Would a Multi-Processor build be a better solution?

[Gonzo01]

I was wondering if anyone has tried or has some feedback to share regarding the use of a multi-processor motherboard build to improve Frame Rate in DCS A-10C?

 

I have tried several builds over the past few years and have concluded that in the end it does not matter whether you have two video boards or one, six core processors or two, because most hardcore flight simulations do not support the use of SLI or multi-core processors. It always comes down to the CPU doing most of the work and that seems to be where the bottleneck lies.

 

I understand that their are exceptions to the above depending on whether you are running more than one monitor, and extra cores can help the operating system keep from using resources that might not be available for the flight simulation otherwise.

 

My question is simple, would a multi processor motherboard be a better solution to improving frame rate, and would DCS A-10C run on this kind of platform uninhibited without any support from the simulation?;)

Edited July 22, 2011 by Gonzo01

[EtherealN]

No. If anything it'll be worse than multicore.

 

Programming-wise there is zero difference between multi-core and multi-processor. (For example, make your Windows bootloader verbose and you'll see that you are loading a multiprocessor kernel already, and it detects the cores as multiple processors.)

 

The advantage of multicore is that you have multiple CPU's that share resources and can communicate quickly to each other - with shared L3 caches a process that's running threads on several cores don't even have to leave the physical processor to pass and share data between the threads. On a multi-processor system all this would have to pass through the motherboard.

 

There is a theoretical case where multi-processor can be better, but with current architectures it's pretty much not applicable. It depends on bandwidth usage of a process data requests, where traffic from one core might end up blocking a second process on a different core from getting required access to RAM. This is not a problem you will face with DCS, and I doubt you'll find it in anything you are likely to run today.

[Gonzo01]

I appreciate the feedback, I was hoping to find a new direction to improve performance. I guess what your saying is multi-processor mother boards is not the solution to improve frame rate.

[EtherealN]

Indeed. Multi-Processor boards are, pretty much, a server-only type gig with the exception of some forms of productivity (might be useful in rendering farms and related workstations) and research applications that require major processing power but not enough of it to merit the use of a supercomputing cluster.

 

The main point though is that, as far as OS and DCS is concerned, there is zero difference between multicore and multiprocessor. They'll not see the difference between two dualcores and one quadcore, for example. (And most of the Q-series C2 chips from intel were actually two dualcore processors sitting in the same socket! (Never checked all of them so I'm unsure about exceptions.))

 

Looking at your signature, I'd say that pretty much the only thing you could do to improve performance would be to switch to an i7-2600K or i5-2500K, but I'd also say that the performance gain (10-ish percent, possibly 20) would not be enough to merit the cost, and you'd experience a performance loss in those applications you have that do use all your 6 cores - if you have any such applications. (There really isn't many in the world of entertainment and general productivity. If you make videos that is an example, though.)

[AtaliaA1]

Video Software uses six cores?

And would there be a noticable difference if I overcloked my i7 920 to 3.0?

[EtherealN]

Video software doesn't automatically use six cores simply through being video software, but rendering and encoding software is usually made to run multithreaded nowadays.

 

I wouldn't expect much of a difference with such an overclock. Your processor should run at 2.8GHz already while running DCS (due to Turbo Boost), possibly even 2.93. I would suspect you probably have to go up to 3.4 or 3.6 before you will really notice things happening without measuring FPS exactly.