SupCom 4/2/1-Core Performance Review

[Verran]

OCC News Article

[H]ardOCP Article

 

We will directly compare single-core, dual-core and quad-core gameplay in Supreme Commander. We will also run several

[cchalogamer]

There's only one thing that I didnt see when I rough looked through the review, and that was any comparison to see if there was any sort of performance hit when cores were disabled on the Quad as compared to say at dual core @ the same speed. It doesnt seem liek there would be, but you never know, a 5-10% hit would certainly make the gains look alot different with the quad.

 

/me runs off to do some informal testing

 

 

EDIT:

Ok, I didnt have the time to do any REAL testing, but here's what I got after a string of restarts and core enables/disables

 

While Super Pi isn't the best I think it disproves my possible performance loss theory rather nicely, In two sets of 2M runs for both single and Dual core with a fresh restart before each and affinity set to core 0 when in dual core mode I found ~0.5% difference infavor of the dual core wth set affinity. I'm going to take a wild guess and say no performance hit

 

And might I add a single core Core 2 still feels exceptionally speedy

 

I would do more indepth and usefull testing, but to be honest, with such a small variation and most certainly being within the margin of error for my testing, I don't see the point.

[markiemrboo]

Also, I've heard it said that XP and Vista cannot utilize more than two cores. Given what I'm seeing in this review, that's becoming harder to believe.

 

In a thread a fair few months back, I actually pointed out that this isn't the case. It is written directly on the Microsoft website somewhere.....*looks it up*

 

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/multicore.mspx

 

Q. How does this licensing policy affect products such as Microsoft Windows XP Professional?

 

A. Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Windows XP Home are not affected by this policy as they are licensed per installation and not per processor. Windows XP Professional can support up to two processors regardless of the number of cores on the processor. Microsoft Windows XP Home supports one processor.

 

It can only support two actual physical processors in different slots (the 'traditional' SMP way, I guess). Apparently it doesn't care how many cores are on each processor

[hardnrg]

ah... finally... [H]ard evidence of the performance advantage of multi-core cpus in games in XP *and* Vista... nice to see it was only a matter of time... the difference between 1600x1200 at all high settings and 1280x1024 and mediocre/low settings is reason enough to say that Quad core cpus DO give an advantage in games... and then again, dual core has a similar distinct advantage over single core...

 

it's only down to developers implementation of code... not a limitation of the OS... one application using multiple cores... fantastic

 

nice find Verran... something to end the doubts and pessimism once and for all!

Edited March 27, 2007 by hardnrg