Gaming and Hyperthreading / Turbo Boost

[Zalgradis]

Evening,

I remember reading somewhere that hyperthreading and/or turbo boost are detrimental to gaming performance, but i cannot find the source.

I am currently running an i7 950 with a Geforce 680 GTX, and as I mainly game Iwas wondering if I would be better off disabling hyperthreading or turbo boost.

Thanks for your help

- Dan

 

[mcnumpty23]

heres a good article

http://www.overclock.net/t/671977/hyperthreading-in-games

though with a gtx680 and an i7-950 especially if its overclocked i wouldnt be worrying about it

should be able to play just about any game easily enough

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Nice find mcnumpty23. While hyper-threading isn't always used it isnt going to hurt you. Turbo Boost on the other hand can always give you a performance boost since what it does is increase the clock speed of the processor based on the number of cores in use and the temperatures of the processor. In the end you don't need to worry about disabling them at all.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[Zalgradis]

Thanks for the quick replies.

I can confirm that Hyperthreading is detrimental to Battlefield 3 performance; the game stutters heavily while it is enabled and is perfect when disabled.

That said i rarely play BAttlefield 3 so will keep it enabled. I was concerned that it may decrease my gaming performance slightly and cause stutter issues in other games.

 

[photonboy]

I have tested many games with and without HT and the ONLY game I ever found an issue with was Spider-Man Web of Shadows (unplayable with HT enabled).

Basically you have to experiment with it yourself because not all BF3 users experience this problem with HT but it has been confirmed that it exists.

Basically there are two issues:
1) does HT cause stutter in a particular game, and
2) does HT make the game run faster, slower or the same?

 

[esrever]

the difference should be minimal. they should niether add or take away more than 1% of performance.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-Core-i7-Nehalem,2057-12.html

 

[lambofgod008]

Well, I don't think that a stutter is always an indicator that you are having poor performance. This is the first time I've seen anything about HT causing stutter. I have a pretty good setup and I have a lot of games that stutter and run choppy even with consistently high framerates. I've got a couple ideas I'm going to try tomorrow, which involve turning this HT off, trying a different mouse, possibly a different keyboard too. I've read somewhere that it is possible for certain mice and keyboards, and their settings, to be the culprits. I've noticed in certain games that plugging in my 360 controller will eliminate stutter(this worked with crysis 2, silky smooth with gamepad). I tried turning of repeated keystrokes in ease of access center with no results. I wonder if maybe USB could be causing this. Not too long ago I swapped out cases and noticed a warning that certain devices could perform faster if I had them plugged into high speed ports. The funny thing is, it gave me this warning even when peripherals WERE plugged into high speed ports. Is it possible for my USB drivers to become corrupt in some way? I know I shouldn't be experiencing stutter in a lot of these games, especially when other games run buttery smooth, ones that seem equally demanding. I've tried just about every fix I've come across, new drivers, new caps, disabling CF, enabling this, editing that. Certain issues I just can't seem to resolve.

 

[lambofgod008]

Just realized a majority of my post was off subject, sorry. Heh