Thread: Intel Core2Duo

Don't bother with the 3092379523 core ones. Most shit doesn't use them anyway.
But also, Graphics cards, for new games need to be very good. Almost need to update every year if you want to play on high settings.

Originally Posted by tommo

Don't bother with the 3092379523 core ones. Most shit doesn't use them anyway.

Wrong. Most programs these days are being developed to use multicore processors. You get so much more for your money if you buy a multicore processor, compared to an old singlecore one, especially because the technology isn't really being developed on anymore. For gaming, a quadcore processor is ideal. Something around 3GHz is generally a good speed. Getting this for a laptop is going to be difficult though. A 2.8GHz dual core is probably the best you will get, which is pretty good too.

But also, Graphics cards, for new games need to be very good. Almost need to update every year if you want to play on high settings.

This isn't true at the moment. Graphics development is much slower the last few years, because of consoles.

An 8800 GTS can still play most games at high settings, and that's a 4 and half year old card.

Originally Posted by Marvo

Wrong. Most programs these days are being developed to use multicore processors. You get so much more for your money if you buy a multicore processor, compared to an old singlecore one, especially because the technology isn't really being developed on anymore. For gaming, a quadcore processor is ideal. Something around 3GHz is generally a good speed. Getting this for a laptop is going to be difficult though. A 2.8GHz dual core is probably the best you will get, which is pretty good too.

I don't agree. Obviously a single core is shit. But you'll be hard pressed to find a program that uses more than four cores.
Of course I'm not sure about PC's but Mac's use some cores for the game, and then some for running other programs. But there's really no need because you don't need to do anything else besides play the game while you're playing it. I'm not sure if PC's do this automatically or not.

Originally Posted by Marvo

This isn't true at the moment. Graphics development is much slower the last few years, because of consoles.

An 8800 GTS can still play most games at high settings, and that's a 4 and half year old card.

Again I do not agree at all. Games are developed for the PC (unless they're exclusive to a certain console) and then they optimise them for the consoles afterwards. (shitter graphics and physics etc.)

And yeah Ninja, that's wrong. CPU's are still very important.

Originally Posted by tommo

I don't agree. Obviously a single core is shit. But you'll be hard pressed to find a program that uses more than four cores.
Of course I'm not sure about PC's but Mac's use some cores for the game, and then some for running other programs. But there's really no need because you don't need to do anything else besides play the game while you're playing it. I'm not sure if PC's do this automatically or not.

Most games these days are being developed to work with multicore processors, like the battle-field series.

Again I do not agree at all. Games are developed for the PC (unless they're exclusive to a certain console) and then they optimise them for the consoles afterwards. (shitter graphics and physics etc.)

There is a large amount of games that just get ported to PC from the consoles. It's actually very rare that a game is first made on PC and then ported to consoles, because dumbing a game down and making it work on worse hardware can be very difficult. Through the last 5 years, graphical development has been incredibly slow. Graphics are only slightly better each year. PC graphics basically hit the peak in 2007 with the release of Crysis. No other game has beat it since then, except for maybe Metro 2033, and even that isn't that good looking. The reason is that developers don't want to develop a game that they can't easily release on all platforms.

Originally Posted by tommo

I don't agree. Obviously a single core is shit. But you'll be hard pressed to find a program that uses more than four cores.
Of course I'm not sure about PC's but Mac's use some cores for the game, and then some for running other programs. But there's really no need because you don't need to do anything else besides play the game while you're playing it. I'm not sure if PC's do this automatically or not.

Not true, simple programs run with one or two cores, but they aren't intensive anyway. Take a look at your Activity Monitor sometime. Programs are highly parallelized. Most programs run about 8 threads at any given time, more cores means more of those can run at the same time. Finder alone runs 6 to 8 threads, Safari runs between 15 and 25, iTunes runs between 10 and 25... Games will significantly more because they use a technique called thread pooling. Most dispatch to the GPU, but you'll still have 8 to 10 of them running on the CPU.

Macs can use CPUs for games because of Central Dispatch, a feature that Windows doesn't have. On a Windows PC, graphics threads run on GPUs and processor threads run on CPUs, there is no overlap. And Macs will only push graphics threads onto the main CPU if the GPU is struggling to keep up, so if you have a high end GPU, it won't need to do that. Are you gaming on a Mac?

Originally Posted by ninja9578

Not true, simple programs run with one or two cores, but they aren't intensive anyway. Take a look at your Activity Monitor sometime. Programs are highly parallelized. Most programs run about 8 threads at any given time, more cores means more of those can run at the same time. Finder alone runs 6 to 8 threads, Safari runs between 15 and 25, iTunes runs between 10 and 25... Games will significantly more because they use a technique called thread pooling. Most dispatch to the GPU, but you'll still have 8 to 10 of them running on the CPU.

Macs can use CPUs for games because of Central Dispatch, a feature that Windows doesn't have. On a Windows PC, graphics threads run on GPUs and processor threads run on CPUs, there is no overlap. And Macs will only push graphics threads onto the main CPU if the GPU is struggling to keep up, so if you have a high end GPU, it won't need to do that. Are you gaming on a Mac?

I'm not sure what threads are. I'm going on my limited knowledge here.
But I said I don't know of any programs that use more than four cores.
And then you said, you don't agree with that because simple programs run on one or two?
That doesn't make sense lol

What I was saying with the Macs using CPU cores was regarding the parts of the games that actually use the CPU, not what you said about Central dispatch,
but the part which allows people to easily write programs to use multiple cores. (I didn't even know it did what you said).

Sorry if that made no sense I should be sleeping.
Basically I was saying to the OP that he's not going to need a CPU with a billion cores or whatever they're coming up with these days.
Because the games aren't going to use them. Unless the games are set up for this, and I'm not sure if many actually are.

For example I run a program and I check Activity Monitor and it's using all of one core (or close to) and it just won't use the other ones.
So I have to start another user account and run that program in there to get it to use the other core. (I did this with iMovie converting videos a while ago).

Reading the rest of your posts it basically seems like you agree with what I was saying though, that he doesn't need a hugely expensive CPU.
But I think we are saying it for different reasons.
You're saying games don't use CPU's much anymore.
I'm saying that if they do, it doesn't matter because it won't use more than 2 anyway that I've noticed.

I game on my Mac only rarely (played TF2 and Gary's mod twice and Minecraft a couple of times in the 2 and a half years I've had it).
I'm pretty much console exclusive coz I switched to a Mac for artwork purposes coz they're relatively easier to use for that than PC's
and they seem to not need to be updated as much. Although maybe that's because of the slowing of graphics progress as you mentioned.