ArmA uses only one core!

[dmitri 0]

My arma uses at max 70 to 90% of my cpu after patching my hyper threading. I have a p4 3.4 ghz hyper threaded cpu.

That doesn't mean you're actually running ArmA using two threads, or any faster for that matter. Hyperthreading, even in an app optimized for two threads, won't increase performance by more than 30%. Seeing 70% percent usage just means you're running on a single thread (the remaining 30%, representing the second "processor"). There isn't a 50/50 split as with a true dual core. Single threaded apps will often run 1 to 3 percent slower on a hyperthreaded processor.

[sickboy 13]

Ummm it doesn't work that way. AMD64 X2 3800+ dualcore processor has two cores running at 1.8Ghz each. AMD64 3700+ singlecore processor (earlier 954 socket model) has 1 core at 2.0Ghz

Yet thanks to the new socket, extra cache etc. even the single core of X2 processor is faster than the single core of a AMD64 3700+

S939 = DDR1 Low Latency

SAM2 = DDR2 High Latency

Athlon cpu's love low latency, compared to speed in mhz.

You can have a single core with either 512kb or 1mb cache, as such what you say about X2 being faster per definition than a single core, with the single core being even 200mhz faster, is not true Cache doesn't make up greatly on Athlon cpu's as it does on Intel, but as said, you can aswell get a 1mb cache single core, as you can get a 2mb cache dual core

S939 cpu's single core are really not slower when you crank up the memory speed on S939, running DDR1 ~550mhz at 2.5-2-3-7 or something definatly kicks the butt of a SAM2, running DDR2 ~533/800 at latencies of 4-4-4-8 etc..

If you were talking about socket s754 compared to socket 939, then it's mainly the dual channel possibility, a little bit the extra cache, and of coarse the core revisions that are done later on the s939, that make it better, aswell as that there are no dual cores for s754 afaik

[Dwarden 1125]

it's not exactly true , newer revisions of AM2 CPUs paired with good DDR2 memory shoows same or faster perf than 939 socket ones with same MHz rating memory...

which is quite good job from AMD considering higher latency on DDR2

[Hammer Schultz 0]

If you were talking about socket s754 compared to socket 939, then it's mainly the dual channel possibility, a little bit the extra cache, and of coarse the core revisions that are done later on the s939, that make it better, aswell as that there are no dual cores for s754 afaik

Yeah I was talking about s754 vs. s939, a single core of X2 3800+ is atleast as fast as the core on X1 3700+ despite having lower mhz.

[sickboy 13]

it's not exactly true , newer revisions of AM2 CPUs paired with good DDR2 memory shoows same or faster perf than 939 socket ones with same MHz rating memory...

which is quite good job from AMD considering higher latency on DDR2

Okidoki, then that's something from the past months as I wasn't aware that newer revisions made up for it again, it's indeed a good job!

[Eidron 0]

I said dual cores are slower.. one core of a 4600 x2 is a 2300... and well, thats slow. at least compared to the faster single core cpu's.

Ummm it doesn't work that way. AMD64 X2 3800+ dualcore processor has two cores running at 1.8Ghz each. AMD64 3700+ singlecore processor (earlier 954 socket model) has 1 core at 2.0Ghz

Yet thanks to the new socket, extra cache etc. even the single core of X2 processor is faster than the single core of a AMD64 3700+

Im afraid you are a little off there. If you mean 939 the 3700+ clocks in at 2.2GHz. At socket 754 (This is the EXACT cpu I have btw) it clocks in at 2.4GHz, and my ArmA runs sweetly.

Upgrading to an E6600 soon hopefully.

[sickboy 13]

Upgrading to an E6600 soon hopefully.

Was thinking about going to core 2 aswell, but as I was reading that AMD will have reversed hyperthreading soon, I am thinking about to wait for AMD K8L design, either dual or quad, and take my advantage of spreading 1 thread over 2 or more cpu's, as such i'm not going to upgrade from Athlon 64 to Intel now, but probably just take a faster s939 cpu and wait how it turns out in 6-12 months when Intel Quad and AMD Quad are coming more into the market, while I hope this means also the introduction of reversed hyperthreading

Sorry for the slight-offtopic

[Eidron 0]

Upgrading to an E6600 soon hopefully.

Was thinking about going to core 2 aswell, but as I was reading that AMD will have reversed hyperthreading soon, I am thinking about to wait for AMD K8L design, either dual or quad, and take my advantage of spreading 1 thread over 2 or more cpu's, as such i'm not going to upgrade from Athlon 64 to Intel now, but probably just take a faster s939 cpu and wait how it turns out in 6-12 months when Intel Quad and AMD Quad are coming more into the market, while I hope this means also the introduction of reversed hyperthreading

Sorry for the slight-offtopic

Wasnt that something that the inquirer made up?

[Hammer Schultz 0]

I said dual cores are slower.. one core of a 4600 x2 is a 2300... and well, thats slow. at least compared to the faster single core cpu's.

Ummm it doesn't work that way. AMD64 X2 3800+ dualcore processor has two cores running at 1.8Ghz each. AMD64 3700+ singlecore processor (earlier 954 socket model) has 1 core at 2.0Ghz

Yet thanks to the new socket, extra cache etc. even the single core of X2 processor is faster than the single core of a AMD64 3700+

Im afraid you are a little off there. If you mean 939 the 3700+ clocks in at 2.2GHz. At socket 754 (This is the EXACT cpu I have btw) it clocks in at 2.4GHz, and my ArmA runs sweetly.

Upgrading to an E6600 soon hopefully.

Ah, I had the numbers wrong. I used to have s753 AMD64 3700+ and somehow I had the feeling it was 2.0Ghz.

Anyway, the main point remains. AMD64 X2 4600+ doesn't have two "2300+" cores in it, they are both 2.2Ghz (from the top of my head).

EDIT: don't wait for AMD's new K8L, from what I've read it's not an improvement over Intel's C2D, quite the opposite in fact especially in heat & noise generation.

[LT.INSTG8R 0]

I dont know whats wrong with your setups but mine has been using both cores from the get go and I did nothing to make it happen.

[Messiah 2]

thats possibly the coolest keyboard ever what is it?

[LT.INSTG8R 0]

Logitech G15

The App I am running is the latest version of Everest Ultimate, which basically gives me a blank rectangle that I can add any sort of sensor data Everest can pick up to the screen and name/move it about as I see fit.

Vent and TS have plugins as well and so does FRAPS. I dont run the overlay on the screen I see it on my G15. Some games even support it natively(most recent I can think of that I play is Red Orchestra) I also have a great little app for GTR2 that I can have my Speedo/Tach/ Lap info, Tires temps etc. I think this is the most useful piece if kit I have as far as "toys" go

Just disregard the low FPS I have since worked that issue out

[crashdome 3]

Upgrading to an E6600 soon hopefully.

Was thinking about going to core 2 aswell, but as I was reading that AMD will have reversed hyperthreading soon, I am thinking about to wait for AMD K8L design, either dual or quad, and take my advantage of spreading 1 thread over 2 or more cpu's, as such i'm not going to upgrade from Athlon 64 to Intel now, but probably just take a faster s939 cpu and wait how it turns out in 6-12 months when Intel Quad and AMD Quad are coming more into the market, while I hope this means also the introduction of reversed hyperthreading

Sorry for the slight-offtopic

Bah.. get the Core2 unless you want to wait but even now SimHQ compared a dual core to quad core and performance difference between dual and quad was minimal (+/- 1%) in most sims. I think it will be more significant in the coming years but by then the sims will be more refined for multiple cores and speed will probably increase. So waiting for quads now will be somewhat pointless. Get a dual core now and wait until quads are worth something.

Also,  

Re: DDR3

yeah. I meant DDR to DDR2 - I attempt to keep things straight but it's practically impossible nowadays - whatever it is my point was I made a small jump in technology.

Re: Comparing Intel P4 to Core2Duo

My answer was in reply to someone saying dual core is slower. I don't care how you shape the lens of performance, at this moment an Intel Core2Duo IS faster than a single core anything... and by a huge margin.

[EDIT] And reversed hyperthreading has to be one of the decades worst marketing ploys... why on earth would I want to task two cores with one thread??? My goal is to do more and do it faster - not do less faster...

[LT.INSTG8R 0]

Crashdome you can see by my picture its obviously using both cores running ArmA and at a well over 100% if it was on one core.

This would be that "marketing ploy" you are talking about and it has been available to AMD users since August.

[Lange 0]

There are only a few games that really support multi-core.

New incoming games more and more support it, but many do not.

a few is not correct. nearly all 3d rich rendering games use multicore. even games that are 1+ years old already had multicore support (doom3, quake4,...)

Nowhere was advertised that ArmA would make use of 2 cores.

Jesus, we are glad that BIS did not us 8086 code on our highend machine since they never advertised to use our specific machines. excuse our ignorance that we did EXPECT that a game which is advertised to be released in the beginning of 2006 and then delayed beside other reasons to include new technologies (statement of BIS after E3) is using state of the art techniques for processing data (e.g. first core for ai and second for gfx/sound management).

Your only benefit is that you probably have a slightly better performance than somebody with the same speed in mhz but single core cpu, simply because background programs and services can make use of the other cpu, altough they usually only take a couple of 0,1%'s of your performance anyway..

you described the current situation since arma does NOT support symetric multiprocessing! consider a book about multithreaded development and its benefits....

Dualcore, and multicore in general is something for past 2007 to be really into the mainstream market of not only hardware, but also software.

you wanna tell us that the eastern block is still there and eastern technologie is 1 year delayed?! SCNR

Make sure you install dualcore optimizer software for amd cpu's, as there have been reported problems with games that are bound to 2 cpu's in taskmanager, and then generate low fps.

first dualcore optimizer is just a consumer directive to exclude a rarely problem which can cause slightly performance issues (nothing you would recognize especially not in a game which does NOT support multicore). everything the "optimizer" does you can do by hand by editing your boot.ini dude.

second, you can optmizer as much as you want. if the programm actually does not supoprt mc (better is not written multithreaded) you wont have any worthy performance boost. nice try, dude.

however,

arma has a lack of state of the art technology. it looks like a game released 2 years ago. it works like a game released 2 years ago (except it has the "bug"-state of a fresh released game).

even unreal (yes PART 1) already had multicore or better smp support which is the same. doom3 quake4 nfs-carbon, halflife2 (and all its derivates)... and lots more do have multicore support.

also noone understands why there is no 64bit (native! support. its not that hard to implement this if you understand your job and know how to (cross-)compile.

so, understand threre is no logical excuse for BIS. they made a mistake along with many more (e.g. no competent quality assurance or how do you call a qa team which oversees significant bugs which accur on first sight?!, BUT (!!! mistakes are not a problem IF they admit their mistakes AND do release fixes ASAP. also more transparency telling the community what is the progress for patches and what will be included with it would flaten the waves a lil more.

we wait and meanwhile dont bother us with excuses a professional can only laugh about. there is no excuse for missing 64bit or even worse missin multicore support - especially for a game which would benefit that much of it.

regards

Simon

[tomcat_ 0]

interesting topic.

At the moment i have an AMD64 4000+, 2,4ghz Clawhammer S939 and 2 gb DDR400 mem with a 6800GT 256mb.

I was thinking of upgrading both my gfx card and my cpu to a x2 4200+ but from what i read around it will be a waste of money as upgrading my cpu will not give me any significant gain in Arma.

So instead i plan to upgrade only to a 7950 gfx card.

[sickboy 13]

Quote[/b] ]a few is not correct. nearly all 3d rich rendering games use multicore. even games that are 1+ years old already had multicore support (doom3, quake4,...)

Afaik this was added later in patches... Fact still remains that not so many games at this moment in time either support, or at least not take full profit of multicore.

(Great to have multiple threads, nice that they are split up over 2 cpu's, but if the threads still need to wait for eachother then there is no or just small benefit, right?) The only 2 games I can remember that will be truely multicore optimized are Alan Wake, and Crysis 2.

(update: I just saw a list of about 15 games that support multi-core, which is actually already bigger than I expected... )

Quote[/b] ]Jesus, we are glad that BIS did not us 8086 code on our highend machine since they never advertised to use our specific machines. excuse our ignorance that we did EXPECT that a game which is advertised to be released in the beginning of 2006 and then delayed beside other reasons to include new technologies (statement of BIS after E3) is using state of the art techniques for processing data (e.g. first core for ai and second for gfx/sound management).

I agree that we might expect from modern games that they support dual/multicore, but I already knew for a year or so that ArmA would not be supporting dual/multicore, as that info was released in either a press release, forum post, wiki... don't remember.. I didn't read or hear anything (neither E3) about BIS pushing the game out to the end of 2006 for making it multi-core (Could you supply some sources?) ...

Besides, I thought it would be Game 2 that would be the "Next Generation Game", while ArmA would be "OFP 1.5".

Quote[/b] ]you described the current situation since arma does NOT support  symetric multiprocessing! consider a book about multithreaded development and its benefits....

Yes of coarse I was describing that, as that was the topic (arma), not what you can do with true multi-core optimized applications or games...

Quote[/b] ]you wanna tell us that the eastern block is still there and eastern technologie is 1 year delayed?! SCNR

No Idea what you mean with this. But if you want to tell that 90% of all consumer software now is SMP compatible then I beg to differ! Of coarse on a system where you do many things at once, dual or more cores will help in your performance, but which "consumer" software is truelly SMP?

Quote[/b] ]first dualcore optimizer is just a consumer directive to exclude a rarely problem which can cause slightly performance issues (nothing you would recognize especially not in a game which does NOT support multicore). everything the "optimizer" does you can do by hand by editing your boot.ini dude.

second, you can optmizer as much as you want. if the programm actually does not supoprt mc (better is not written multithreaded) you wont have any worthy performance

There were reports of ppl that were having problems with games that were not true multi-core that had bad performance

when the game was set to both cpu's. As soon as you bound the process to 1 cpu, the problem was gone. When you install the dualcore optimizer, this problem was gone aswell.

About native 64bit support, please tell me which game does have native 64bit support, and what you think is the real benefit, for games.

Oh and sorry if my knowledge of multi-core/threads and what the benefit of them is for applications, in a "pro" (developper?)'s eye, is a bit thin, as im not a "pro" (developper)..

[Bugsfrombis 0]

how do i see if both my cpu's are being used i press cntrl + alt + del then click performance but only see Cpu usage

[UNN 0]

Quote[/b] ]how do i see if both my cpu's are being used i press cntrl + alt + del then click performance but only see Cpu usage

I'm new to dual cores myself, so most of this thread is way above my head. But I did check out my CPU history after running the single mission, Convoy Ambush for 5 mins.

I'm running a AMD 4600 x2 with 2 gig of ram, under XP 64. Not sure if it's Arma, but both CPU's certainly look busy enough?

Yet to try the hyper thread patch that Jack Horner posted, to see if that makes any difference to my CPU bench mark.