How much faster are current day games / apps with a dual core?
- Thread starter phonywish
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Jakal
Tech Monkey
Dual core is very much a logical choice these days. You get twice the operating power out of a single chip. For instance, you can run a game one one core and at the same time run your antivirus or any other program on the second core. Speed is relevant to the core. You won't slow down your half-life 2 game by running mulitple processes because it gets the full processing power of one core. While, the other processes are handled by the second core. If you're thinking about getting an X2 or Dual Core Opty, it's a wise choice.
I don't run a dual-core CPU myself, but the thing I like is that they make your computing experience smoother. As Jakal said games themselves aren't fully optimised for dual-core just yet, but when you factor in that your antivirus and other background services can run on one core and your game on the other then that is going to make it run a little faster. Not to mention that if you multitask at all, the programs are going to run super-smoothly as if they were running by themselves.
So dual-core is worth going for right at this minute because of reasons such as those; when you factor in that more and more applications are going to be optimised to take advantage of it in the future then it is a no-brainer going for a dual-core CPU if you are buying a new computer.
So dual-core is worth going for right at this minute because of reasons such as those; when you factor in that more and more applications are going to be optimised to take advantage of it in the future then it is a no-brainer going for a dual-core CPU if you are buying a new computer.
living_joke
Obliviot
Would not get dual core at this point. Instead would wait until they iron out all the bugs first.
living_joke said:
I wouldn't wait at all.. the bugs are not in the processors but the software. I love my Dual Core rig only because I can do two things at once without risking performance loss. You can literally stress the hell out of one core and play a game at the same time. It's great.
Jakal
Tech Monkey
That's not as efficeint as it sounds. If you were to run the data parallel you'd have to split the processes. Then the data would have to be able to coincide with each other while it's being processed. Then put back together to form the single thread. With processing speeds these days, leaving one core to handle the majority of work, and the other to handle the smaller loads is probably the best way.
living_joke
Obliviot
Rob Williams said:
But if there are bugs in the software, then I would wait for them to iron those bugs out first. I would wait atleast 1 year. There will be a lot more software that better supports dual core by that time.
Should make a decision based on price. Dual cores are relatively new in the marketplace. Prices will be going down on dual cores as competition increases between AMD and Intel on dual core processors. If you buy a dual core processor too soon, you may spend too much, while a little later the price may make a big drop.
yeah, some games do have slightly performance hits with dual core. The problem is current games are not fully designed to take the full advantage of the dual core. A lot of them just spread the demand over 2 core but not taking the full dual core's power. I think next gen's cpu will be mroe dual core friendly as it seems like dual core is the future.
PUTALE said:
Dual core is definitely the future.
There is a light speed limit to consider too when manufacturing chips. The light speed limit applies to chip manufacturing because the speed that electrons can flow thru wires is limited to the same speed as light. Eventually chip manufacturers will run into the light speed limit in addition to other quantum problems when manufacturing single core chips. Dual core lets the chips manufacturers continue to produce higher speed chips but spread it out across two cores and avoid potential manafacturing problems with constantly trying to get faster speed on a single core.