Programs that actually use all 4 cores of a quad core chip

[graysky]

Here is a short list of programs that actually use all 4 cores of a quad core chip. If you know of others, please post them to this thread, and I'll update it.

THE LIST:
Real-World Applications
3D Studio MAX using Mental Ray Renderer (>99 % of 4 cores)
Adobe Premiere Elements v3.0.2 (52-85 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
AutoGK v2.40 (30-53 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
Cinema 4d Rendering (>99 % of 4 cores)
Dr. DivX v2.0.0 (47-65 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
DVDShrink v3.2 (~90 % of 4 cores)
Lightwave 3D (>99 % of 4 cores)
Nero Suite 7.x (>90 % of 4 cores when encoding)
Noise Ninja v2.13 (~80 % of 4 cores when doing the noise reduction on an image)
Sony Vegas 7.0e (83-100 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
TMPG XPress v4.2.3.193 (65-100 % of 4 cores depending on source type, filters, etc.)
Winrar v3.70 (~85-90 % of 4 cores on benchmark; ~75% in practice)
x264 v0.55.663 (>99 % of 4 cores when doing the 2nd pass of a 2 pass encode)

Benchmark/Distributed Computing Applications
BOINC Clients (most of them) (>99 % of 4 cores)
Folding@home SMP client (>99 % of 4 cores)
Muon1 DPAD (~85 % of 4 cores)
OCCT (>99 % of 4 cores)
Prime95 v25.3 (>99 % of 4 cores)
wprime v1.50 (>99 % of 4 cores)

Games
none that I know of yet

If you'd like to contribute an application or game, please post the following:

1) Program name
2) URL to homepage of the program
3) The percentage as shown in the Windows task manager of the CPU's that are getting used @ peak or thereabouts along with a screen-shot of the task manager.

Here's an example screen-shot of my task manager during the Noise Ninja noise reduction:

Also, please limit the replies to quad chips only (yeah, I know this will limit the amount of replies, but this is after all what this thread is all about).

Thanks!

Note: I don't think this thread really belongs under the software section since it's specifically about software for quad core chips.

 

[jackluo923]

Oh.. there's way more programs and games that use more than 4 cores.
Photoshop and many other photoediting programs
Adobe product series
3D Max Studio
A lot of Encoding program such as DIVX. Also the beta DIVX also support SSE 4 which improve encoding time by quite a bit.
Vitualization programs such as VMWare
Basically a lot of Multimedia programs
Benchmark softwares such as 4x prime 95, 2 x TAT ( maybe. never tried that, i think that's only for c2ds) Super Pi....
Games:
Supreme Commander, Crysis (?) not sure. and there're few more that i cannot think of right now.

And uncountable number of virus.

 

[Hatman]

Crysis will.


I was just wondering, what that red bar is in each of the CPU boxes, I havent seen that before.

 

[jonisginger]

Those are the Kernel times. I'm not sure what this means, if this is a load vs. time graph, then it perhaps shows how much "work" the kernel is doing, for example moving stuff in and out of memory. Anyone know?

 

[graysky]

All, thanks for the replies... my hope was to keep the list kind of semi-quantitative. If you offer up an app or game, please make sure that it's tested on your quad machine and you report the CPU usage. As you can see in my short list, Noise Ninja does use all 4 cores, but only 80 %.

Thanks!

 

[MU_Engineer]

Real-world programs that use 4 (or many more) cores:

GNU Compiler
Bzip2, at least at decompression
Navier-Stokes 3D Fluid Flow Simulator
Most scientific programs, especially ones that use the Message Passing Interface (MPI.)

Not to mention that a lot of single-threaded programs can be scripted to run smaller jobs in parallel rather than one big job at once if there are enough CPUs and RAM (and an OS smart enough) to handle it. I do just that to get R to crunch on a bunch of data sets at once on an HPC cluster without messing around with MPI.

 

[clue69less]

Here is a short list of programs that actually use all 4 cores of a quad core chip. If you know of others, please post them to this thread, and I'll update it.

Cubase 4 will run all 8 cores of a dual quad Mac, or so they (Steinberg) claim. I've seen forum posts showing Q6600 task manager with all four cores pegged when mixing a bunch of tracks in Cubase.

 

[maverick7]

im fairly certain supreme commander uses all 4 cores.. but as to how well it uses them, i am not sure

 

[Heyyou27]

Crysis will.


I was just wondering, what that red bar is in each of the CPU boxes, I havent seen that before.

Actually, what I've been hearing has said that Crysis may not take advantage of more than 2 cores.

 

[mcain591]

No, watch the latest nVidia video. Intel is in it and the explicitly state that Quad core is supported.

 

[graysky]

Real-world programs that use 4 (or many more) cores:

GNU Compiler
Bzip2, at least at decompression
Navier-Stokes 3D Fluid Flow Simulator
Most scientific programs, especially ones that use the Message Passing Interface (MPI.)

Not to mention that a lot of single-threaded programs can be scripted to run smaller jobs in parallel rather than one big job at once if there are enough CPUs and RAM (and an OS smart enough) to handle it. I do just that to get R to crunch on a bunch of data sets at once on an HPC cluster without messing around with MPI.

These are some interesting titles. Can you post a % usage (or a range) for each along w/ a screen-shot?

 

[morerevs]

Here's the data for Supreme commander. These guys did some heavy testing and posted some detailed stuff. This was just after it was released so who knows, maybe with updates they can increase CPU usage even more.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwNiw4LCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

Enjoy.

 

[Amiga500]

Any and all commerical CFD packs will easily eat 4 cores...

Thats thinks like Fluent, CFX, Star-CD, Numeca, Phoenics - not to mention in-house bespoke codes.

 

[Ancalagon_uk]

No, watch the latest nVidia video. Intel is in it and the explicitly state that Quad core is supported.

K I havent seen the video unfortunately, but be careful of language like that. I had a Radeon 9200, and it said on the box that it supported DirectX 9. Now, of course it didnt in hardware, but what they meant was, if you install Direct X 9, this card will still function.

but in this case, I'll bet that by support they meant fully utilize, because the way crysis looks, you might actually need a quad core.

what about unreal tournament 3? how multi threaded is that?

 

[Shielder]

Linux
Many GNU programs
MCNP

are all capable of being multithreaded using any of the following packages:

PVM
MPI
Sun's Clustering Software

To name just a few. Yes, you need the GNU gcc compilers or something similar to compile the programs, but some work with as many cores as you have got "out of the box".

Oh yes, most of what I've said above applies to *nix systems, not Windows. Mind you, I've been running a 64-bit OS for about 7 years at work, so I'm used to it. Windows on the other hand...

Andy

 

[penguinusaf]

i found a game that will use up all the cores, deep firtz 10. even the older deep firtz 7 which came out during 2000 or earlier was able to use up to 8 cores

 

[aladar]

I was just wondering, what that red bar is in each of the CPU boxes, I havent seen that before.

The red bar means kernel times. In *nix usually means the CPU time taken by kernel (+drivers). In windows is anyones guess...

You can activate it on the task manager in view > show kernel times

 

[aladar]

I have a machine (@ work) with 4 DC CPU's, so 8 cores, and it's usually over 50% utilization (sometimes up to 90%)

Oh wait, it's the application server (server that compiles and creates pages for delivery by the web server).

This kind of tasks (web server, database, etc) are usually highly threaded (currently the company apache web server has max 255 processes with 32 threads each = 8160 threads)

 

[kona]

comsole multiphysics will utilize four cores and as much RAM as you car throw at it!!!

 

[bfellow]

Rainbow Six Vegas takes advantages of 2 or 4 cores

 

[zenmaster]

I did not see the video, but you need to be careful about when they say it's supported. Technically, all that has to mean is the game is playable on a PC with a Quad-Core. You could even say that the game can use all for cores. That does not mean that there is ever more than a single thread that may just happen to run on any one of the four cores.

I know nothing of Crysis, I just work with alot of software companies and have seen the use of "supported" and "non suppoted" quite a few times and they never really seem to mean what we think they should mean.

 

[LAPIII]

A list of games and applications that use 4 cores:

http://www.motherboards.org/reviews/hardware/1669_11.html

 

[Guest]

Hi,

Does anybody know of a zip password recovery tool using all 4 cores, or may be it supports multiple instances to use different cores and recover passwords using a different set of range?

I have tried "PicoZip Recovery Tool", it only uses 1 core.

If there could be one such recovery tool, it would vastly decrease recovery time, which can be huge at times.


Thanks,
Jas

 

[snarfies]

GTA4, or so I hear, since I refuse to buy it.

 

[Wartz]

FSX uses 90-100% of 4 cores.

http://fha38g.bay.livefilestore.com/y1p1KatkmqFDjpkoJKcjrYXKxaIQZFCB1sp8w-WX-4o_7m09--XdXl9L1Vz1mKVZ11oH_iu7XZygPc/quadcoresftw2.JPG