Does HyperThreading slow gaming performance?

I have a 3 GHz Prescott with HT enabled. Since I use my computer 50% of the time for gaming, I want to know if HT slows gaming performance.

I know I prefer AMD myself but had no choice for the processor and motherboard on this build, chose everything else though, GPU, 160mm fan and PSU

Its a small modified house fan and this thing spins around 7100 rpms, of course it makes a lot of noise and moves more air than any PC fan, but Im a gamer and don't car about noise, just life of parts and visual quality.

Figured as much, just wanted to see what other users thought in their experience.

No it won't hurt the performance of your gaming. I use mine, well, heh, let's say I used to use mine for heavy gaming but now I use my opty machine primarily for gaming now. However, my 630 machine does very well in gaming.

Technically, yes, it affects overall performance.

Both the Hyperthreading aware OS & the processor's logical partitioning units, are prepared to extract the most parallelization as possible, from the running application. It happens that, the majority of apps (games included) are single-threaded. End result: there's a latency penalty when using Hyperthreading with single-threaded software, althoug a small one (about 3 to 5%).

The very usefulness of Hyperthreading, for now, is simultaneous multitasking, where at least two processes are running in parallel, with a significant advantage over non-Hyperthreading implemented processors.


Cheers!

definitely not true... I noticed quite a increase in speed when I turned on HTT... and it seems faster for everything, including gaming 8)

and, it does not increase heat.

Yes, Sir!


(Oh! And this is not a post, OK?)


Cheers!

Well.. that's interesting to know. (about the extra heat)

I'm on a non-HT P4 northy. I've read that programs/games do need to be optimised to make better use of HT.

On Quake 4 - ID claims their patch makes better use of HT. So a P4 with HT would gain suppositively, up to 25 percent in performance, then a non-HT P4.

Yes, bothe have an impact.
Lately we have seen a lot more advances in gfx than we have in cpus.
As a result, we are seeing fewer cpu limited games than gfx limited games. If you have a chip that is 3 years old, you can still have a great gaming machine. Got a gfx card that's that old, go play solitaire.
To have a serious kickbutt gamers rig, you have to have a newer cpu, and the newest gfx card.
If you want eye candy, youv'e got to have the frames to give up for it.

actually i feel hyperthreading is better classed as a load balancer rather then performance booster or anything - when encoding and trying to play UT2004 without HT it packs down real bad, with HT on it plays much better but encoding will take a hit.

You can't really be in favor in just cpu or graphics card when it comes to gaming. As slower hardware would only bottleneck the faster ones. But as for most of the games that are coming today like BF2 and FEAR would basically need 2.5Ghs Intel or 2Ghz AMD but on the other hand taking more advantage on the graphics card for better quality and performance.
At the end it really depends as most player are in favor of performance and other of quality.

A pc that has no graphics card would still play games like pong. So that makes cpu better when it comes to gaming? Ok im just joking.

Actually it doesn't. There is no 50/50 split. One thread can easily dominate cache activity.

Gaming performance depends on the game itself. Some DX9 games perform much better on HT and dual-core systems than same generation OpenGL based ones. But in the end, all you have to do is enable/disable it and benchmark to see for yourself. Every game uses a different engine, so you can't really speak in general.
Really soon, most games will be multi-threaded, VGA drivers are constantly improving as far as multithreading is concerned, so HT Pentiums and dual-core CPU's might benefit from that. If your system performs well in current 3D apps, then why worry?