will P4 hyperthreading help gaming?

[whistleclient]

just curious...

 

[zsouthboy]

maybe

For the most part, i think the answer will be no, however, this doesn't take into account OTHER things happening in the background, etc. that would like CPU time...

So could be either way, only 2 weeks before we find out BTW.

 

[Wolfsraider]

no it won't (at least as yet).
i don't know if games will incorporate hyperthreading,as it would require the game makers to recode the game for support.
since no? game has this kind of support available then it would actually hurt the games performance if indeed it was enabled.
at least thats my understanding from what i have been reading

anyone else?

 

[RaynorWolfcastle]

Wolfsraider, it may or may not help current games but wouldn't it make sense to program future games to take advantage of this? I know nothing about writing multithreaded programming, but I imagine it must be possible to do the AI computations in one thread, generate the polygons for rendering in another thread, handle UI in another, etc., no?

Of course what I'mn saying may be impossible, I'm sure someone with experience writing multithreaded programs could answer this...

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: icecool83
Wolfsraider, it may or may not help current games but wouldn't it make sense to program future games to take advantage of this? I know nothing about writing multithreaded programming, but I imagine it must be possible to do the AI computations in one thread, generate the polygons for rendering in another thread, handle UI in another, etc., no?

Of course what I'mn saying may be impossible, I'm sure someone with experience writing multithreaded programs could answer this...

It takes a lot of extra work to write multi-threaded apps, so I doubt they will do it until a LARGE percentage of people have SMP/SMT (hyperthreading). However, I would imagine you would get a slight improvement in performance just because other threads that are running in the background should have less negative effect.

 

[Shagga]

I guess its a bit like SSE2. If the game/application is not coded for it specifically then its unlikely to have any effect. However I read this the other day. Now it's just heresay, but if you chose to believe it then it goes someway to answering your question, sort of.

 

[Chadder007]

Is AMD making anything like this technology? It to me seems like one of the best ideas from Intel in a while (compared to good ole mmx and sse) I know AMD has hypertransport though...is it the same?

 

[Bovinicus]

It depends on a few things. First of all, does the game support hypethreading? If not, there will be no benefit. Another factor is how bottlenecked the game is by the CPU. If you play in low resolutions, it is very likely. If you play in higher resolutions with lots of visual effects, then the video card will be holding back your performance, so the CPU is negligible to a certain point.

 

[Nemesis77]

If the game is SMP-aware, it might benefit from HyperThreading. But the thing is that few games are. Falcon 4.0 and Quake 1, 2 and 3 are the only one to come to my mind.

 

[CrazySaint]

Originally posted by: Chadder007
Is AMD making anything like this technology? It to me seems like one of the best ideas from Intel in a while (compared to good ole mmx and sse) I know AMD has hypertransport though...is it the same?

No, HyperTransport is different. IIRC, it is a high speed link between the north and south bridges (or is it between North Bridge and CPU?).

 

[ElFenix]

hypertransport is a high speed scalable interconnect technology, nothing more, nothing less. in theory you could connect just about anything.

i wonder if HT will let me process seti while gaming?

 

[imgod2u]

Games are usually not very multithread friendly. Simply because they are of a very serial nature. Think about it. When you're rendering a video you know everything you're about to render (all the data) before hand so you can process all of that at the same time. In a game, you have to stand there and wait for user input. You need to know where a user directed his object 1 second ago before you can start processing on what would happen next. You process things in-order as they happen, which also means you can't really extract that much parallelism out of it thread-wise. The AI needs to run at the same speed as the screen is rendering, you can't have 1 thread where the game is running and another thread for the AI because you're not sure which thread will finish first. If the scene is rendered before the calculations for the AI is finished, you have a stall.