Hyper-Threading = Worse FPS?

[Zac_The_Dude]

I just enabled Hyper-Threading on my CPU. I was told that this would increase performance by 30%. This was false. It instead decreased performance by like…50%! I’m running RPCS3, the PS3 emulator that by all means should work badly on my dumb i7 2600. But it actually worked very well. And as soon as I turned on hyper-threading, everything went to crap. 45 FPS with it off, 20 FPS with it on! So what the hell is going on here?! What’s wrong with my PC, and how the hell do I make hyper-threading actually do what is should: make the game play better!

[Hinjima]

4 minutes ago, Zac_The_Dude said:

I just enabled Hyper-Threading on my CPU. I was told that this would increase performance by 30%. This was false. It instead decreased performance by like…50%! I’m running RPCS3, the PS3 emulator that by all means should work badly on my dumb i7 2600. But it actually worked very well. And as soon as I turned on hyper-threading, everything went to crap. 45 FPS with it off, 20 FPS with it on! So what the hell is going on here?! What’s wrong with my PC, and how the hell do I make hyper-threading actually do what is should: make the game play better!

In normal games you will should see a nice performance boost. An emulator is weird in so many ways, especially the ps3 emulator.. The ps3 was an absolute NIGHTMARE to make games for! Absolutely terrible, so THIS particular program might not work well with hyper-threading.

[Zac_The_Dude]

3 minutes ago, Hinjima said:

In normal games you will should see a nice performance boost. An emulator is weird in so many ways, especially the ps3 emulator.. The ps3 was an absolute NIGHTMARE to make games for! Absolutely terrible, so THIS particular program might not work well with hyper-threading.

I was told by the discord it would help, but still nothing. There must be some setting that I’m failing to find. If not, then I suppose the discord is wrong. I have set the SPU and PPU threads low since that helped with stuttering. That could be it. Maybe there’s something else…

[GuiltySpark_]

That i7 is 12 years old, that alone is not a great recipe for emulation. Secondly hyperthreading would have been on be default, that's what give your 4 core CPU 8 threads. Did you turn it off at some point?

[Zac_The_Dude]

3 minutes ago, GuiltySpark_ said:

That i7 is 12 years old, that alone is not a great recipe for emulation. Secondly hyperthreading would have been on be default, that's what give your 4 core CPU 8 threads. Did you turn it off at some point?

I never turned it off. I had changed the CPU to this, and my old one did not have hyper-threading. This CPU is actually the best my motherboard can handle. 

[unclewebb]

@Zac_The_Dude

Does the Task Manager Performance tab show 4 cores and 8 logical processors?

 

 

If you swapped in a different CPU it might only be showing 2 cores and 4 logical processors. If you have this problem, run msconfig, click on the Boot tab, press the Advanced options... button and make sure the Number of processors box is not checked. Reboot after you do this. 

 

[Ebony Falcon]

Hyper threads are about 20 percent performance of a core, emulator doesn’t no what is a hyperthread or core 

so any workload pushed to them tanks

 

Normal pc gaming is fine because games will know what is what and assign light work loads to them 

[cmndr]

It's possible you bought a "questionable" CPU. 

One thing to check, see if you can do core pinning in software. 

https://www.google.com/search?q=rpcs3+hyperthreading

 

It does look like for your specific use case there might be issues. 

As a rule of thumb hyperthreaded squeezes around 20-30% more performance out of a core and there's only very rarely a downside. 

You'd have probably benefitted more from going with a used, more modern system though. There's some very cheap refurbished office systems out there.