DX12 and Hyperthreading

[Jayhawk]

Since DX12 is meant mainly to make the most out of CPUs, does this mean DX12 games will implement Hyperthreading? It slightly aggravates me that my i7 4790k performs about the same as an overclocked i5 4690k. The only real differences I notice are when I'm modding the hell out of Witcher 2 and Skyrim. Also, when does DX12 and Windows 10 hit the shelves and is it really true that Windows 10 will be free/discounted for Windows 8.1?

[Oshino Shinobu]

I would expect it to, but it's also down to game developers to support hyperthreading and more cores. Even then, most games are limited by the GPU, not the CPU, so you're probably not going to see much, if any improvement from a HT CPU over a non-HT CPU even if the game supports it. 

 

And maybe late next year, maybe 2016? Who knows. 

[typographie]

DX12 is supposed to reduce the API's CPU overhead (as Mantle does). I think that whether a game is able to make good use of more cores is still going to be up to it's engine and it's developers, as always.

[ManWithBeard1990]

You mean multithreading, right? One advantage of DX12 is that multiple threads can send commands to the GPU instead of just one, and this was the only part of a game's code that could not be multithreaded until recently. Some will do that, but writing software in multiple threads to run on multiple cores (hyperthreaded or not) is hard to do. I fully expect a large amount of developers to still not bother, like they always have done.

[Bogica]

It's a well known fact that an i5 can perform and in some cases outperform an i7 in gaming as it is usually optimized for 2-4 cores. I don't know what were you expecting, an i7 wins in everything else but when it comes to gaming and single threaded tasks it's the same performance (depends on the clock speed). An i5 is perfectly fine for gaming, you were better off investing the close to 100e difference in a better GPU than an i7 or you wanted bragging rights?
Anyway, not saying it's a bad investment, but if the main use is gaming, then I don't see the point of an i7, unless hyperthreaded games come sooner, but I wouldn't expect that until 2016 the very least. 6 or higher core CPU's need to become mainstream in order for that to happen, keep in mind that quite a few games still use 2 cores.