8800GTX vs. 2900XT, Duo-Core vs. Quad Core
- Thread starter DraKon2k
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8800 GTX is faster and more expensive than the HD 2900 XT.
Quad core has four cores while duo only has two. The more the better. And I heard Intel is cutting the prices next month.
Quad core has four cores while duo only has two. The more the better. And I heard Intel is cutting the prices next month.
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Heh, well he already knows that.
I think he'd prefer more specific information as for what performs better in what games.
In this case we already know that a quad-core CPU has a huge impact on the Source engine (it seems the framerate tends to multiply by two compared to a E6600), on MAX-FX (Alan Wake) and Crysis.
And that the HD2900XT is the biggest bang for the buck.
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Tomshardware cpu & gpu charts might come in handy for this sort of information !
Thanks !
Thanks !
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Quad Cores will only give you a serious performance boost in titles optimized for multiple cores. Those titles are few (can count them on one hand). Even windows applications that support quad cores are fairly rare. I would think twice about paying twice or thrice for a quad core over a dual core which in most cases would give you very decent performance. Also, quad cores develop a lot more heat and requires better cooling to run and are generally more dififcult to OC, not because they ain't clockable, but because they are just freakin' hot. A lot of mobo's/chipsets also have quad core issues, including many of the 680i boards released. If yer picking a quaddie, better go for one of the intel chipset mobos, thus limiting you to one gfx (no SLI).
The primary use for quadcores are for servers which run multiple applications/threads and specialized software that can utilize multiple cores better. They are not per se gamer cpu's, altho a lot of people have bought them and buy them to have the shiniest little chip in the street to show off. In the future quaddies will no doubt be much more common as software generally "learn" to take advantage of them. Unfortunately, the future is not here now
If you're still serious about a quadcore, take a look at the latest Intel Xeon series, which are the "business" version of the same (socket 775 that is) quaddie chips you're looking at atm. They can be found at somewhat lower prices and should be identical.
/DFN
The primary use for quadcores are for servers which run multiple applications/threads and specialized software that can utilize multiple cores better. They are not per se gamer cpu's, altho a lot of people have bought them and buy them to have the shiniest little chip in the street to show off. In the future quaddies will no doubt be much more common as software generally "learn" to take advantage of them. Unfortunately, the future is not here now
If you're still serious about a quadcore, take a look at the latest Intel Xeon series, which are the "business" version of the same (socket 775 that is) quaddie chips you're looking at atm. They can be found at somewhat lower prices and should be identical.
/DFN
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I would wait a bit, the quad core Q6600 will drop in half the current price in a month or 2!! So for the price of an E6600 you can get a Quad core version!
Supreme Commander will use all cores of your quad
Plus you will get better multitasking - how about have a torrent running, while you play a game, and maybe encoding a DVD at the same time/ One app on each core...
plus you will be future proofed for a good few years with a quad core
Supreme Commander will use all cores of your quad
Plus you will get better multitasking - how about have a torrent running, while you play a game, and maybe encoding a DVD at the same time/ One app on each core...
plus you will be future proofed for a good few years with a quad core
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Every known Unreal Engine 3.0 powered game:
- Aliens — (2009) Gearbox Software
- America's Army 3.0 — (2007) US Army
- APB — (2008) Webzen
- Black Powder Red Earth - (2007) Echelon Studios
- Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway — (2007) Gearbox Software
- BioShock - (2007) Irrational Games
- BlackSite: Area 51 — (2007) Midway Austin
- Elveon — (2007) 10tacle Studios
- Fatal Inertia — (2007) Koei
- Frontlines: Fuel of War — (2008) Kaos Studios
- Fury — (2007) Auran
- Gears of War — (2006) Epic Games
- Halo Wars — (TBA) Ensemble Studios
- Huxley — (2007) Webzen Games
- The Last Remnant — (2008) Square Enix
- Lineage III — (TBA) NCsoft
- Lost Odyssey — (2007) Mistwalker
- Mass Effect — (2007) BioWare
- Medal of Honor: Airborne — (2007) Electronic Arts
- Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia — (2007) Artificial Studios
- RoboBlitz — (2006) Naked Sky Entertainment
- Rogue Warrior: Black Razor - (2007) Bethesda Softworks
- Stargate Worlds — (2007) Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment
- Stranglehold — (2007) Midway Chicago
- Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas — (2006) Ubisoft
- Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction - (2007) Ubisoft
- Too Human — (2007) Silicon Knights
- Turok — (2007) Propaganda Games
- Unreal Tournament 3 — (2007) Epic Games
- Upcoming Mortal Kombat Game — (Unknown) Midway Games
- The Wheelman — (2007) Midway Games
- HEI$T — (2007) InXile Entertainment
- Various upcoming Sega titles will utilize the Unreal Engine
Then there is Source engine:
- Counter-Strike: Source
- Day of Defeat: Source
- Half-Life: Source
- Half-Life 2
- Half-Life 2 Episodes (One, Two and Three)
- Portal
- Team Fortress 2
- Alien Swarm: Infested
- The Crossing
- Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
- Deep 6
- DinoHunters
- Garry's Mod
- The History Channel's ShootOut! The Game
- Kuma\War 2
- Left 4 Dead
- Natural Selection 2
- Postal 3 (PC and Xbox 360)
- Prime
- SiN Episodes
- The Ship
- They Hunger: Lost Souls
- Twilight War: After the Fall (production resumed)
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
- Untitled Nexon Corporation game
- Untitled Threewave Software game
But most will.
Then there is GTA IV (Rockstar said in a magazine that if it comes it will have multi-threading support), CryENGINE2 (Crysis, unknown CryTek IP), Alan Wake, etc.
The Doom 3 engine (Doom 3, Quake IV, Prey, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, etc) also have multi-threading support, although it's not such of a big difference yet.
id promised it will be more optimized for Quake Wars though.
And of course most games in the future will be multi-threaded. Even some old Quake 3 engine powered games support multi-CPU, which is somewhat similar.
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It isn't stated officially yes, but there is somewhat improvement in FPS (R6 Vegas).
Probably because Unreal Engine 3.0 is built for multi-threaded rendering.
At least that was on a QX6700.
RoboBlitz, I don't know haven't got experience with that. But I think it would help there aswell.
I think that's because they want to increase PhysX PPU sales.
Anyway the PhysX API in the game (or embedded in the engine actually), does use multi-core though.
Same for GRAW and GRAW2. Those games aren't multi-core supporting, though you can clearly notice the difference in-game.
Kynapse AI, which is used in lots of games (atm mostly Unreal Engine 3.0 games) definately benefits from dual-core and even more in quad-core.
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Nah, I prefer to believe in real-life performance increases/decreases.Yoshi said that R6 Vegas doesn't support dual core processors in any way
Believe it.
In games like Armed Assault it doesn't do jack sh*t though.
Hell! It seems to be even slower then a E6700!
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Are the Core 2 Quad-CPUs price-reduced as well(in july)?
and is the quad core Q6600 as fast as the E6700?
and is the quad core Q6600 as fast as the E6700?
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Intel are bringing a new batch of CPUs which use a 1333mhtz FSB up from the 1066 in the current Core 2 CPU
That's probbaly why the price is going down, the Q6600 is the one with the largest price drop. I guess Intel wants a bigger market share of quads going around
You can see that there will be a quad core Q6700 to replace the Q6600 price wise, while the Q6600 drops half the price!
The Q6600 is the same speed as a E6600 when running as a single or dual core, but twice as fast when running at all 4 cores, so it can be much faster than the E6700, just depends on what program your running. You can off course overclock it pretty easily as all Core 2 CPUs overclock well on the stock fan and heatsink - you can get past E6700 speeds easily, even as high as 3 gigahertz, so into E6800 speeds, and that's with 4 cores!
Just make sure you get good quality ram, motherboard and powersupply and overclocking will be a piece of cake. Asus motherboard, Corsair XMS ram and HX620 powersupply and you can't go wrong. If you get an aftermarket CPU heatsink like a Tuniq Tower and a good quality case with good air flow you can get as high as 3.2+ gighertz, and 3.0 will be no sweat at all..that would be way faster than any CPU you can buy now!
Like I said future proofed for a good few years
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I could get my E6700 processor to 3,6 GHz, though my stock heatsink and fan didn't cut it. Temperatures went way beyond 60c. Now I'm getting myself a watercooler ;3
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When you put up a list like that its a few more than what you can count on one hand. Still, a lot of those titles are (IMHO) minor/not very interesting titles. To confirm your suspicion, Vampire: The Masquerade are basically "abandoned", i.e. dev shot down in flames.
There will no doubt be a number of independent game studios doing what has become more and more common recently, developing their own gfx engine instead of licencing the source engine, unreal x.x or one of ID's. I highly doubt all of these have or will have the time/ressources to build in multicore support as well. Each year we see about 500 comercial titles for the PC alone being released (not counting "free" mods). At the moment probably about 10 % of them are multicore enhanced, that is, able to take advantage of multiple cores in one or other way.
This percentage will no doubt grow, but it will take quite some time. 3-4 years I'm guessing myself. If you want a quadcore, buy all means, go ahead and buy, I'm just saying people should be aware that there's not really that much to gain from it for the average gamer. Of course, with the considerable price dumps comming up, its another discussion. They are still some time into the future.
/DFN
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True.
However, most popular commercial titles will definately have a bigger percentage of multi-threading support.
Not only the games that use Reality Engine, Unreal Engine 3.0, Gamebryo (which should have multi-threading support soon), Quake 3 engine, Source engine, Doom 3 engine, CryEngine 2, etc.
Also in home-grown engines like MAX-FX (Alan Wake), RAGE engine (GTA IV).
Ok, at the moment it's less then 10%, probably more like 1-2%
But if you're looking at the near future, say October-November this year there will be loads of multi-threaded games. Most of them being popular games like:
Half-Life 2: Episode Two (incl. Team Fortress 2, Portal and automatically older Source-powered Steam games will be updated aswell), Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Medal of Honor: Airborne, Crysis, etc.
I heard that Armed Assault was going to be patched so the AI would benefit from multi-threading processors aswell, although I can't confirm it and I'm sceptical about it.
Supreme Commander is already patched for multi-threading support.
And videocard drivers seem to benefit from it aswell, aswell as the operating system itself, dividing threads over multiple tasks.
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No doubt. In the long run quaddies and whatever is next up (eightcores? sixteencores?) the future. Even then, do not forget that there is a considerabel leap in technology and theoretical possibilities just moving up from a singlecore to a dualcore. With a measly dual core your OS get the chance to offload system processes etc on the one core while the other one does the heavy job. Yet, a lot of CPU power get wasted due to the lack of proper software support. This problem just increases with quaddies. Your average dell or hp or whatever mainstream computer will for the next few years typically contain a dualcore CPU, and even how much they dump the prices on the quaddies, I doubt they'll willingly let go of dualcores as source of income as they are cheaper to produce and can be sold at more competetive prices for a good while to come. I'm thinking that the majority of software will not be written to take fully advantage of quaddcores before quaddies become mainstream processors.
Generally speaking I've got a feeling that multicore cpu setups have been some of a hype, ever since that consumer AMD mobo some 7-8 years ago that could run two CPUs. That quake had multi cpu support almost a decade ago was fun and interesting from a techie perspective, but who the heck had a dual cpu setup back then? 1 % of the players? Probably less
They've had all this time moving up, planning and designing engines/games and other software that really takes advantage, yet this process didn't even start before the first mainstream dualcore and quaddcores came fairly recently. Take another example of how slow the industry is/can be. There is no doubt whatsoever that 64bit computing and OS'es is the future and that simply in order to allow proper memory mapping above 2-3 gb you'll need a 64bit OS (32bit OS'es theoretically supports 4gb memory, this is a truth with serious modifications, in most hardware setups they don't support more than about 2gb properly). Knowing how fast memory demands have increased the last 10 years, from the typical 32-64mb setup in '97 to the 2048mb setup today, one has to ask oneself, why the heck ain't they just jumping straight to 64bit OS'es instead of going from 32bit XP to 32bit Vista? We've been at the 32bit stage for ages already. Again the industry is painstakingly slow, particularly the software part of it, because since the first mainstream dualcores popped up, 64bit computing have been generally possible.
Personally I just want to get to the 64bit stage as quickly as possible, because then that part of the development finaly grind to halt. 64bit OS'es can adress up to 128 gb of memory (at least I think it was that much), which is an amount we'll need maybe 15 years of development, or even more to "fill". I just hate to walk on the crumbling edge of an outdated technology
I have yet to be truly amazed by the practical benefit of more than one core. I don't doubt the hard facts and the theory, I'm just still waiting for the technology in terms of software to catch up with the hardware and produce solutions that do any good for us Joe Sixpacks.
/DFN
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It's been that way for as long as I've been PC gaming. The new hardware comes out then waits for years while the software finally comes out to make use of it and by that time the price of the hardware has come down to sane levels. Cutting edge technology is mostly just for extreme enthusiasts who want the latest & greatest regardless if it can be immediately used fully or not.
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