Hyperthreading for Gaming - Worth it ...

The Intel Core i7 has been out for over a year now. It without doubt is the fastest processor and it's cost clearly shows this. The question is, is this excellent performance due to its heavily advertised hyperthreading (HT) or is this mostly and advertising gimmick.

Lets take a look at the facts and see. An article at vr-zone.com shows that in the games Crysis Warhead and Far Cry 2 enabling HT actually causes a reduction in performance. In Crysis not even one frame per second but in Far Cry 2 it 9 frames shy.

http://vr-zone.com/articles/does-core-i7-hyper-threading-helps-/6160.html

At iXBT Labs, they ran tests disabling HT and Turbo Boost. In numerous cases, the HT either didn't help, offered very little gain or actually caused a drop in performance. In the games tested, only one game actually saw a boost in performance with HT enabled and it was only a 1% gain. The other 7 saw either no change or a slight drop.

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/ci7-turbo-ht-p1.html

Another test was run at bit-tech.net where they ran several tests comparing HT performance differences. There results also showed that there is no gain in video games by having HT enabled.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2009/09/08/intel-core-i5-and-i7-lynnfield-cpu-review/10

So, clearly there is no benefit to having hyperthreading for playing games. This is largely due to the fact that no current game and efficiently utilize more than 4 cores at a time. Most games utilize only 2 or 3 cores with only a couple fully using 4 cores. Because of this, the addition of hyperthreading has no benefit for playing games.

Although games do not benefit from HT, there are some situations where a huge benefit is seen from HT. These are situation where more than 4 threads are used. These cases though are not seen often outside of your benchmarking software. The video & audio converters are about the only item a average home user would see a benefit from the hypterthreading.

Many people ask why AMD hasn't released some similar solution to hyperthreading. I myself had been wondering the same thing. After doing this research and looking at the results it is no surprise why. The core i7 & i5 Processors are just superior in architecture and offer great performance straight up. It has nothing to do with HT, the HT is just an added little bonus.

Intel has now released the core i5. If you look at the benchmarks, you can see that a similar clocked i5 and i7 have the same basic performance. The i7 slightly outperforms the i5 due to the HT in a few small scenarios but for most users, this difference will never be seen making the i7 a useless product and a waste of money.

As of right now AMD is against a tough lineup of processors. But they are not down and out. It may not hold the crown for the top lineup, but it is still competitive in the midrange and budge CPUs. Plus, its motherboards can usually be found at lower prices containing richer features so this helps increase the value. In the case of a gamer, this allows the purchase of a better video card, which makes a larger difference to the performance of the game anyway.

Other Links:

http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/cpu/intel-ci7-920-p3.html