Gadgetory

this is it the final verdict we've tested one core with one thread one core with hyper-threading a triple core scenario but this this is golden for those of you tuning in for the first time a welcome aboard we've been disabling cores on hyper threads in an effort to scrutinize CPU core scaling and modern and popular triple-a titles the only exception being csgo you can start here if you're interested in watching from the beginning or stick around for everything to be thrown at you all at once although there are a few pretty funny parts in part 1 let's quickly review the test bench it's that right there my own personal rig for every scenario you're about to see 16 gigabytes of ddr4 clock to 3000 megahertz was used not the RAM you're seeing now mind you an asus strix rog gtx 1070 running its stock and an Intel Core i7 6700 K whose cores and hyper threading capabilities will be enabled and disabled starting from one core and one thread all the way up to four cores and eight threads the CPU has also been held at 4.4 gigahertz throughout for the sake of consistency remember we're doing this purely from a scientific standpoint manipulating any other variables in this experiment would be pointless as the only thing we're trying to do here is determine the number of cores necessary to game at a fairly demanding resolution 1440p in game settings were liberally tuned as you'll see in the graphs it's about that time actually here they are first in the list as usual the well balanced PC port GTA 5 at max settings and no anti-aliasing to spare the GPU of unwanted stress we see a fairly odd trend yes as core count increases the framerate does as well but that's as far as it goes hyper fitting really doesn't help out grand theft auto I first noticed this in my i3 versi 5 video that you can check out right here long story short it's the physical cores that matter in a game like this by the way the C stands for core and the T stands for thread so if the thread count is double the core count it means that hyper threading was enabled in that scenario now then jumping from say a Pentium to an i3 won't make much of a difference in a game like grand theft auto 5 I've actually confirmed that with those physical processors as well and yes I know level 3 cache varies but it won't significantly impact overall frame rates in a well optimized game remember in this case it's constant as is clock speed for that matter but cpu's these scenarios represent will vary slightly CPU clock speed doesn't change very much in game either believe it or not and I've proven that in a series right here on to City skylines notably very CPU intensive it definitely shows and you know what else shows the frame rate increase when hyper threading is enabled hence the rather linear trend here what's likely going on here city skylines is pushing a large amount of parallel data to the CPU in which case an adept scheduler and a hyper threaded environment would surely help the more threads the more data can be processed simultaneously if GTA v is in hyper threading optimized it won't know how to send more information to the dispatch and schedulers Cities is doing quite the opposite simply pushing as much data as needed through the pipelines to be later processed and rendered by the GPU ashes that the singularity is very bizarre in another way here essentially any core account above 2 is ideal what you're seeing towards the top is something often referred to as the law of diminishing returns we discuss it extensively in economics at some point adding another stimulant in this case a physical core changes almost nothing and it shows up like a brick wall at the three core boundary another interesting note here is how much better the hyper-threaded triple core simulation performed over the quad core non hyper threaded scenario when a game was optimized in such a way that it benefits from hyper threads a CPU with more of them should in theory trump a CPU with less of them pass a certain point regardless of how many physical cores there are we didn't see this in cities but we do definitely see it here let's throw it back for a second csgo how do you think this one will react when more cores are thrown at it well believe it or not a lot like GTA 5 in fact in a few instances particularly above the three core boundary hyper-threading appears to hurt the overall framerate the reasons range far and wide but one theory involves parallelism if csgo sends information to the CPU in a linear fashion then enabling hyper threading will only stress the decoder and instruction pipeline at this point I really can't avoid it let's use the Linus analogy if hyper threading is a bit like eating with two hands as he says in his tech wiki video but you're chewing and swallowing at a rate slower than either hand is preparing food you're just wasting energy using two hands instead of one which might even be able to accomplish the task faster now that you're not using additional energy on the second hand it's an oversimplification yes but if the scheduler has data ready to be processed for the core demands it without hyper-threading then what good is hyper-threading we don't see this trend in too many modern games but csgo is definitely a victim here you could even make the case for GTA 5 check out the full hyper-threading video from tech wiki in this video's description let's move on total war Warhammer oh is this one strange so it's a very CPU dependent game pretty much like every total war game in existence but this one falls into that category for a different reason it doesn't need many cores it just needs a few fast ones check the sound the difference between a single hyper-threaded core and a full-fledged i7 6700 K in terms of averages equates to just a couple of frames sure minimums are significantly lower we see these flattened out of the three core boundary but the average framerate trend is a testament to differing strategies when it comes to game coding Total War took a different route than most that's for sure last up is battlefield one beta I had to test this one first chronologically because it recently closed for the upcoming official release as it's a relatively new game these scores are subject to change and my benchmarking methods were admittedly not the smoothest but again above the three core boundary there isn't much of a difference in terms of neither minimums nor averages stay tuned for revisited benchmarks once the full game does go on sale so what do you think of the grand finale folks did anything catch you by surprise let me know in the comments below be sure to give this video a thumbs up if you thought it was cool give it a thumbs down you feel it can be opposite or if you have no idea what you're doing here be sure to click Subscribe but if you have already a not really know what I'm gonna do next maybe something about the iPhone se in the Apple watch it severed even something about a mag I also have a few head-to-head mashups between the MacBook and things like the XPS 13 and the razor blade stealth I get my hands on either of those I'll definitely have those videos uploaded this is science studio stay tuned thanks for learning with this Oh