12 replies to this topic

[JSmith7784]

Hello everyone,
Recently I have been reading up on Hyperthreading and the pro's and con's. I've been checking the usual hardware forums and from what I have read it seems you shouldn't see much of a benefit in games. I have a I7-950 @ 3.5ghz, 12gb ram, EVGA GTX770SC 4gb. I have been using hyperthreading and my game performance seems to be pretty good at very high settings. I recently tried disabling hyperthreading, but haven't had much time to test and see if it makes a difference in game. Has anyone else tried this with MWO? I used to do this with my old P4 and it did help my gaming performance years ago.

I get the idea behind hyperthreading. It allows 1 physical core to act like 2 cores and thus get more productivity out of your CPU. Does the virtual core perform the same as the physical core? Will 4 physical cores at full load out perform 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores? It seems with hyperthreading on the physical cores and virutal cores are at about half load or so when gaming. Some of the cores don't show much usage at all. If I go to 4 physical cores only they all seem to be pulling a heavy load, but not really going up to 100%.

Thanks for any infomation and please feel free to correct me if my understanding of hyperthreading is incorrect.

Thanks again

[xWiredx]

I guess I'll be "that guy".

As it pertains to MWO, there is a lot of discussion including hyperthreading already:
http://mwomercs.com/...=hyperthreading

Hyperthreading as a general concept:
http://en.wikipedia....Hyper-threading

The wiki article describes how it works, the performance increase claims, drawbacks, etc.

My personal experience: Hyperthreading on my i7 2600K helped out maybe by a few percent, nothing spectacular. 1-3FPS difference, which is technically within margin of error (although it did seem to be a consistent difference when testing with FRAPS). With my i7 5820K, there is zero difference either way so I just leave it on.

[Golrar]

Of course on my FX chip I disable the virtual cores. Gives only a nominal increase n FPS, but with an AMD chip every little bit counts.

[poohead]

With the older i7 chips I believe the biggest advantage of deactivating HT is that it made higher stable overclocks possible. You might be able to squeeze out a few more Mhz if you turn it off.

It seemed to help on my old 920 as I recall.

For MWO that extra OC could well help add a few FPS.

[Catamount]

Moving from a 3570k to a 3770k netted averages maybe 10fps higher with FRAPS (~ 60-70) for me, so MWO is clearly taking advantage of HT on a quad core in my case. Wired's comment suggests MWO doesn't care past 8 threads, and maybe not even to that many, but then, he doesn't get advantage on a 2600k, either (GPU differences? *shrug*). I suppose as always, YMMV. Play with it and see how it behaves with each setup.

[Flapdrol]

Some games hate hyperthreading (arma 2 had massive stutter until they made a patch that ignored the extra "cores").

Also, I hear there's a difference between haswell hyperthreading vs previous gen, haswell i3's seem to have less problems and more extra performance in things like games.

[Catamount]

I've noticed a strange stuttering in combat in Star Citizen since moving to my 3770k at times (not in racing, thankfully), so that could always be it, but who can say. I'll try turning it off later and see what happens.

It'd be good news if Haswell improved HT implementation.

[xWiredx]

Catamount, on 29 October 2014 - 07:49 AM, said:

Moving from a 3570k to a 3770k netted averages maybe 10fps higher with FRAPS (~ 60-70) for me, so MWO is clearly taking advantage of HT on a quad core in my case. Wired's comment suggests MWO doesn't care past 8 threads, and maybe not even to that many, but then, he doesn't get advantage on a 2600k, either (GPU differences? *shrug*). I suppose as always, YMMV. Play with it and see how it behaves with each setup.

Yeah, I was GPU-limited since SLI wasn't supported and every time I tried to hack it together it was unreliable. The Nvidia drivers that add SLI support came out after I built the new beast. MWO likes having 6 cores. Not 6 AMD cores, 6 Intel cores. It also likes high clocks. On Haswell, 4.0GhZ+ and add 200MhZ for each gen backward (pretty sure a 4.6GhZ Nehalem could keep up anyway).

[JSmith7784]

So I tried about 10 matches with hyper threading turned off and everything seems about the same. No noticeable difference in max FPS but it does seem to stutter every once and a while. Usually at the beginning of a match. Tomorrow I plan on turning it back on and seeing if the stuttering goes away.
I recently went from 6gb of ram to 12gb and now using all 6 ram slots. Basically upped the ram to prepare for star citizen. Does more ram help at all with hyperthreading or is that performed in the cpu itself? With my i7 950 would it have been better to go with 3 4gb sticks or will 6 2gb sticks perform about the same? Not sure if it matter buts it's gskill ddr3 1600 9-9-9-24 1T.

[xWiredx]

I can't find it now, but there was some testing done that showed using all of the RAM slots on a triple-channel Nehalem setup could stress the memory controller and actually hurt performance. Since this game doesn't seem to care about RAM too much, that probably isn't going to matter for you.

Hyperthreading is the CPU only. Any CPU thread can wait for something from RAM, but RAM doesn't affect CPU performance any more or less with hyperthreading on or off unless there are also real issues with the RAM.

[DjPush]

I just upgraded to an I7 4790k. Using CPUID's PerfMonitor I see activity on all 8 cores (4 actual and 4 virtual). I have the chip set to its 4.4Ghz turbo boost and I get about 80 to 100 fps on max settings with post AA. This is a 100-120% increase from my FX8320 I was using before. Even then I saw all 8 cores of the FX chip active while playing MWO.

[MechWarrior4172571]

JSmith7784, on 28 October 2014 - 09:03 AM, said:

Hello everyone,
Recently I have been reading up on Hyperthreading and the pro's and con's. I've been checking the usual hardware forums and from what I have read it seems you shouldn't see much of a benefit in games. I have a I7-950 @ 3.5ghz, 12gb ram, EVGA GTX770SC 4gb. I have been using hyperthreading and my game performance seems to be pretty good at very high settings. I recently tried disabling hyperthreading, but haven't had much time to test and see if it makes a difference in game. Has anyone else tried this with MWO? I used to do this with my old P4 and it did help my gaming performance years ago.

I get the idea behind hyperthreading. It allows 1 physical core to act like 2 cores and thus get more productivity out of your CPU. Does the virtual core perform the same as the physical core? Will 4 physical cores at full load out perform 4 physical cores and 4 virtual cores? It seems with hyperthreading on the physical cores and virutal cores are at about half load or so when gaming. Some of the cores don't show much usage at all. If I go to 4 physical cores only they all seem to be pulling a heavy load, but not really going up to 100%.

Thanks for any infomation and please feel free to correct me if my understanding of hyperthreading is incorrect.

Thanks again

My AMD Phenom II x6 Thuban 1090T processor is lousy at mwo, even when overclocked to 3.8 GHz. MWO hogs only one core of it and maxes it out in usage--the rest of the cores are pretty much at 0-10% usage.. horrible. Phenoms don't have hyper-threading, but wanted to throw this in here for comparison anyway. Hyper-threading is a trick to make software think that there are 2 actual cores (even though there is only physical core that is hyper-threading the 2 virtual cores.) It's like 2 virtual machines running on one physical machine (if you are familiar with the concept) or two thoughts running inside of one head--you alternate between the two thoughts that you have but you still have one physical head to process them.

[xWiredx]

DjPush, on 02 December 2014 - 01:07 PM, said:

I just upgraded to an I7 4790k. Using CPUID's PerfMonitor I see activity on all 8 cores (4 actual and 4 virtual). I have the chip set to its 4.4Ghz turbo boost and I get about 80 to 100 fps on max settings with post AA. This is a 100-120% increase from my FX8320 I was using before. Even then I saw all 8 cores of the FX chip active while playing MWO.

That doesn't necessarily mean MWO benefits from hyperthreading, though. It's just seeing a "core" based on what the OS tells it, and the thread happens to get scheduled to one of those. Cryengine is supposed to support up to 8 threads, but I don't think MWO uses 8 threads. There is speculation of it using 6, though.