Do games use Cores or Threads?

[rb1998]

Im planning on buying an i5 4460 because it's a quadcore.
But I was wondering if the i3 6100 stutter in games? Since it's a dual core with four threads?

 

[smorizio]

threads are virtual cores and very few games use them. your better off with 4690 or a locked i5 and a h81/h97 mb.

 

[Ecky]

Games can't tell the difference between a physical and a logical core. For all intents and purposes, an i3 6100 is a quad core, it just has less throughput than an i5.

The i3 is a fine gaming CPU, but there are some games that will not stay consistently above 60fps with an i3, where they would on an i5.

 

[geofelt]

It is windows that translates threads and dispatches them on cores.
You can look at a I3-6100 as a 4 thread processor with two very fast threads and two somewhat slower.
The i5-4460 has 4 threads each equally fast.
It matters in some games which depend on the performance of a single master thread.
Such games like strategy, mmo and sims may well do better with an I3.
Few games can make use of more than 2-3 threads.
A I5-4460($189) has a total passmark rating of 6614 and a single thread rating of 1948.
By comparison, a I3-6100($125) has a passmark rating of 5500 and a single thread rating of 2102.
A closer comparison would be a I3-6320($159) with a total rating of 6073 and a single thread rating of 2245.

You will not be disappointed with any of them.

 

[DonkeyOatie]

They are different generations, but i3's behave almost is if they had three cores when fully loaded. The hyperthreading uses wait and idle time in a core to run a second thread.

Some games, like multi-player games, practically require four real cores, and even then you may have issues. If you plan to record and/or stream that will hurt too.

An i3 will generally work, but I would go for an older i5 over a modern i3 at about the same price.

 

[Pinhedd]

Games can't tell the difference between a physical and a logical core. For all intents and purposes, an i3 6100 is a quad core, it just has less throughput than an i5.

The i3 is a fine gaming CPU, but there are some games that will not stay consistently above 60fps with an i3, where they would on an i5.

Normally I just delete posts that are blatant nonsense but this is one that I'm going to reply to because the topic is so poorly understood.

Lets get one thing straight: There is no such thing as a logical core. There never has been. There are cores and there are logical processors. They are two separate things.

Cores are tangible, physical parts of modern CPUs. With a little bit of cleaning, a microscope, and some knowledge of topology individual cores can be seen visually on a CPU die.

Logical processors are an interface exposed by the computer's firmware that is utilized by the operating system to schedule tasks for execution. The relationship between a CPU's architecture and the logical processors exposed by the firmware is manufacturer specific, and manufacturer specific scheduling logic is usually a necessity.

Intel x86 CPUs that do not feature SMT (aka Hyperthreading) expose one logical processor per core. Intel x86 CPUs that feature SMT expose two logical processors per core. IBM POWER8 CPUs that feature SMT expose a whopping eight logical processors per core.

It is the job of the operating system's kernel to schedule tasks on the logical processors. All modern general purpose operating systems use some variation of a preemtive multi-level priority queue scheduler with a many-to-one relationship between threads and processes.

 

[Ecky]

Thank you for clarifying.

Still, an i3 and an i5 both have 4 logical processors, the i5 just has more potential throughput.