking. Maybe I should work on my creativity more. Anyway there's also the possibility that you just used a non-standard name for a Turbo boost, but that would be too simple, wouldn't it? However I vaguely remember being called a simple man in the classroom many years ago or was it a simpleton? I'm not quite sure but for the simplicity's sake I'll just assume you really meant turbo boost by that sophisticated phrase. Of course such a blatant simplification of a phrase that might very well be technical could be wrong and I got a feeling that there's more to this "race condition" then a mundane turbo boost of course I won't know for sure until you confirm if my semi-educated guess is correct or if it is misguided. I won't ask more question until that race condition term is explained in detail, preferably by no other than you. Also what games(name a few just for example) need to have their affinity specifically set to a single logical core? I had no idea that there were games that won't work on CPUs without SMT technology, because it must have been very hard and I'll even go as far as to say it's naight impossible to find a logical thread on a CPU that only have for example just four physical cores like very popular gaming CPUs. I'm talking about i5, up until now it made no sense to have SMT in a gaming CPU so for gaming rigs people just bought i5s instead of i7s. The first generation of i series CPUs even had the same amount of cache between an i5 and i7. It was a dark time for threaded games and the same can be said about windows scheduler of that time. Once in a blue moon the windows scheduler would put computationally intensive threads on virtual cores while leaving physical cores in their C-state slumber. I guess it was too benevolent to physical cores and too harsh on logical ones, that scheduler clearly had bias and I would say it was racist! That's right, the i7 CPUs came in black boxes and the i5 CPUs came in blue boxes so that twisted scheduler had to do something to make those from the black boxes look bad at the very least sporadically. Fortunately the antagonist's nefarious deeds didn't go unnoticed and so it was changed to always first utilize physical cores and only if it run out of those it would put threads on logical cores. Of course not every physical core was happy about them always working more than logical ones but most of them listened to reason and knew that it was the only way to do the CPU's job properly, that is as fast as possible. The only outliers were some exotic module types which were condescending to those conventional logical cores, but the same can be said the other way around but this time it was about physical cores. Are you sure you didn't mean physical core, from what you said you can reach a ridicilous conclusion that there are games which will only ran on CPUs that support SMT, because otherwise you don't have any logical cores, just physical ones. Care to elaborate?

Those guys were sublime when I was 15. For adults? Not so much.

KotOR2? Good. Neverwinter Nights 2? Not very good but the Mask of the Betrayer expansion was phenomenal. But they weren't made by Bioware. They were made Obvsidian...

And Obsidian has gone the same way of Bioware anyway, stuck producing actioncraptastic flicks for the consoles.


Activision didn't make Warcraft 3, and certainly not Starcraft. StarCraft was made by Blizzard North, and so was Diablo 2. In their genres, those games are bastions of goodness. But Blizzard North is gone now. Now, we have StarCraft II, a pale shadow of StarCraft II, and Diablo III, an insult and spit in the face of Diablo II fans. Sure, they are fine games, I won't argue that, but they are worse than their previous iterations.

And that's my opinion, but the opinion of many old fans as well. I won't claim that means it's true, but what I'm saying is I'm not alone.


But they don't do them anymore. I'm with you that their older games are good, head and shoulders above many, but they don't do them anymore.

Mass Effect is a poorly executed shooter with a couple of binary plot choices and a terrible character system. Dragon Age (the original) is worse than Neverwinter Nights (the original) in all aspects bar graphics and voice acting, and the newer Dragon Ages are jokes (they oughta be, seriously).

Blizzard, on the other hand, is stuck in a vicious cycle of internal iterative design from people with no passion for their games, spewing out WoW expansions, the phenomenally dumbed down Diablo 3 (it's a very well dumbed down game, for sure, they did a fine job of it), and the ever-late StarCraft stuff. And their other games that pay so little tribute to Blizzard's name I can't even remember their names, despite having tried them...

I don't mean to insult anyone though. You're all free to like whatever, I don't mind

OH, man, just tell me that you also think that Planscape Torment is junk and that you couldn't stand neither the witcher 2 nor any of the fallouts, not to mention the elder scroll games. If you say so then out taste for computer games couldn't be any more different. Maybe you are the anti-me and if we meet then we would annihilate each other with one minor collateral damage. I say minor because I think it would be just the earth but then again I don't know what is our combined energy potential, given that mass is energy it would all come down to what we had for dinner, on worse days I would feel sorry for mars and mercury, but a guy got to know how much a good diner is worth, given that you are anti-me you can't possibly agree with anything of what I write.
ps. Sorry for the length of my post. I actually didn't realize it was more than a few sentences at most until I submitted it and saw it in the thread. My writing usually tends to be succinct and overly simple due to my not so good command of the English language but this time I kind of snapped into a writing condition which might or might not be related to that race condition. I'm also sorry for the ratio of words to information. I think I might have outclassed my previous record for that particular kind of things. It even reminded me of my time at school when I had to write something about a book I have never even seen a cover for. I actually could manage to fill a few A5 pages without saying anything of substance. I would go as far as to say anything at all and yet our stupid teacher preferred such nonsensical scribblings to an actual answer to the question asked. Being laconic and to the point is a good thing and yet when I tried that twice (shame on me) I always got lower grades then when I didn't read the lecture and write nonsense in a grandiloquent style taken to the extreme. There was no substance in there, none at all It was all backwards, the most important thing was how many words you used, with more is better philosophy. It should have been the other way around provided that the content was all there laconic writings should be rewarded but it was so bad that even using that word was a misdemeanor while trying to champion brevity would get you kicked out of the class. Sorry for that reminiscence I miss some of the things I would do in the past but who doesn't? The only one I can think of is the anti-me, because we can't see eye to eye.

 

[lyssword]

I'm quite happy with my 4.6 g3258 w/$50 mobo. Uses 100w less than 760k if it was overclocked to same speed (if even possible). Quite sure it beats weak quads in every old game (Starcraft2),
and even newer ones that I play: maxed out settings cs:global offensive, path of exile, L.O.L, shadow of mordor, wolfenstein:new order, batman: arkham city was pretty smooth with my r270.
Pretty happy with speed of opening IDE's (w/ssd), editing images,
youtube, skyrim , bunch of older mmo's, elderscrolls online was very playable even with 30ppl attacking a monster spawn.
Finished MM:lastlight, although not on ultra, just high settings. 30 tabs in browser, ubuntu on VM was ok.
Only thing I don't do is video encoding. *watch dogs had some slow downs on ultra textures, did not play it much

 

[Cerb]

I have to be blunt here, I have no idea whatsoever what a race condition is.

For simplicity's sake, let's take this, and pretend it's really much more complicated code.
Thread 1: x = a*b+c
Thread 2: x = a*d+c
Which gets to write the value of x for future reads of it? The one that completes first, hence race. With a single core, it's quite possible to have a program in which you'll get the same result every single time, because generally, the threads will get scheduled in a deterministic order (I don't know for sure, with Windows, but I would imagine with a single core, multiple active threads from a single process would probably get processed in a simple FIFO order). With multiple cores (logical or physical doesn't matter), they might execute in a different order.

While not terribly common, it was also not exceptionally rare for software to horribly, or worse, subtly, break, due to such things, when we started getting HT, and multiple cores, as a decent bit of high-performance software was written in C and/or assembly, and with little of the discipline required for proper SMP operation, and no way to test it. Today, it's fairly rare all around, and usually of the very subtle variety.

P.S. But, note, for instance, that AT couldn't run Metro on their dual socket setup, when they tried...there may yet be very coarse ones waiting...

 

[toyota]

I'm quite happy with my 4.6 g3258 w/$50 mobo. Uses 100w less than 760k if it was overclocked to same speed (if even possible). Quite sure it beats weak quads in every old game (Starcraft2),
and even newer ones that I play: maxed out settings cs:global offensive, path of exile, L.O.L, shadow of mordor, wolfenstein:new order, batman: arkham city was pretty smooth with my r270.
Pretty happy with speed of opening IDE's (w/ssd), editing images,
youtube, skyrim , bunch of older mmo's, elderscrolls online was very playable even with 30ppl attacking a monster spawn.
Finished MM:lastlight, although not on ultra, just high settings. 30 tabs in browser, ubuntu on VM was ok.
Only thing I don't do is video encoding. *watch dogs had some slow downs on ultra textures, did not play it much

I dont believe for a second that Wolfenstein was smooth. that game is stuttery as hell on 2 cores. even when the framerate is acceptable its not smooth as 2 cores are literally maxed out. and yes I tested this with 2 cores of my cpu at 4.4 which is as fast or faster than the G3258 at 4.6. when I went from 2 cores to 3 cores it was night and day and the game felt like it was supposed to for most areas. and going to 4 cores made the game feel exactly how a modern game should feel. well aside from the few little issues with the game itself.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Seems like we are talking about 2 different things here. I dont think anyone is saying a dual core is optimal for recent games. That said, I agree that a fast dual core has plenty of power to run multithreaded games, and at best it is just lazy programming not to allow the game to at least run on a dual core. Let the user then decide if the performance is acceptable.

I will give the devs the benefit of the doubt and not try to assume they are intentionally crippling dual cores, but who knows and if they are what the motivation is. But I will assume that they are doing it out of laziness or the idea that it is not cost effective to put in the extra effort.

Personally, I dont see why so many are buying into this trend of excluding any portion of the potential gaming audience just because their hardware does not meet what they think it should be. I think it is a slippery slope at best. What next? Dual core with hyperthreading not enough? Maybe not even a quad. Hell, lets make games only run on hex cores, that would be progress wouldnt it? (I have a quad core and have not tried to game on a dual core in years, BTW, but I just hate to see any part of the potential gaming group excluded.)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Personally, I dont see why so many are buying into this trend of excluding any portion of the potential gaming audience just because their hardware does not meet what they think it should be. I think it is a slippery slope at best. What next? Dual core with hyperthreading not enough? Maybe not even a quad. Hell, lets make games only run on hex cores, that would be progress wouldnt it? (I have a quad core and have not tried to game on a dual core in years, BTW, but I just hate to see any part of the potential gaming group excluded.)

Game devs / publishers would be wise to look into the case of LookingGlass Studios, that developed Ultima Underworld. The game required a 32-bit 386 CPU at the time, when few PC users had them. Thus, their total target market was extremely limited, and subsequently, the company went out of business after that project.

Sure, it was a fantastic, if a bit bleeding-edge game, with software 3D graphics that blew away Wolfenstein 3D (which ran on 286 CPUs), but they paid a dear price for developing a game that advanced.

 

[lyssword]

I dont believe for a second that Wolfenstein was smooth. that game is stuttery as hell on 2 cores. even when the framerate is acceptable its not smooth as 2 cores are literally maxed out. and yes I tested this with 2 cores of my cpu at 4.4 which is as fast or faster than the G3258 at 4.6. when I went from 2 cores to 3 cores it was night and day and the game felt like it was supposed to for most areas. and going to 4 cores made the game feel exactly how a modern game should feel. well aside from the few little issues with the game itself.

I dunno, from what I remember it was very playable, but I probably did not max out ultra settings or whatever. This youtubevid shows same setup, except his is stock, and both my 270 and g3258 oc'd

 

[Remobz]

i3 4360 for the win!

 

[toyota]

I dunno, from what I remember it was very playable, but I probably did not max out ultra settings or whatever. This youtubevid shows same setup, except his is stock, and both my 270 and g3258 oc'd

as I mentioned earlier a video does not show the jitterness and slow feel that actually playing the game does. the game played like complete garbage with 2 cores despite being above 30 fps the whole time. even when staying above 50 fps it looked and felt terrible. again enabling a third core smoothed out the game making it feel like it should. I was use higher settings though but I did have screen space reflections off and vt compress on.