When will Quadcore Matter for PCGAMING?

[bamacre]

If you plan on keeping the cpu for a while, I'd get a Q9550. I don't think $320 is too much for a nice processor. People were getting an erection for X2 3800's when they were $300. And with memory dirt cheap and the video card price wars, might as well get a good cpu while you can. I'd say an i7, but DDR3 memory prices would make that route much more expensive.

The more quad cores become common, the more games will make use of them. Better safe than sorry.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: mrblotto
I believe the OP was asking when will gaming be able to use quad cores effectively, not 'when will I be able to play 2 games,and use other apps at the same time because I have no life'

Yet there's no actual difference... I am playing one game and using multiple cores while doing it.

Trying to say I have no life is just rather lame as well, you pompous, arrogant ass.

 

[Udgnim]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
I played supcom more than most of the people here, so I'm gonna start out by pointing out that quadcore for gaming doesn't make a whole lot of difference at this point. Well, I am wondering, when do you think it actually will? Next summer? 2010? Anyone got any ideas?

I'm about to buy a dualcore E8400, and I haven't seen any good reason at this point why I should pay more for quad. I'm almost looking now to find that evidence.

it depends on how many console ports come to the PC

 

[mrblotto]

Originally posted by: Aikouka

Originally posted by: mrblotto
I believe the OP was asking when will gaming be able to use quad cores effectively, not 'when will I be able to play 2 games,and use other apps at the same time because I have no life'

Yet there's no actual difference... I am playing one game and using multiple cores while doing it.

Trying to say I have no life is just rather lame as well, you pompous, arrogant ass.

lol

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: mrblotto
lol

My goodness, I have fed the troll and he has gotten giddy!

Oh and I have just done it again .

Well now, if you want a more serious talk about multi-core programming, the simplest answer is... it's not necessarily as easy as you might expect and won't always provide the best gains. The thing is, not all tasks are inherently able to be broken down easily. Now a game can be broken into AI, Physics, Sound, I/O, etc, but the problem we get here is that even if you do break these down... it's not like they're all necessarily intensive sub-tasks nor do they all necessarily compute at the same time, because sometimes, one of these sub-tasks will rely on the updates committed by another sub-task.

I mean, you can look at something like the summation of a bunch of numbers (let's say 4 trillion of them) and you can easily split that up amongst four cores and just give each of them an equal block of the task at hand and then at the end... you simply combine (add) them together. It's quite simple.

I could probably make some example out of making a cartoon in real time (i.e. you do everything at once... no planning->production->finalizing phases), but I actually have a life to tend to .

 

[TidusZ]

Originally posted by: Aikouka
I play two World of Warcrafts at the same time as well as do other things while playing those. I'd like to see you do that well on a single-core or a dual-core.

I haven't played WoW in a few years, but back in the day I'd log on and play up to 3 different accounts to kill world dragons, particularly in the wee hours of the morning when not many were online, on an e4300 @3.2. Ran wonderfully. I wasn't running background stuff though aside from maybe winamp.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
I haven't played WoW in a few years, but back in the day I'd log on and play up to 3 different accounts to kill world dragons, particularly in the wee hours of the morning when not many were online, on an e4300 @3.2. Ran wonderfully. I wasn't running background stuff though aside from maybe winamp.

Well, a single instance of WoW can use an entire core by itself. Now it may not be as necessary to have x+n cores for x instances of WoW (where n >= 1) as WoW isn't really that CPU dependent anymore (when it first came out, the CPUs obviously weren't as fast). But I do remember even when I first upgrade from single core to dual-core (Athlon 64 X2 4400+) and the difference was phenomenal and I only played one WoW!

Although like a lot of other resource-heavy games, WoW definitely benefits from more than just a fast CPU... with all of its vastly different lands, it has quite a few textures and such that will have to be loaded on demand. Combine that with a lot of textures that need to be stored in Video RAM (and if you run out of Video RAM... System RAM!)

It's definitely crazy, but there was even a thread recently where someone was surprised that their relatively new and powerful PC was having some issues in the new expansion with diminishing framerates.

 

[Ruptga]

Originally posted by: Martimus
Quad Cores are usually better on RTS games where there are a lot of AI units that are easily broken into separate threads. Supreme Commander is a game where a Quad Core is pretty much needed at the larger map sizes.

As more people migrate to quad core processors, more programs will be written to use them. In this case, the hardware has to come first, since the software industry has such small margins that most developers can't afford to take risks forcing new technology to run their programs.

It seems like the majority of CPU's sold will be quad core within 2 years, so you can expect a lot of programmers to assume they are the norm a couple years after that.

I can vouch for this, I have a p8400 and it does perfectly fine as long as I keep the unit cap at 250. But it can easily get down to a 3:1 ratio of real time to game time on medium-large 8-way maps with a unit cap of 500.

 

[MustangSVT]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
It isn't going to matter for quite a while because most people do not have quad cores.
The people with quad cores are only %10 of the market.

lmao. 10% huh? where did that number come from? lmao

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: MustangSVT
lmao. 10% huh? where did that number come from? lmao

I think the Steam survey would list stuff like that... I donno, never looked at one much, but it's a possible Source (engine... heh, bad pun).

 

[theblackbox]

playing supreme commander on my box runs great. running dual quads.

 

[TehMac]

Originally posted by: MustangSVT

Originally posted by: Modelworks
It isn't going to matter for quite a while because most people do not have quad cores.
The people with quad cores are only %10 of the market.

lmao. 10% huh? where did that number come from? lmao

Steam did a survey, and I guess 10% of Steam users are quad users.

 

[MustangSVT]

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

ah, here it is. I understand the target audience is gamer and NOT general public, but still 10% !! I am surprised.
But then again quads are becoming cheap.

 

[zerogear]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
I played supcom more than most of the people here, so I'm gonna start out by pointing out that quadcore for gaming doesn't make a whole lot of difference at this point. Well, I am wondering, when do you think it actually will? Next summer? 2010? Anyone got any ideas?

I'm about to buy a dualcore E8400, and I haven't seen any good reason at this point why I should pay more for quad. I'm almost looking now to find that evidence.

Honestly SupCom's multithreading is not at all efficient, it is very rudimentary. And even other multithreaded games are not as good as they can be (read: they suck.)

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: MustangSVT
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

ah, here it is. I understand the target audience is gamer and NOT general public, but still 10% !! I am surprised.
But then again quads are becoming cheap.

It is actually pretty surprising I thought. I would have guessed 4%, when you consider how many FX5200 and 7300GTs are being used.

 

[Martimus]

Originally posted by: Azn

Originally posted by: Martimus
Quad Cores are usually better on RTS games where there are a lot of AI units that are easily broken into separate threads. Supreme Commander is a game where a Quad Core is pretty much needed at the larger map sizes.

As more people migrate to quad core processors, more programs will be written to use them. In this case, the hardware has to come first, since the software industry has such small margins that most developers can't afford to take risks forcing new technology to run their programs.

It seems like the majority of CPU's sold will be quad core within 2 years, so you can expect a lot of programmers to assume they are the norm a couple years after that.

Not when most of the games we get are console ports.

Console ports are more likely to be optimized for multiple cores, since the XBox 360 and the PS3 both have multi-core processors. But I wouldn't expect non-ported games to have much multi-core optimization until the computer hardware market catches up.

 

[Oyeve]

This is the first time in my tech history that I am actually looking forward the the next generation of game console that the next wave of PC hardware. Too many disappointments for me in my last build (in sig) that I pretty much am gonna stay with this system for quite a long time. I really cant see why some newer games run like ass when using state of the art HW. And really are not much better looking than older games that run great.

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: Oyeve
This is the first time in my tech history that I am actually looking forward the the next generation of game console that the next wave of PC hardware. Too many disappointments for me in my last build (in sig) that I pretty much am gonna stay with this system for quite a long time. I really cant see why some newer games run like ass when using state of the art HW. And really are not much better looking than older games that run great.

Poor programming.
There are quite a few programmers out their that use the excuse of , you need faster hardware, when it is instead, they need to optimize their code.

With a console they have to work hard to optimize the code they can't change the hardware. With a pc all they have to do is get the game to run, and then if its slow, blame it on the hardware.
Unfortunately all programmers are not created equal.

 

[skace]

The real answer is when Intel gets done with that new compiler / language that is automatically going to write code to utilize an unlimited number of processors. At least that's what I remember reading about. Until then it's always going to be semi-functional. However, that doesn't mean I hate having it, I actually enjoy just having bonus CPU sitting around, 100% cpu utilization really makes shit sluggish.

 

[PsharkJF]

Maybe never. Aren't games one of the more serial things out there?

 

[mrblotto]

Originally posted by: Aikouka

Originally posted by: mrblotto
lol

My goodness, I have fed the troll and he has gotten giddy!

Oh and I have just done it again .

Well now, if you want a more serious talk about multi-core programming, the simplest answer is... it's not necessarily as easy as you might expect and won't always provide the best gains. The thing is, not all tasks are inherently able to be broken down easily. Now a game can be broken into AI, Physics, Sound, I/O, etc, but the problem we get here is that even if you do break these down... it's not like they're all necessarily intensive sub-tasks nor do they all necessarily compute at the same time, because sometimes, one of these sub-tasks will rely on the updates committed by another sub-task.

I mean, you can look at something like the summation of a bunch of numbers (let's say 4 trillion of them) and you can easily split that up amongst four cores and just give each of them an equal block of the task at hand and then at the end... you simply combine (add) them together. It's quite simple.

I could probably make some example out of making a cartoon in real time (i.e. you do everything at once... no planning->production->finalizing phases), but I actually have a life to tend to .

D'oh! I just came across this. I've been out of town the last 5 days and I saw a couple email notices for a reply in a thread I didn't even participate in. I'm like 'this is odd'. I did leave my machine on, and I'll be you any amount my little dysfunctional (14) nephew was over at my place causing trouble while my sister (his mother) picked up the mail and made sure everything at the place was copacetic. I offer my apologies.......sigh, I wonder what other wrenches he's thrown a monkey into.......*shakes head*

 

[rudder]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
I played supcom more than most of the people here, so I'm gonna start out by pointing out that quadcore for gaming doesn't make a whole lot of difference at this point.

If you don't have any software that utilizes quad cores... there is no need for one, plain and simple.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

PC gaming will be dead before quadcore gaming becomes viable.

 

[Tempered81]

Originally posted by: TidusZ
I played supcom more than most of the people here, so I'm gonna start out by pointing out that quadcore for gaming doesn't make a whole lot of difference at this point. Well, I am wondering, when do you think it actually will? Next summer? 2010? Anyone got any ideas?

I'm about to buy a dualcore E8400, and I haven't seen any good reason at this point why I should pay more for quad. I'm almost looking now to find that evidence.

I think when quads really matter that lucid, larabee, and 6-core 32nm intel chips will matter too.

aka around jan 2010 or later...

 

[minmaster]

didn't someone say you pretty much need a quad-core to run the new GTA game? there's one then.