Core Confusion!!! Any help please?

[JG27CaptStubing]

Originally Posted by Feuerfalke

Technically speaking, you won't benefit from a multicore-CPU or a multiprocessor-board, as long as you use XP. This OS was build for a different generation of computers, does not natively support these features and draws little to none benefit from it. Users posted about stutters and other problems when setting it to two cores, others, as yourself, that the effect is minimal, or rather placebo as you put it.

Switching to Vista gave me a performance boost when playing IL2 with both cores assigned, especially over urban areas, but since IL2 is an old engine, you also have some side-effects. The only really important I personally ran into was with my new ATI4780 graphics card. It didn't render the light from the muzzle-flashes in yellow, but in purple, which was quite psychedelic.
With my nVidia everything runs fine, though.


In other words: Never change a running system unless you are willing to pay the price. A brandnew system doesn't mean an 11 year old sim will run like silk on it and the benefit for IL2 is not really worth the price (especially not for an i7, looking at the actual price!)

Wait for BoB or for another new program you want to play, then decide on that.

Just for clarification. XP is very capable of running multi threaded applications and it recognizes and uses multple CPUs and Cores for that matter.

The problem with IL2 is it was never meant to take use of multiple CPUs or cores. Even though it's a multi threaded application it can cause stuttering if you use it across more than one core.

Applications have to be written to take real advantage of multiple cores or cpus and there are always compromises because ALL of it has to be managed which adds overhead. This leads to scaling issues with more cores and you will eventually get diminishing returns.

Vista isn't any better at processing than XP. It used to be XP would beat the pants off of vista in almost every regard in terms of performance. That gap has lessoned since SP1.

Here is an example. Black Shark was released about a month ago. Guys had learned to have it use more than one core in Vista. What they found out was they did get a performance boost. Guys that are running in XP wouldn't get any performance boost the guys in Vista did because the XP guys were ALREADY getting the same performance out of the gate on one core.

There is an excellent artical over on Simhq that talks about the i7 and it's effects on flight sims.