Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: MADe on August 04, 2010, 03:12:23 PM
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Hello,
I use an Intel i7 920 DO cpu. Its a quad core with HT. With HT enabled thats 8 logical processors. Is AH coded to work with this cpu?
If not, what are the best choices to make for AH gaming?
ty
Same question about multiple vid cards, SLI and Crossfire. How does AH deal here.?
ty
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Natively, Aces High uses 2 cores. There is no practical way to use more as virtually everything in the game is dependent on an event happening before the next thing can happen. That is the wya it is with most software.
Very few applications can really take advantage of more than two cores and see a performance gain. Video/Audio editing packages are the ones that can get the most gains from a high number of CPU cores.
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:huh Since when did Hyperthreading increase the number of cpu cores in a processor?
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It always has. There are two physical sets of registers for each core of the HT enabled family of CPUs. Intel doubles the number of ALU's for each core as well. They did it in to take advantage of the bandwidth available in the cores.
Just like the Xeon quad core CPU's which report 8 cores per CPU. The Xeon's take it one step further and double the number of FPU's, per core, as well.
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I have disabled HT because no software uses 8 threads really, it gave me a bit of ram speed boost 5000MB/s +/-.
Is there a method for asigning AH to specific cores and if so what is the recommended choice?
ps many of the console game hardware and software has been using 8 logical processor cpu's for awhile now, home pc's are behind the curve.
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It always has. There are two physical sets of registers for each core of the HT enabled family of CPUs. Intel doubles the number of ALU's for each core as well. They did it in to take advantage of the bandwidth available in the cores.
Just like the Xeon quad core CPU's which report 8 cores per CPU. The Xeon's take it one step further and double the number of FPU's, per core, as well.
But hyperthreading is not actually doubling the processors, it's virtual duplication of part of the physical processor through OS support. Put any hyper threading processor into a system with an OS that isn't optimized for multiple processors and hyper threading and it's only the physical core(s) is getting recognized and used.
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Gentleman stay on target please. :x
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But hyperthreading is not actually doubling the processors, it's virtual duplication of part of the physical processor through OS support. Put any hyper threading processor into a system with an OS that isn't optimized for multiple processors and hyper threading and it's only the physical core(s) is getting recognized and used.
No, it is not a virtual implementation, it is a physical implementation.
MADe, Windows controls the thread allocation. At any given time a Windows system may be running hundreds of threads. Video and audio editing packages will use all 8 cores, if you want them to.
When I said the game natively uses 2 cores, that does not count the thread where sound is running, nor the thread where the graphics pipeline is running, nor the thread handling input and so on.
Like the consoles, all those threads block waiting for input. Do not get sucked into the hype about how many CPUs/cores a console will use to run a game. Regardless of what hardware the game runs on, there is very little that can be done to take advantage of more than a couple to 4 cores for a game, and then only for brief periods of time.
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I'm confused.
So the i7s actually have 8 physical cores?
Because even with HT enabled, my dual-core Conroe still only has 2 cores.
Does this mean the i7 has twice the cores of the older C2D quad cores? Or is it all a trick for selling more i7's?
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I'm confused.
So the i7s actually have 8 physical cores?
Because even with HT enabled, my dual-core Conroe still only has 2 cores.
Does this mean the i7 has twice the cores of the older C2D quad cores? Or is it all a trick for selling more i7's?
An i7 has four physical cores (CPUs). Each core has two full sets of support hardware (registers and such) right there on the chip, allowing each core to run two threads simultaneously. If you have an i7 on a mobo that supports hyper-threading and also run an O/S that supports hyper-threading, applications will see eight CPUs.
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My 930 show 8 logical cores. Video editing software is the only thing that uses all 8 right now on this machine.
Krusty I don't think the dual cores have HT. Someone told me it had been disabled in the intructions set.
AH runs rock solid maxed out everything including Hires textures at 60 FPS even on TT.
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i7's are quad core processors. Electricity is a wave form. HT seems to use the bottom side of the wave form. Many modern electronics can use both sides of the wave form. Enabling HT adds 4 logical processors. Each physical core works both sides of the wave form, 2 threads each. 4x2=8
Core2 Duo's are two core processors with out HT. HT was first with the P4's, went away with the dual and quad cores, came back with the i7's.
But no one ever said which cores are the best choice for AH, which was the point of the thread. You can assign which cores do what if you want. If AH uses two cores native, which two has proven best. Or is no choice possible?
Task Manager process cpu affinity.
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Pretty much any of them can run AH. Your bottleneck will be more graphical (and only if you turn AH graphics up). Anything semi-modern, say 2GHz and up with at least 2 cores should run AH without any problem.
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If AH is using two cores, then can the other two cores be assigned to other processes?
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I won't get into the 2 core thing, but I've yet to see any real proof that going crossfire or SLI adds over 15% at best over a single video card.
Much better and simpler to spend a few dollars more on a single good card.
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i7's are quad core processors. Electricity is a wave form. HT seems to use the bottom side of the wave form. Many modern electronics can use both sides of the wave form. Enabling HT adds 4 logical processors. Each physical core works both sides of the wave form, 2 threads each. 4x2=8
Core2 Duo's are two core processors with out HT. HT was first with the P4's, went away with the dual and quad cores, came back with the i7's.
But no one ever said which cores are the best choice for AH, which was the point of the thread. You can assign which cores do what if you want. If AH uses two cores native, which two has proven best. Or is no choice possible?
Task Manager process cpu affinity.
MADE, Bino has it right. I have it right. There are two physical interfaces, per core, in the HT enabled family of CPU's from Intel. It really is that simple. Each physical interface can concurrently run its own thread. It does not have anything to do with the square wave. All data is valid after the rising edge, and just before the trailing edge of the square wave. The edge has to meet the hold time requirements before the data is valid. The data is all that matters. It is always read/written on the positive edge, not the negative.
Windows manages the threads (pathetically, I might add) and assigns them to the various cores. Windows own processes which never stop running, and they run on whatever free core(s) that are available.
Aces High responds better to faster CPU's, than to slower quad (or more) CPU's. Example, a dual core CPU running at 3Ghz is going to kill a quad core running at 2.4Ghz. That is actually true of most applications. In a game, the "i" family of the CPU's, running at the same clock rate as the C2D family of CPU's is going to perform pretty close to the same.
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I won't get into the 2 core thing, but I've yet to see any real proof that going crossfire or SLI adds over 15% at best over a single video card.
Much better and simpler to spend a few dollars more on a single good card.
I will disagree with this. Once I bought a $700 vid card, it was very good for its day. Then in a 2nd machine a few years later, I put 2 vid cards in SLI. These cards were later models than the 1st machines, but a little out of date at purchase. 2 of them for $425 a pair, almost half the cost of before. Major graphics improvement. Mostly I think its the better cpu in 2nd machine, because it has the oomf to drive a pair of cards and the results are great for less cost.
Triple cards, Quad cards are really for specific professionals, but having a little extra GPU calcs can't be bad with the right set of hardware.
But then this is off topic.
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HT was IMO one of the slickest marketing strategies Intel has ever come up with.
By making processors that had 2 front ends but only a single execution core, they increased performance by as much as 1/3 for a minimal increase in die size.
But probably more importantly, it set the stage for the processors we now enjoy - it was a wake up call to programmers that proper multithreading wasn't just a best practices that made no 'real world' difference as it had in the past in the Wintel world. It was actually beginning to matter.
Yet it could still be turned off if necessary, without taking too much of a performance hit.
Too bad RamBus wasn't as well played, and the subsequent DDR RAM MTH fiasco - which I STILL feel was a deliberate ploy.
<S>
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I've yet to see any real proof that going crossfire or SLI adds over 15% at best over a single video card.
This all changed with the 400 line which presents 100% scalability. The only limiting factor is when you activate PhysX which removes a specific card from the link. I think there can be some effects of CUDA programming which limits effectiveness if poorly done.
EDIT: Not a programmer but I have seen 100% scaling and I have seen 85% (estimated) so I think its the implementation that changes the scaling.
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It is quite impossible to obtain 100% scalability in a multi-video card setup. The simple reason being the software overhead to maintain it all.
The actual amount to be gained is going to be dictated by the CPU/system RAM performance, but it is quite impossible to not have any overhead for multi-card installations. The best you can get will always be some percentage less than 100%.
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my laptop has a i7-620M (arrandale?), interestingly it detects 4 cores although its specced as 2 cores and only 2 are used. judging by the 35w consumption it looks like intel just disable 2 of the 4 cores and wind the clock back a little to half the power draw and lower the temps for laptop use.
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Easy to see a manufacturer disabling HT in a laptop.
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It is quite impossible to obtain 100% scalability in a multi-video card setup. The simple reason being the software overhead to maintain it all.
The actual amount to be gained is going to be dictated by the CPU/system RAM performance, but it is quite impossible to not have any overhead for multi-card installations. The best you can get will always be some percentage less than 100%.
Okay I should have said I have seen 32 fps go to 60 fps with a second card added and with a third card added for PhysX all on the same SLI chain.
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Doubling of FPS does not necessarily mean doubling of performance and rendering power. Often times overclocking a card just a little bit yields the same results and could not be considered twice as powerful.
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Right... anything that doubles FSX FPS is pretty powerful. :aok