i5, i7 and i9

[Lanemeyer]

Anyone using them for gaming? What can you tell me about them? I heard the i9 won't be so much better for gaming but for 3D working stuff and all.

[GodBeastX]

Your processor has very little to do with 3D precisely. It does have the ability to speed up math processing which is obviously used for 3D object in situations such as physics, collisions, etc. It can also be used for determining visibility for if geometry should render. However, the actual rendering of 3D is all done of video cards. To be more specific, the video card ram is filled with polygons, shaders and texture, and the CPU just says when to render them with APIs like Direct3D and OpenGL.

i7 core processors combined Core 2 with Hyperthreading. If you don't know the advantages of that, I'll give an overview. Where cores allow multi-processing, hyperthreading allows multithreading... to a degree. Essentially a hyperthreaded core is a "Partial" core that allows the cpu to execute two scheduled tasks during certain situations, like cache misses. Cache misses happen when data isn't in CPU Cache and it has to go to real Ram to retrieve it. This is a slow operation for a processor and usually stalls the processor until Ram fills in the data. Hyperthreading allows the CPU to execute other code during this situation.

It isn't as large an enhancement as multiple cores. 4 cores will be better than 2 hyperthreaded cores, however, it does improve multiprocessing to a degree.

The i9 Appears to have 6 hyperthreaded cores. This is a major improvement... in some situations.

Basically cores ONLY speed up multiprocessing or multithreaded programs. Single threaded programs gain NO speed increase from having multiple cores. However, alot of games and programs realize people have multiple cores so divide their programs into threads.

If you're looking for some giant performance increase going i9 from i7 you'll only see it in such programs, otherwise your only speed improvement will generally be ghz, assuming opcodes still have same cycle usage, which they likely do. You will also see improvement running multiple programs at once.

To give you an example, NWN2Server.exe is single threaded. 100 cores or 10, it'll run the same speed. However, with 100 cores, you could have 100 NWN2Server.exe's running, and essentially have 100 servers on the same computer without slowdown (If you have enough ram). Understand?

[Saulus]

I doubt Core i9 will be much faser than i7, you could probably count the mainstream applications that can use more than 8 cores on one hand.

[Lanemeyer]

So, just for gaming, basically, those ones are not that worth the money?

Just to see if I got it right.

[GodBeastX]

Like I said, some engines are multithreaded taking advantage of cores. Crysis engine is definitely optimized for such. Most aren't optimized to that degree because it's a difficult concept for some programmers to wrap their heads around

[Lanemeyer]

Thanks, it helped me a lot.