Core Confusion!!! Any help please?

[TX-EcoDragon]

Originally Posted by JG27CaptStubing

. . .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.

That's not so, at least not for BlackShark.

I had wondered if that was the case, I saw that people with Vista had nice gains with the second core enabled, but I couldn't determine how that might compare to what I was seeing with XP. Along came the Windows 7 beta, so I decided to find out. I set up a dual boot, and compared BlackShark on Windows XP 32bit to Windows 7 64bit. The difference between identical hardware at identical graphics settings was quite obvious (OK so some had 2 gigs vs 4 gigs of RAM but my benchmark comparisons suggested that it made no fps difference, also different is the much older slower HDD for Win7) Performance with both cores enabled is much better than in XP with one or more cores enabled - minimum fps went way up, and max and average saw nice gains as well. . .better than any hardware upgrade would get anyone with a fairly recent computer, and better than a 1GHz overclock on the CPU!! My other sims didn't see such gains, most saw slight losses - but very, very, slight. I did only one comparison with AERO on vs OFF and honestly think there was no change. Some sims do have issues with it being on (Like FSX, which disables it for you when you launch), but supposedly it should be disabled when in the background anyway. In any case, I even run my XP installation with all the transparent text backgrounds, animated windows, and colored titled bars etc turned off. So my benches are comparing the leanest possible XP, against Win 7 with all the fluff running.

Here's the few benchmarks I did in some of my sims comparing Win XP to Win 7: http://www.txsquadron.com/forum/index.php?topic=2675.0

OK, the TX site is down for maintenance for a bit, since that link might not be working I'll post the full BlackShark results for an extremely hardware challenging mission here:



Windows 7 Preliminary testing in BlackShark has some very interesting results!!

Remember the run posted above for 3.06 GHz? Well, no need to go look up there for it. . .here it is:

Windows XP E8400 @ 3.06 GHz (speedstep enabled) DX9.0c 2x1Gigs of PC8000 RAM at 850Mhz, 8800GTS (G92) at stock clocks 178.24 drivers
Frames: 16232 - Time: 480193ms - Avg: 33.803 - Min: 5 - Max: 61

The following is the same run as above, but in Windows 7, with DirectX11, all other settings the same ( more than 2 gigs of RAM doesn't appear to make a difference in BS):

Windows7 core 0 E8400 @ 3.06 GHz (speedstep enable) D11 2x2gigs PC8500 at 850Mhz, 8800GTS (G92) at stock clocks 178.24 drivers
Frames: 13802 - Time: 480225ms - Avg: 28.740 - Min: 7 - Max: 60

So that's not so great. . .at this point it's not looking very good for Windows 7. . .but it's supposed to run like a better version of Vista, which supposedly is strong in Black Shark. . .so what gives? Ahhh, the CPU affinity trick you say?? Well, lets see if that makes up the lost performance!

For this run, settings are the same, only I enable both CPU cores in the taskmanager:

Windows7 (64) core 0+1 core E8400 @ 3.06 GHz (speedstep enabled) DX11 2x2gigs PC8500 at 850Mhz, 8800GTS (G92) at stock clocks 178.24 drivers
Frames: 21729 - Time: 480340ms - Avg: 45.236 - Min: 23 - Max: 62

So umm. . . can you say AWESOME?!??!!!?! Not only did I get the lost performance back, but I set something of a personal record for this benchmark!!! If you take a look at my previously posted Windows XP runs the best I ever managed, when overclocked to 3.9GHz was - Avg: 42.185 - Min: 10 - Max: 62. Nearly a 1GHz Overclock doesn't do as much as just running Win 7 instead of XP!!


Even my runs at 3.960GHz with 2x2Gigs of PC8500 RAM at 1100MHz, only averaged: 44.439fps. . .so simply running Windows 7, and using both CPU cores gave me .8 avg fps better performance at a stock 3.06 Ghz than at just about 4.0 GHz on XP!!!!!!

Now to see how this performance scales with overclocking, here's some 3.96GHz runs:

Windows XP 32 E8400 @ 3.960GHz 2x2Gigs of PC8500 RAM at 1100MHz, 8800GTS (G92) at stock clocks vSynch and triple buff on on 178.24 drivers
Frames: 21281 - Time: 480107ms - Avg: 44.439 - Min: 10 - Max: 63


Windows7 (64) core 0+1 E8400 @ 3.960GHz 2x2Gigs of PC8500 RAM at 1100MHz, 8800GTS (G92) at stock clocks 178.24 drivers vSynch ON
Frames: 26647 - Time: 480074ms - Avg: 55.506 - Min: 27 - Max: 62

OK, since most review sites and such disable vSynch to generate fps data, here's a run in that situation which shows the all out performance increase:

Windows7 (64) core 0+1 E8400 @ 3.960GHz 2x2Gigs of PC8500 RAM at 1100MHz, 8800GTS (G92) at stock clocks 178.24 drivers vSynch OFF
Frames: 28235 - Time: 479994ms - Avg: 58.823 - Min: 32 - Max: 93

Impressive results no? Under the same conditions I had an increase of 11.1 frames per second better on average when overclocked to 3.96 1100MHz DDR2, and 14.4 frames per second better when vSynch and triple buffering are forced off in the driver control panel (the normal way in which benchmarks are run).

Perhaps most impressive is the minimum fps. . .they are almost as good as the average fps at stock clocks!!!! My track really killed the fps in a flew places on XP, but with 7, and both CPU cores, that's gone!!!!!