ultimate multicore thread

i have searched through all the treads and still i would like if possible, people that have LOCKON experience on both dual and quad to state details like what was the the CPU behavior during Lockon (how many cores active, what was runing on which etc) and stats or experience from performance differences (including TIR implementations etc)

How is it in the multicore field for BS ?

You're not going to get any performance gain whatsoever by using a quad vs a 2-core with DCS or LO/LOFC.

Go for 2 cores with more GHz instead.

^^ That is, if you primarily plan to play DCS with your new rig ;)

I don't know of too many games that'll run better on 4 cores instead of 2 with more GHZ ;)

On same Ghz i think FS-X and Thirdwire do better on more cores ?

Whats the best practice to your experience with LO/DCS, to set affinity on one core, on two cores, or let affinity to auto ?

To your expert estimation from Q6600 @3Ghz to i7 860 @3-3.2Ghz would there be a noticeable improvement ? (considering i guess also the higher mem bandwidth and actual difference between DDR2 1066 & ~ 1600 DDR3)

As far as my own tests have indicated, memory is relatively irrelevant - though I have only been able to change it's frequency, not it's bandwidth, but with faster RAM giving absolutely zero change in performance even when running on a 4GHz processor I don't think you should expect too much from the change in memory. It's still the CPU that will be your bottleneck.

That said, you might very well have a better experience since you are going more than clock-for-clock to a much more modern architecture. If it's worth the expense I don't know, at least if DCS and LockOn are your primary objectives, but there will be a minor improvement in DCS and possibly major improvements in other applications.

If I had your system, I'd probably purchase either a newer generation Q or an E, and overclock those, or overclock the existing Q6600 you have there. It really is mainly clock frequency that matters here, even if the i7's are slightly better on a per-clock count when used towards DCS.

Well I cant tell the difference because never had duals. But when I bought my current machine there werent many CPU's at stock speed with significantly higher MHz anyway. So when I got my quad I cranked it as high as my MOBO could muster.

FS-X perfromance seems to be affected by mem badnwidth.

Should we consider as advantages making some difference, the hyper thread (if this has any application in the case of LO/DCS) features of the new i7 & i5 and intel's turbo boost for single thread applications?

I don't know of too many games that'll run better on 4 cores instead of 2 with more GHZ ;)

Rise of Flight, for example runs roughly 50% faster with 4 cores than with 2. Just an example, though. FSX also benefits from more cores.

You're not going to get any performance gain whatsoever by using a quad vs a 2-core with DCS or LO/LOFC.

 

Go for 2 cores with more GHz instead.

Then what was the point of DCSMax or the implementation of CPU affinity in 1.0.1?

Affinity isn't really a matter of being multithreaded, it's about designating the cores that the process will be wanting to run on. Having affinity on multiple cores allows a modern operating system (like Vista and 7, not XP) to move the thread to a less busy core. It isn't multithreading, but if you have the thread on an already "half-filled" core you'll obviously get less performance than if the operating system is allowed to move it to another, "almost-empty" core.

Maximus_G ran some very very extensive tests that quite conclusively showed that there were great benefits to having affinity to two cores instead of one, but none in having affinity to more than two cores.

What we are dealing with here is basically asset management in the operating system, and with this kind of use there is no added benefit to more than two cores. So the "point" of DCSmax and the affinity fix in 1.0.1 was to enable the process to move between cores at all, something that it didn't do otherwise (though you could manually set affinity on the process each time, though that was tedious work to do every single time you start a new mission).

"Why go for quad?" Here's your answer---> IT MAKES YOUR PC FUTURE PROOF! Well for a couple of years at least.:music_whistling:

The longer I sit and seeth about it the more I think that multicore is a bunch of marketing bullshit as far as the home user is concerned. Oh, I still like my Q9550 but I question the need for multicore CPU architecture when it's been soo poorly utilized.

It isn't "poorly utilized" per se. The main benefit is that it allows the operating system to perform a lot of load balancing. An example would be the old bane of computer gaming - an antivirus that starts performing a scan while you are playing. That would often completely ruin a gaming session - especially if you are playing online and don't quite have the freedom to pause the game. In the case of a multicore processor that very heavy process can be given it's own core by the operating system and thereby have very little effect on your game performance (with the exception of HDD load times).

Similarly, with people having reported 30 to 70 percent performance gains in DCS 1.0 through the "affinity tweak", that is a pretty massive gain in spite of the process in question being singlethreaded. Multicore processors are very very good - especially since attempts at raising the capacity of singlecore processors ran into serious problems with diminishing returns. It's just that the one thing that they are mainly good at today is when you have many tasks running simultaneously. Which you do. Here's my system at this time:

Applications running: 2. (Steam and Chrome.)

User Processes: 26

System Processes: 41 (excluding the idle process)

So while most of those processes aren't actually doing much, at those times when one of them has to kick in and perform a task the system can take a quick look at the processor loads and decide which core is best placed to handle it without causing issues for other processes (like dcs.exe). This is also where the good old magic of the multicore processor wins over the old multi-processor design, since the multicores can have shared L2 cache (or, in the case of the newest Intel and AMD - L3) thereby allowing a process to move from core to core due to loadbalancing without having to move all the related memory between the L2 caches. (This is one of the issues with older AMD multicores - they had separate L2's which makes loadbalancing less efficient.)

Similarly, in a multicore design all those extra-programs we tend to have active (like TrackIR, Ventrilo/TS etcetera) can be made to never steal processor cycles from dcs.exe.

The issue is simply that multithreading an application is very very complicated and therefore costs a lot of money through longer development time and the need for more thorough Q/A. More and more games are becoming multithreaded (like Rise of Flight), but this takes time simply because it is complex. (Though there are types of applications that can be easily multithreaded - for example Folding@Home's simulations of atoms in protein molecules are very easy to split up wherefore it's not such a big job for them to split it up into hundreds of cores on your graphics card or Tesla cGPU.)

"Why go for quad?" Here's your answer---> IT MAKES YOUR PC FUTURE PROOF! Well for a couple of years at least.:music_whistling:

Yeah, until we all start drooling over those 12-core processors that have been demonstrated. :P (Though they often cheat in the same way the i7's do in order to "look" like 8-core, and are actually 6-core processors.)

Very true, the tech is increasing in preformance it seems every week a new CPU is out and the one I bought is another $20 cheaper...:doh:

Aye, the trick is to gear one's purchase to what one expects to do with the hardware.

In my own case I decided on the e8500 since almost all applications I use are single-threaded, wherefore my gains from the quads are diminished enough that the price difference mattered - especially when coupled with the higher clock per euro. If I performed heavy-duty movie editing or was seriously into photoshop I would have gone quadcore (and besides, anyone able to afford a copy of Photoshop won't cry about an extra 100 euro for the processor). Also, I don't tend to have a lot of background tasks running when I play, so I don't need the luxury of being able to encode video on a core while showing Panzer how a tailless Ka-50 can still dogfight. :P

A friend of mine however did purchase an i7 system as soon as they came out, since what he's doing is mainly testrunning research software he's coding for universities, where he not only needs a bare minimum of 16GB of high-speed RAM - he also needs all the processing power he can get. He calculated that a system like mine (even if it had the RAM) wouldn't be able to run those simulations within deadlines even if it was left completely to that task the entire time.

So it's all a question of figuring out what programs you need and if they are geared to take advantage of your hardware.

That makes sense, I went to what was the most bang for the buck! :) I couldn't be happier on my purchase.

whats the dcs "afinity tweak" , "dcsmax" etc ? And remind me please what is the best affinity policy for lockon.exe ? (assign 2, 1, 3 or 4 cores?)

Accidently DCS was released with affinity set only to core 1.

DCSMax corrected that by manually changing this affinity to more cores when available.

Patch 101 removed that problem, so DCSMax is no longer needed to enable DCS to use multiple cores.

You don't need DCSMax for LockOn.

Of course you can still use DCSMax for the other nice options available, like skin-configurations, but the core-feature, overwriting the affinity is no longer needed.

- so when dcs runs now its automatically assigned to all available cores like most typical executables for windows right ?

- when running lockon.exe , what is the best practice manually from windows affinity management , to leave it assigned on all cores or assign only one or two ?

- so when dcs runs now its automatically assigned to all available cores like most typical executables for windows right ?

 

- when running lockon.exe , what is the best practice manually from windows affinity management , to leave it assigned on all cores or assign only one or two ?

1. Yes, it DCS:BS 101c is automatically assigned to all available cores.

2. AFAIK LockOn is automatically assigned to all available cores as well - no need to edit affinity.