Ricardo B (ricardo.b.delete@this.xxxxx.xx) on May 14, 2013 11:15 am wrote:
> RichardC (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on May 14, 2013 10:38 am wrote:
> >
> > It's best served by a rather specialized throughput machine, i.e. a GPU.
> > Not an SMT multicore. Game benchmarks indicate that there's no significant
> > advantage for 4C/8T over 4C/4T with most current games.
>
> But do most games even benefit from going from 2C/2T to 4C/4T?

(I'll post this here, but this is really a comment to about 15 different posts on this thread.)

Here's latest Steam hardware survey: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ .

Take a look at the number of physical CPU. Most common number is 2 (47.78%) followed closely by 4 (43.27%). I don't have numbers right now, but vast majority of those 4 core chips don't have hyper-threading. This is why game engines don't need to support 8 threads. Even if they did, those lucky few would only see at best something like 25 % improvement. When capped by CPU instead of GPU.

Also, if you look at CPU clock speeds, you see that something like 75 % is under 3 GHz. There are some 8 thread laptop processors that fall into this category, but generally speaking, there are very few gamers that go for top of the line CPU, and only after spending thrice as much on GPU(s). Only top of the line CPUs have 4 cores and Hyperthreding.

Of course, having consoles that are beaten to pulp by every single i5 doesn't help on multi-platform engines.

Anyway, if someone wants to bitch about low single-threaded performance, why not bitch about the fact that we don't have higher clocked dual-cores? Losing two cores should bring a lot more benefit than axing Hyperthreading, but Intel just doesn't want to sell fast dual-cores.

-JLarja