Will games really use all 4 cores?

[Shane]

This month's game informer lists it as 360 only, but they will probably port it over. They are probably doing that to reduce the amount of piracy for the initial sales since the 360 is harder to pirate games on.

Oh nah we dont want another port....we all know what ported games tend to be like

 

[Scubie67]

Yeah from some of the charts I have seen ,its more worthwhile now to go quad ( maybe a couple of years ago you could make the dual arguement,I guess).Thats why back in Jan. when I rebuilt a new rig I went ahead and got an I7 instead of a dual core,especially since I tend to keep a comp. till its ancient.My old computer was a P4 ,Agp That I had about 6 1/2 years and it was struggling with the new games even on low settings.LOL.

 

[tlarkin]

Yeah from some of the charts I have seen ,its more worthwhile now to go quad ( maybe a couple of years ago you could make the dual arguement,I guess).Thats why back in Jan. when I rebuilt a new rig I went ahead and got an I7 instead of a dual core,especially since I tend to keep a comp. till its ancient.My old computer was a P4 ,Agp That I had about 6 1/2 years and it was struggling with the new games even on low settings.LOL.

Well really your OS is the core of what would take advantage of a multi core system.

For example, I have an iMac at work which is my work desktop. On my iMac every day I have the following running:

ARD admin
Email client
Web browser
up to 10 terminal windows at any given time
Casper Remote
Casper Admin
Composer
Excel
Word
iChat
iTunes
server tools (WGM, Server monitor, server admin, etc)
Passenger
TextWrangler


All of these apps tend to almost kill my machine as it only has 1 gig of RAM and a C2D processor. However, for how low my specs are it handles them rather nicely. I mean I have them all running at once all day all the time every day. I try to avoid using Excel as much as possible as I HATE spread sheets, but I gotta use it.

If I tried running that on a Windows box with 1 gig of RAM you could say forget about it. So not only is multi core processors important for performance it is also important how you OS utilizes them in every day usage.

I hear Windows 7 is way better at memory management though, so I will have to wait to see how it pans out.

 

[Scubie67]

Well really your OS is the core of what would take advantage of a multi core system.

For example, I have an iMac at work which is my work desktop. On my iMac every day I have the following running:

ARD admin
Email client
Web browser
up to 10 terminal windows at any given time
Casper Remote
Casper Admin
Composer
Excel
Word
iChat
iTunes
server tools (WGM, Server monitor, server admin, etc)
Passenger
TextWrangler


All of these apps tend to almost kill my machine as it only has 1 gig of RAM and a C2D processor. However, for how low my specs are it handles them rather nicely. I mean I have them all running at once all day all the time every day. I try to avoid using Excel as much as possible as I HATE spread sheets, but I gotta use it.

If I tried running that on a Windows box with 1 gig of RAM you could say forget about it. So not only is multi core processors important for performance it is also important how you OS utilizes them in every day usage.

I hear Windows 7 is way better at memory management though, so I will have to wait to see how it pans out.

I dont have all those apps on my computer so Are you saying a dual core in my situation would work just as well?

 

[tlarkin]

I dont have all those apps on my computer so Are you saying a dual core in my situation would work just as well?

I am saying that multiple core hardware is fantastic, but only if the OS can properly multi task between the two. A good trial would be to build two identical systems 1 with a core 2 duo and one with a core 2 quad and then seeing how they perform.

Some software will not take advantage but the OS should always take advantage balancing out tasks to each core.

If I had a single core processor my machine would run even worse, and believe me I can push this little guy to the limit and have crashed it a few times, but for the most part I am pretty impressed it is running all of that with only 1 gig of RAM.

 

[Scubie67]

I am saying that multiple core hardware is fantastic, but only if the OS can properly multi task between the two. A good trial would be to build two identical systems 1 with a core 2 duo and one with a core 2 quad and then seeing how they perform.

Some software will not take advantage but the OS should always take advantage balancing out tasks to each core.

If I had a single core processor my machine would run even worse, and believe me I can push this little guy to the limit and have crashed it a few times, but for the most part I am pretty impressed it is running all of that with only 1 gig of RAM.

K, I see now,thx.