CPU Upgrade

[Lt.Dan]

I'm currently running an Athlon 64 3000+ in a socket 939 motherboard.  I'm considering eeking out some more performance by upgrading my CPU but before I do that would I actually gain anything for the money spent?

Other hardware
GeForce 7800 GS graphics card (last of the AGP cards)
2Gb memory

(And yes, I'm aware that the 939 has gone the way of the dodo)

[Trippy]

If your motherboard supports dual-core you might see the biggest benefit from switching to that depending on your application usage patterns. Otherwise going from 1.8 GHz to, say, 2.4 GHz is an okay bump if you are willing to spend the $60 or so.

[Engels]

I did this, Dan, and to be honest, I should have just bit the bullet and spent the higher amount to get a Core 2 Duo chip & required motherboard and memory. Yes, there is improvement from a AMD 64 3000+ to say, the top end of the AMD 939 socket type, but its still getting behind the curve for many games.

[Yegolev]

Dual-core smells like apple pie.

[Baldrake]

Are games beginning to take advantage of dual cores now? It isn't at all obvious that a game designed for and tested on a uniprocessor would perform better on a dual.

[Yegolev]

It won't, but other things that might run should do so on the other core.

[Baldrake]

Sorry, let me be more precise. I buy your argument that it's nice to have a "spare" core for all the other crap running on your machine, but that's not what I meant.

Games are typically multithreaded even if they were designed for a single core uniprocessor.

If the game is moved to a multicore processor, having those threads running on different cores (with different latencies for inter-thread communication and different costs in thread switching) could cause the game to tank. For example, I did a trial of SWG a while back, and found it performed very poorly unless I forced it to run on a single core.

So I have one example of a game that runs worse on a dual core than single. Are there examples nowadays of games that work better if two cores are available?

[LK]

Yeah, but, come on.  SWG.  That's a real poor example to use as a good game to test Dual Cores on.

[Moaner]

It really depends on what you want to do.  I just upgraded my CPU to an AMD X2 4200+ for $50 and it was definitely worth it.  For things like TF2 and Hellgate I think we'll be fine.  If however you want to play UT and Crysis (among other stuff) I think your better off putting your money towards a completely new rig.

[Lt.Dan]

Upgrading to the next technology is going to mean buying a new computer - new MB, memory, PCIe graphics card, CPU, and potentially SATA drives.  I'd rather spend that money on a TV. 

A small upgrade for $50 might tide me over.

[Engels]

I guess it really depends on what you mean by 'tide over'. If you mean playing the latest and the greatest, I suspect even with an upgraded CPU your machine is probably gonna clunk about a bit. If you mean just getting a bit more speed for day to day useage and playing older games, then ya, $50 is totally worth it.

[Trippy]

Sorry, let me be more precise. I buy your argument that it's nice to have a "spare" core for all the other crap running on your machine, but that's not what I meant.

Games are typically multithreaded even if they were designed for a single core uniprocessor.

If the game is moved to a multicore processor, having those threads running on different cores (with different latencies for inter-thread communication and different costs in thread switching) could cause the game to tank. For example, I did a trial of SWG a while back, and found it performed very poorly unless I forced it to run on a single core.

So I have one example of a game that runs worse on a dual core than single. Are there examples nowadays of games that work better if two cores are available?

That problem has nothing to do with multithreading, it's an issue with the way Windows handles certain timing mechanisms when it moves a chunk of running code from one processor to another. It will happen in single-threaded apps as well. It shows up most often with the A64s but some of the old "HyperThreading" P4s can have this problem as well. There's a boot time parameter (/usepmtimer) and various patches from Microsoft and AMD that take care of this problem for all but a handful of programs like PlanetSide.

As for games that support duals CPUs all the major "platform" 3D engines (UE3, id, Source) support it now and others like Crysis, Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes, and so on do as well. On the MMORPG-side City of Heroes/City of Villains has been supporting it for a while now (still may be the only MMORPG that does). Not as many games benefit from quad CPUs, however.

[Falwell]

I actually was in a similar situation myself. Socket 939 board etc. I didn't feel like doing a full CPU / MB / RAM swap so I just went with the best 939 processor I could find. Which is the FX 60 dual core (or was). Nothing but good things to say about this processor, picked mine up for...130? I think it was from Tiger Direct.

The FX 60 is still plenty of processor to keep up with the top end games on the market if backed by enough GPU and RAM. Give her a try.

[Sky]

I think it was Gabe Newell who said they are throwing a lot of resources into making Source multicore-friendly, he didn't want to just optimize for dual-core or run the server on the second core and client on the first or whatever. So I'd imagine future Source-based games would be the place for the folks getting quad-core machines to look.

[Trippy]

That's correct. The latest Source engine (which TF2 should be using) can scale beyond 2 CPUs. There's a particle effects benchmark test that shows off how well the Source engine does on quad cores.