Two cpus???

Ben Bibedorf · April 17, 2017

hello! A friend of mine recently received an old software engineering computer which has two xeon cpus. Is there anything he needs to set up for gaming? As in, do both the cpus share the load or what? I really dont know much so please include lots of steps thanks!

suchamoneypit · April 17, 2017

CPUs are CPUs, it would run a game just like any other computer. However, the way most games distribute computing tasks they usually use only a few cores, or worse (especially in older games) use only a single core. Desktop PCs usually favor low core count, high single-threaded performance, great for games, while a server favors high core count, with fewer single-threaded performance. (think, do a ton of things at once decently: server, do a few things very good: desktop PC).

So you can run games, however im guessing your single-threaded performance (power of each individual CPU core) is low so game performance would be bad compared to a mainstream processor

An interesting fact related to this, my 16 core 32 thread (which is dual-CPU) server destroys my 6 core 12 thread gaming PC in stuff like rendering, but my gaming PC outperforms my server in gaming by a good margin. So although on paper my server appears to have vastly more CPU performance, it would actually limit my game performance compared to my desktop-grade 5820k.

SpaceGhostC2C · April 17, 2017

17 minutes ago, Ben Bibedorf said:

hello! A friend of mine recently received an old software engineering computer which has two xeon cpus. Is there anything he needs to set up for gaming? As in, do both the cpus share the load or what? I really dont know much so please include lots of steps thanks!

There's nothing special you need to do. The scheduler will take care of cores being in different CPUs, etc.

Whether the load will be distributed depends on whether there is any load to distribute. If you have a setup like @suchamoneypit has, games will rarely need more than one. But if you are talking about 2x dual-core Xeons or something like that, then you can relatively easily find games using all 4 cores, in which case it will happen as naturally as if the 4 cores were on the same CPU. As long as the OS sees both no problem (and it's an OS compatible with the games you run), there's nothing to worry about.