Hyperthreading, the future, or still just a liability in gaming?

[Irisena]

So, the belief about 2 years ago regarding hyperthreading is, if you're gaming, turn HT off as that may hurt your performance. back then, what really matter is single thread performance, hence i5 CPUs are preferred for gaming workload due to pricing. Nowadays, games use more threads than 4. some games like AC Odyssey and GTA5 (and perhaps more, as I don't really follow AAA releases nowadays) are seeing much better performance with HT on, and intel are rumored making HT accessible on every SKU with their 10th gen CPUs. So, the question is, what do you guys think? will HT ever be the future for gaming? Will there come a time where AAA games use every thread you have effectively? Should we buy i5 or i7 nowadays if we expect our system to last for the next 5 years or so?

[GoldenLag]

1 minute ago, Irisena said:

will HT ever be the future for gaming?

its allready important, especially with "lower" corecount offerings around 4 and 6 threads, where it can be a hinderence not having HT. 

 

2 minutes ago, Irisena said:

Should we buy i5 or i7 nowadays if we expect our system to last for the next 5 years or so?

going at the pace we are now, we can only guess, but id avoid non-ht offerings seeing as both AMD and intel is looking to increase corecount from 10 and beyond. 

[Mick Naughty]

Been needing it to game for years. Not like getting more core was always easy. 

[Mathieu9836]

When monitoring a 2700 in gaming, you can actually see all 16 threads being used, i don't think disabling SMT or HT give you any performance in games that can use all available cores/threads, not talking about older games only using 1 or 2 cores.

[Princess Luna]

1 hour ago, Irisena said:

if you're gaming, turn HT off as that may hurt your performance. back then, what really matter is single thread performance, hence i5 CPUs are preferred for gaming workload due to pricing

Say again?

 

If you're going on the high end with the best GPU available it has been meaningful for a very long time, even back then going with a locked i7 made more sense than trying to OC the i5's due to the much better 0.1% and 1% lows.

 

i5's have always been shitty value in the great scheme of things as you get *just enough* to run the game and nothing more, no multi-tasking and no breath of life.

1 hour ago, Irisena said:

will HT ever be the future for gaming?

It has been for years.

[Mister Woof]

if the recent intel leaks are to be believed, ALL 10th gen SKUs will have hyperthreading save for the celeron offerings. 

 

The i3 is going to basically be an i7 of old.

[Irisena]

Dang, guess I really missed a lot of stuff nowadays. Alright, these answers just sated my curiosity if anything else. thanks guys. never knew HT is the way all this time.

[King_Jahh]

On 11/5/2019 at 1:03 PM, GoldenLag said:

its allready important, especially with "lower" corecount offerings around 4 and 6 threads, where it can be a hinderence not having HT. 

 

This. 

 

Yeah a physical core is always going to work faster than a "virtual" hyperthreaded/SMT thread. But means nothing if you don't have enough cores in the first place.

 

Yes you will (in some games, not all) get better fps without multi-threading on but only if your CPU has enough physical cores to not hit that limit even with multi-threading turned off.

 

A new AAA game like Battlefield V i think will happily use up like 10 threads, plus anything you've got going on in the background (steam, discord, windows services/updates etc) thats even more.

At this point if you want to run with no multi-threading you're gonna want a CPU with like 16+ physical cores ie a Threadripper or a i9-9980xe

 

So yeah, if you have a 4/6/8 core CPU and want the best performance, hyperthreading ON will always be better

 

And if you have a 16 core CPU and want the best possible gaming performance, then you bought the wrong CPU in the first place