Dual/Quad CPU Support - How effective?

[SnR 1]

Just had a look at my screen on my G15 Keyboard and CPU seems to be steady around 70 - 80 % both performance bars active.

Arma was 50 - 60 % one always active

C2D E8400

[=Spetsnaz= 0]

Hmm seems ive tested some games like COD4 and ArmA with my new GFX card from my 3850, i didnt see much improvement on those games cause the CPU is limited so i can't gain fps unless i have a faster cpu. Now with games like CSS i saw a 40-50 fps boost.

Can anyone tell me with arma 2 if thats the same problem? if you upgrade your gfx but still have the same fps with the same settings? If Arma 2 is CPU Bounded?

[mr_centipede 31]

yes. OFP/ARMA/ARMA2 has always been hungry for CPU power. think of it this way, graphics card handles the looks of the game while the CPU handle the calculations side

few calculations that i can think of:

AI (decision making)

the wildlife - where to spawn, their behavior.. those are calculations

maybe winds too

might be dynamic weather?

I also remember someone mention/wrote an article? on ARMA1 forum that ARMA is really CPU hungry rather than GPU hungry...

Pls note that I am no technical person, so what I said could be wrong/hit or miss. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong

Thank you

[=Spetsnaz= 0]

yea but it seems with arma 1 it uses only one core..

[mr_centipede 31]

yea but it seems with arma 1 it uses only one core..

err.. yeah. ARMA 1 didnt support multi-core optimization

[EDcase 87]

After researching found out that quad cores are great for multi-tasking (ie music/graphics/spread sheets) if the OS supports them but for gaming can actually be slower that a comparative Mhz dual core (has something to do with instructions passing between cores).

Thats for games NOT coded to use multi-threading (like ArmA1)

ArmA2 is written to use 2 or 4 cores.

[Wynthorpe 10]

Well ive been running with C2D E8500@3.5Ghz, HD4870 512mb, 4 Gig 800Mhz RAM, Vista Ultimatex64 and all settings on high with 130% Fill rate and ive not noticed hardly any stutters or low frames, But i have noticed textures taking a time to load at times :(

[Baff1 0]

It looks to me from the tests in other threads that in this game quadcore is giving a 2% performance increase over dual core.

I'm going to buy a solid state drive instead of a hard drive to install the game on. I think that will be the best help for the textures loading. Faster access speed for the streaming.

[Skeptic 10]

It looks to me from the tests in other threads that in this game quadcore is giving a 2% performance increase over dual core.

I'm going to buy a solid state drive instead of a hard drive to install the game on. I think that will be the best help for the textures loading. Faster access speed for the streaming.

We need more test results with 4, 3, 2 cores before we could make a conclusion. So wait a bit.

Having said that SSD will help you. Don't bother with RAID-0 since it only helps with large sequential reads (of files 128M+ in size). No review site is posting Crystal Disk Mark / HD Tune Random Access scores for random 4k read/write tests - that's where the majority of your ops are.

Check out 60/120Gb versions of Intel X-25M, G.Skill Falcon, OCZ Vertex, OCZ Summit...

Edited June 4, 2009 by Skeptic

[EDcase 87]

Or just get a small fast HD dedicated for ArmA2 install...?

Not quite as good as a SSD but alot cheaper and should be marked improvement from installing on the OS drive.