Suspicion, BF3 not as multicore friendly as we thought........

[hamunaptra]

Lately after looking around at BF3 cpu scaling reviews, and this one points it out best(but the same pattern remains in all cpu BF3 tests from what Ive found):
http://www.techspot.com/review/458-b...nce/page7.html

If you remember, windows bounces around threads on cores, thats why even when running a dual threaded task on a quad core system...task manager will show cpu utilization yet all cores in system will be right around 50% .. whereas we all know its really running like 2 cores @ 100%
This same exact pattern exists in the link provided above. Youll notice that the dual core CPU's are pegged at 100%, then quads are right around 70%(have to chop that in half for intel HT enabled cpu's so...that leaves about 30-35%). The hex cpu's are right around 50% and the final 8 core cpu is right around 45%...
The only oddball that doesnt add up is the FX8150, which should be at 30-35%...Im thinkin perhaps it was doing something else in background at time this SS was taken.
Now call me crazy but.......
These values all point to 3 threads at 100%
...these same patterns have shown in other reviews as well.

The only real way I can think to confirm this is take a quad core cpu and clock it really low, with a nice video card...MAKE SURE its being bottlenecked by the cpu by confirming the vidcard is not at 95-100% utilization.
When the above is sustained, open task manager and if CPU is still aroun 70-75%...then it DEFINITELY does NOT scale beyond 3 cores.

Now, this may be different in multiplayer, because most reviews dont do the cpu scaling test in multiplayer. But either way...I find it VERY odd....

 

[Grooveriding]

Some personal results of mine comparing BF3 MP when upgrading my CPU. I am repeating a lot of these tests as I had to wait for a new motherboard and finally have it now.

I can't comment as to the effect the 2 additional cores had and these benches were done with HT off. I leave HT off for gaming. There are definitely huge gains to be had in large scale multiplayer in BF3 from your CPU though.

 

[Childs]

These values all point to 3 threads at 100%
...these same patterns have shown in other reviews as well.

3 would be the magic number, as in the number of cores on the 360.

 

[hamunaptra]

Interesting, but getting repeatable patterns out of multiplayer is hard isnt it? How do you get identical runs on a 64man server.. ?
Also part of that is attributed to the fact your new processor is a 400mhz faster and its quad channel memory is it not?
Very interesting results nonetheless. So, in MP , I would say it is able to dish out some more tasks to the CPU, if your test runs are in the least the same scenario...

 

[BD231]

An assigned thread in a game doesn't mean it'll be doing intensive work, so there may be three cores doing a bulk of the heavy work sure, but until u monitor each core individually you won't have your answer.

I wouldn't listen to a guy who use's a GPU bottleneck to explain a point about CPUs and doesn't even show you the reported usage of all individual cores with a trusted program. All this guy did was prove that even a 580 has its limits, and clearly few cpu's have any trouble exposing it.

 

[96Firebird]

I went from an E8400 @ 3.6GHz to an i5-2500k @ stock and saw a major improvement. Although I also went from 4GB to 8GB RAM, which may have helped. But on the E8400, I wouldn't get close to 100% GPU usage.