How does Hyperthreading help gaming?

[Hydrogen1803]

I was wondering if my CPU's hyperthreading will help gaming or not? All help is appreciated, thanks. 

My build: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/XRTCYJ

[ANewFace]

No it doesn't help gaming

[theereal]

No.

[Kobathor]

No it doesn't help gaming

What he said. Short answer- no. Games like less, more powerful cores, so it won't help it.

[Glenwing]

Depends on the game and how multi-threaded it is, but in general most games don't scale to a lot of cores and the ones that do are so graphically intensive that your GPU(s) will be the limiting factor in performance long before the benefit of hyperthreading would come into play.

[Mohenjo]

you see ivan. you get cpu with 2 core, then you make magic and get 2 or 4 scary ghost cores. when in terms of i3 ivan it could be quite a big help for video games. but when it comes in turn of i7, you may aswell turn it off (dont though ivan, because thats fucking stupid) 

[WoodenMarker]

More threads can help gaming performance as long as the game can utilize them whether or not they're hyperthreaded or not. 

Most games don't benefit from more than 4 threads though.

[Fate]

It helps a bit in some select games, but in the vast majority of games, the difference is negligible between that and an i5 4690k. 

[Mumpka]

Yes. Just look at the difference between the G3258 and the 4170

[Wombo]

I was wondering if my CPU's hyperthreading will help gaming or not? All help is appreciated, thanks. 

My build: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/XRTCYJ

I'll try to explain this as plainly as possible. Hyperthreading essentially adds more queues, where each processor is then given 2 of these queues. Thus a quad core + hyperthreading = 8 "cores". Really all it is you still having 4 cores but each core now has 2 processing threads to manage, so you have 8 processor threads. This vastly increases the efficiency of the cores as they can more effectively use clock cycles by ensuring no cpu time is wasted.

 

In gaming however... Multithreaded support is still heavily lacking in a lot of games. Hopefully we will see better support soon. Having more cores will help you in most all other ways tho. Multitasking, video rendering, streaming, virtualization. More threads will help you do more at the same time. But how much you want to be doing at the same time and how much you are willing to pay for that is completely up to you.

[Wishiwasdead]

open up task manager and then go to the performance tab so you can see what cores / threads are being used. then open up leteraly any game. you will notice one cpu core/thread being used whilst all the others are down about where they idle... it doesnt matter if you have a 2 core, 4 core, 6, 8, or 18 core processor... how ever most higher end CPUs that have a bunch of cores will still run games better then the cheap low core processors just because they are faster not because of the number of cores....

[NuclearPeace]

Games that can use extra hardware threads in any meaningful way will generally see a benefit in using Hypertheading. This is an almost absolute fact.

 

Its easy to observe this seeing the gulf bewtween even a very highly clocked G3258 and a lowly i3 4130.

[TheBlackPantha]

Summing it all up : It doesn't

[NuclearPeace]

There isn't a simple yes or no answer.

 

It obviously helps a ton when you only have two physical cores whcich need as much execution hardware in use as possible to be able to keep up with the big dog I5+ (One haswell core can perform 4 macro-ops(or micro?) per cycle).

 

When you have four real cores, it doesn't really matter if one thread is stalled out because you have 3 more hardware threads to cover you instead of just one other one.