GTX 980: anybody using one (or two)?

[El_Roto]

Hyper-threading is what I meant, sorry for the confusion. I had read somewhere quite a long time ago that if an app didn't support it, turning it off would increase CPU performance. I was ignorant (until just now) that DCS used 2 cores; I had thought it was only one. Guess I'll go back to my BIOS and fix that.

Thanks for all!

[Howie]

To be honest, I take most things I hear from Wags as speculation these days. Saying that, I'm cautiously optimistic that EDGE and 2.0 will improve performance for most people eventually (when all the kinks are ironed out).

[Dojo]

You're correct, it can have a positive effect when apps don't support multiple thread. It's probably OK to keep it off, perhaps even better. But you'd have to A/B it for sure. It's high unlikely you have a 1 core CPU, so enabling the hyper-threading should have no affect on DCS.

That said, the only way to know if it will improve your particular machine empirically is to run a mission and evaluate performance with and without it on.

To be honest, I take most things I hear from Wags as speculation these days.

Um... OK.

[JayPee]

Turning hyper-threading off generally improves the performance per core. Since hardly any game utilises 4 threads, let alone more than 4, overclockers generally advice to turn HT off.

[Howie]

Well, my i5 doesn't support hyper-threading anyway. Saying that, DCS does seem to benefit from higher clock frequencies.

I'd quite like to buy a dirt cheap, unlocked dual core CPU like the Pentium 3258 and OC the balls off it for DCS. Would be interesting at least.

[JayPee]

Same reason why I went for the 4th gen i7 4790K. It has 4 cores but the raw GHz' per core is much higher than compared to the 5th gen i7 with 8 cores, which cost twice as much. And you can OC that i7 I picked at lot.

[Howie]

Good choice. I was a bit dissapointed the i5 4690k was only clocked at 3.5GHz stock. I guess Intel wanted to give people more incentive to go for the 4GHz i7 other than for hyper-threading alone.

Those 6-8 core extreme chips are a bit too rich for my blood. Give me a cheapo dual or quad core with an unlocked multiplier any day of the week

[JayPee]

Gaming = fast cores, few cores
Programming, designing, calculating = slower cores, many cores

[Howie]

I wish Intel or AMD would actually release a CPU that is substantially better for gaming than my almost 4 year old 2500K.

Advancements like PCI-E 3.0 and DDR4 have had very little impact on real world gaming performance.

Going to a brand new system would probably only give me around a 15-20% performance boost, which is just crazy when you think that I'm running a mid range system built in 2011.

[Dojo]

I can't address every point in this thread, it's become unwiedly. But in short, you're sort of thinking about it wrong. Intel/AMD aren't the problem. The core processing element of many (not all) games isn't CPU bound. That's why newer CPUs don't offer magnitudes of performance increase. When they do offer improved performance for modern games in particular, it's often because the bus system/ L1-3 cache architecture/size has been modified. So certain instructions are being handled faster/ more efficiently. If the gaming engine fundamentally hasn't changed or doesn't take advantage of that, newer processor won't/can't help performance significantly.

You simply don't have many games waiting on the CPU to finish. It's not the bottleneck you're worried about.

For the record, I've been running a 3930K hexacore, with hyper-threading since 2012. It's not even close to being taxed by DCS or anything else I play. But I do a lot more than gaming (not programming) that does take advantage of those cores.