DualCore

[malinson]

I have heard that DualCore computers are overrated because unless an application is designed to take advantage of it, you don’t get its full potential. Any insight on this with X-games?

[CBJ]

All X-series games are single threaded, and so will only use one core. However there is still some noticeable advantage to be had running the game on a multi-core processor as the extra cores allow the operating system and other background tasks such as drivers to offload some work to the other core(s) leaving the one the game is using entirely free to do whatever the game wants it for.

However, this is not an X² Tech Support question, so I'm moving it to off-topic.

[frymaster]

note that some of those drivers are attached to the game process, so if you examine the list of threads in the game process, you'll see several even with a game like x3:tc - most are fairly inert but ones relating to graphics and sound can use almost 33% of the cpu cycles that the main game thread can. So even with a game only coded to be single-threaded, a dual core processor has an effect bigger than just reducing the impact of background tasks

[fiksal]

^ that makes sense.
I definitely noticed both cores sharing the load when X3 was running.


as far as applications go - the dual/multi core processor will benefit if you run more than one application at a time
(most of us, kinda do, though not all are CPU intensive)

[silenced]

if you plan to upgrade your rig -> don't stick around with dualcores ... go quad instead (socket 775 is enough, no need for the new i7 moneywasters from intel)