Dual Core OR Quad Core...?

Hey guys,

I want my B3d products to have the ultimate performance capabilities, will I see any improvements in performance in my B3D produced games with a Quad core or will Dual Core be enough?

I am thinking along the lines of the 320MB nVIDIA 8800GTS Graphics card.

Actually its this beast:

http://www.meshcomputers.com/Default.aspx?PAGE=PRODUCTVIEWPAGE&USG=PRODUCT&ENT=PRODUCT&KEY=185572

Thanks.

Neither will give you any noticeable performance increase, since Blitz3D does not allow you to write a program that has more than one thread. In fact since most Dual/Quad core processors (that is all but the most expensive ones) are clocked at lower frequencies that single cores, you'll probably take a performance hit.

If you already have a single core PC with a faster processor than about 2.6Ghz, you will take a performance hit. Note that the three other cores will be mostly idling doing menial tasks for Windows.

Maybe instead of petition for BlitzMax for ARM processor we should run a petition for multithreading support in BlitzMax... ;-)

If anyone has a Fry's electronics local to them and needs a new Quad core and Mobo.



I am extremely tempted to get one myself.

Are those guys paying you mate? :P

nah, I just get pretty excited when they have a good deals and I'm thinking of upgrading myself in the next couple of months. Partly frustrated because my puter is really slow when playing oblivion with decent graphics settings at 800x600. And I actualy found a game that I come back to after a few months away.

@Flameduck

right, so are you saying that I should stay with a faster single core processor then and beef up the graphics and memory speeds for B3d - I just want the absolute best performance for my work.

I am currently working on a

3.20 GHz PC
2GB of 433 MHz memory
Sapphire Radeon X800XL (with 256MB DDR)

What would you suggest as improvements?

IPete2.

Well I don't really remember what your work involves (or whether it's changed), so I can't say for sure. I can say that for pure Blitz3D CPU punch, the one you have now, is better than the Quad Core. However depending on your program, the Quad Core's faster memory bus is also an important factor (because Blitz3D doesn't have the best compiler in the world).

I'd start with some faster memory, and if you need the fill-rate, a bigger gfx card - although from memory the X800 is fairly decent in that department, so it might not give you the performance boost you crave.

If you can afford it get a single core Xeon processor - the extra cache is going to come in very handy.

I don't know - it's hard to say really. I find it hard to imagine how that rig could have any problem handling anything Blitz3D can throw at it. I mean it's more powerful than my current machine, and while a bit dated it seems to manage alright as long as I'm not doing that shader thing.

Well with such a configuration you are pretty much at the top for B3D. I assume the 3.2 Ghz is an Intel PIV, I found that Pentium M (centrino) or Core 2 Duo in the top range (above 1.8 Ghz) runs as fast if not faster than a PIV, you have slightly faster memory and PCI-express (not much faster than AGP). A newer graphic card will give you a little more speed, but with B3D I doubt a 8800 will make such a difference compared to a 6800 (the 320MB instead of 256MB only useful if you are using huuuuge textures).

So if you want to upgrade it's not really necessary for B3D, but if you upgrade it will be not that or that (because I assume you have an AGP card), you will have to change everything!

Hummmmmm,

Noob question, Can you not run two B3D programs at the same time?

Its not so much an upgrade, I have a project which will require me to purchase a PC which will be able to cope with the game I am writing.

Currently I am getting slowdown when using lots of characters and shadows and stuff, I just wanted to know what would give me some more headroom.

I want the final game to run as smooth as possible, with as much on screen as possible.

IPete2.

I dont think you will take a performance hit, even if the chip speed is slower than your single core, the beuty is that you can assign all current windows processes to only use core one while you gain 100% of core 2 for your blitz app. you cant stop windows process from using your single core so thats something well worth having duel core for

Flame I see what you are saying, I understand that I may take a hit on duo core if the processor speed is less, but has Yarvin got a point there with the Windows processes interfering?

This new pC I have to purchase will not be doing anything else other than play my game full time. It won't be connected to anything and it won't have to have other software installed, and I intend to run XP Home on it, with SPs as necessary.

Has anyone got a duo or Quad core who could add their actual experience into this pot pourri of information?

Would it make any difference at all to the number crunching? My characters are 4,000 polys with 30 bones in the hero and 20 odd in each of the others. At present the max number I can have on screen is four with shadows or 7 without. The level design is very low polygon, and currently I have no textures on screen so I believe the current hit is from the animations and characters.

So I guess my next question is - would an nVidia dual SLi card be worth having?

No, you can overcome the occasional system glitch by having your app give it a little time occasionally. Buying a dual core CPU to cut down the - what? - 0.5%? cpu usage seems rather wasteful to me.


Without a doubt, that's a B3D limitation, not a system limitation. The best solution to that would be to move to a 3d engine which processes character animations on the GPU instead of the CPU. As FlameDuck as already explained, Blitz3D cannot utilize a second thread, let alone a second CPU, so you're not going to see any difference.

Cool - thanks guys,

My next question is where can I get the fastest single processor rig with the best graphics card from?

I have to do this in B3d, that's my chosen language so I have to apply sensible decisions to what I can expect, I must therefore look into a new way of doing the shadows then, ah well - :)

Thats been a great help, thanks.

IPete2.

What are you currently using for shadows?

Swifts shadow system.

Im looking at the flex system by Rob Farley (Code archives).

I have animated b3d characters, I would like the hero to have (if possible) an animated shadow.

IPete2.

Man you must have some seriously high poly characters or something. I could have four characters animated with shadows ( soft shadows enabled too! ) on my old 1.2 Athlon. That was using SSwift's shadow system too, although the characters were only about 1200-1500 polys each.

At the moment only raytracing and video work will benefit from multi cores. There are some multi core games due out end of year but they also want dx10 as well. (dx9 will be reduced version)

Some games are out that use multi cores, STALKER comes to mind.

The most recent Ogre3D supports media streaming on a seperate core, and if you use Novodex Physx with it, that has built in support for offloading the physics to other cores.

Not that thats much use with Blitz3D, unless physx becomes avaliable for it.

Gabriel,

Yeah - my hero is about 4,000 and 29 bones. The npcs are currently 3,700 and with 21 bones each ( the polys will come down for the final versions).

I have a stack of animations loaded too, I am beginning to think I may load some animations 'on the fly' as they may happen only rarely.

I think the shadows look fab, but I can't afford them this time, so I am going to look at something a little less processor intensive. Probably Flex from the code archives - if I can get it to work with types pivots and characters.

I can have 3-4 characters on screen - one with animated shadow, the other three with circles and that is acceptable, however I really wanted 8 plus characters, which I know is asking a lot, but then I do like to try to push the limits a bit.

I'll keep you guys posted - I'm sad the multicore won't really help too much - maybe with the processing. Maybe with a dual sli gfx card I can get some extra punch too???

Some yes. But gfx cards these days are optimized for shader rendering, not hardware T&L.

Kind of like how gfx cards are no longer optimized for 2D stuff.

I'm sure some people would consider it progress. In either case, two cards would mean roughly twice the rendering power (fill rate). It won't mean an effective 2x boost to Blitz3D performance (as I'm sure there are other factors that play a part in this).

and

Bzzzt, thanks for playing. He's got a P4 (the only processor that has a speed that high) - each core of a Core 2 Quad is substantially faster than that of a P4. Of course a Core 2 Duo 6600 would be perfect - Quad won't give any improvement over that - but either of them will be significantly faster than the P4.

And the only single core Xeons use the Pentium 4 architecture - expensive, bloated, slow compared to a Core 2 Duo.

Please, if you're going to give advice about things that you don't really understand, at least put a disclaimer in - if he had of actually bought a single core Xeon on your advice it would have been a tragic waste of money.

Well I have to deal with a lot of computers and both b3d and blitzmax. My apps are slow on Opteron and Xeon, avoid absolutely these ones, and fast on Pentium M / Centrino and Core 2 Duo/ Core Duo, and among these ones for the same clock speed there isn't much difference.

What I am buying at the moment as configuration for my works is a Core 2 Duo 6600, 1 GB ram, WD raptor HDD, Geforce 7600 Gtx, Creative X-fi fatality edition, some really silent fans and a good aluminium case... and I am really satisfied by the B3D performances, it's better than any P4 that I had, yet it's not THAT spectacular, but as Michael is saying it's "significant". But let's say all these Core processors (even the solo) are way better than the P4, and you will "feel" it ;)

LAB - Of course, the new Xeons are using the same architecture as the Core 2 Duo/Quad so they're deadly fast as well.

"Faster" in what sense? While Intel claim that clock for clock, the Conroe core is more efficient (40% if memory serves) at fetching, decoding and executing instructions than a Cedar Mill Core - that doesn't mean it's faster. It means it makes more efficient use of the clocks it has - which is half as many.

There are 6 different CPUs that have been labeled "Pentium 4". Do you have any favorites? Or are all of them equally useless?

Can normal windows support quad core? I didnt think XP could, i guess vista must be able to.
I was under the impression it was just 2007 server and linux etc. that supported it at present.

XP home+ can support Quad-Core.

More than that, actually, and they're all of the same Netburst architecture, and they're all uniformally bad.


Thanks for the CPU lesson, but your memory doesn't serve. Read some benchmarks instead of speculating. Tom's Hardware CPU charts are a good start. And please do read up on it, or stop giving advice on what CPU to buy, because right now your lack of respect for other peoples money is shocking (had Pete followed your advice he would have been throwing money down the toilet).

Did you miss it when AMD dropped their prices 50% in the months following the Core 2 Duo release? It was because their Athlon chips became thoroughly outclassed - exactly the opposite situation they were in when they were going up against Intel's Netburst chips.

While this is true of AMD currently... with all things technology (esp in the computer world), AMD will overshadow Intel's cpus again. They always bounce back and forth. Same with nVidia and ATI.

Although, I do explicitly remember watching a tech TV broadcast a few years back that stated the differences between cpu speeds and why on the same architecture why one made 2.2 GHz vs 2.4 GHz (or any other speed). They said the one with 2.4 GHz speeds basically has less flaws electronically than the 2.2 GHz did. This also led to te question of overclocking. They find a cpu that benches a specific speed, then stamp it that speed should it pass efficiently at it. That doesn't mean it couldn't operate faster, just it performed well at the required speeds. I could over clock a CPU to twice the speeds (theoretically) and it would operate fine (obviously you'd need to make other adjustments to the mobo voltage and clock settings jumpers or sw)

I'm not going to venture into the argument of what cpu is faster, etc. Just thought it would be appropriate with this information I learned a while back to be posted here.

I wasn't. Benchmarks need to be interpreted, they are not statements of facts.

Perhaps you could provide a link then, as the one I found doesn't do Blitz3D benchmarks. It exclusively benchmarks applications or games that are multithreaded, and thus get much more performance out of a multiple core CPU than Blitz3D ever could, even on it's best day.

1) Only you have the ability to look at conclusive benchmarks over hundreds of different applications (Core 2 Duo has to be one of the most benchmarked CPUs ever) and say that they can be 'interpreted' differently (i.e. in reverse).
2) There are many single threaded applications on those charts
3) Even if there weren't, Intel graced us with a dual core Pentium D with which we can compare results

Be mature enough to admit that you were wrong, or keep whining about trivialities, it won't change the fact that Core 2 Duo packs some serious punch and is *the* clear choice where speed is a concern for a new CPU currently. Large cache single core Xeon is not.

Today ,clock speed doesn't mean much anymore.
What FlameDuck says is true only when comparing Pentium D Dual Core with Single Core CPUs. Even there, Dual Core CPUs usually have more L2 cache, and L2 cache is more important than few hundred MHz.
There is a big difference between the old Pentium D Dual Core, Core Duo and the newest Core 2 Duo CPUs. They all have 2 cores but they are very different CPUs
If you can afford it, you should really go for Core 2 Duo ( or Core 2 Quad ). It has many advantages and for example, e6400 ( C2Duo at 2.4 GHz ) is faster than ALL Pentium D Dual Core Cpus, including the one running at 3.4 GHz.
This is true for both single and multithreaded applications.
The main advantage of C2Duo over Dual Core is that C2Duo's L2 cache is available in whole to both cores. Thermal performances are also much much better, 1066Mhz is better than 800 etc.

Here is some benchmark with several games that shows that higher speed doesn't mean better performance in games :
http://www.bcchardware.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=2869&Itemid=40&limit=1&limitstart=0

But your best bet is to post some simple B3D test that uses mostly CPU and ask for feedback on FPS :)

Benchmarks are seldomly, by their very nature, conclusive.

Here you go:

Sure, whatever.

Today, clock speed means the same thing it's always meant. The number of pulses an oscillator emits every second.

First of all, Dual Cores typically share that L2 cache. Secondly, whether a cache is useful at all, depends entirely on how cache friendly your algorithm is. If it isn't a cache friendly program (which games traditionally aren't) then you need a ridiculous amount of cache, or you'll actually take a performance hit (which explains the Pentium Extreme Edition).

As far as cache is concerned: the Intel Core 2 Duo uses shared L2 cache -- I picked the E6600 myself, primarily because it has 4MB of cache. Even if all you run is a big singlethreaded app and the 2nd core isn't doing anything, that still means 4MB of L2 available. that's a whole lot more than most of the older single core CPU's have available.
The AMD X2's don't share cache, so while pretty nice CPU's you have a penalty in that area -- one core sitting idle means that you essentially waste half of your caching ability as well.

Even though my new core 2 Duo E6600 runs at 'just' 2.4GHz, I notice a massive speed improvement over my older AMD Athlon 2800+ (single core) which ran at 2.21 GHz. The cache difference is massive though, and the speed increase is substantially higher than the 10% difference in MHz might lead you to believe.
The cheaper Pentium D's, on the other hand are junk. they were just a stop-gap measure for Intel to release while AMD was killing them with the dual core AMD CPU's and intel wasn't even close to having the Core 2 line ready for production.

(Core 2 Duo is based on the older Pentium 3 Mobile architecture, while the Pentium D is based around the Pentium 4. the P4 was a step backwards from the P3 mobiles in that the mobile chips had a much shorter pipeline and was much more power efficient (=cooler as well) than the P4 designs ever were.