Hyperthreading not good for gaming

[dream431ca]

HL2, Warhammer Dawn of War and other games have been skipping framerates recently. Basically the game runs smooth for a second, freezes for half a second, runs smooth again and so on. I read on another forum that Hyperthreading is the thing that is causing the problem (at least for me). So I turned it off and now all my games run smoothly. If any games are doing this to you, you can try this..it should work...but only for Intel Processors...at least that's what I read.

 

[Lahire149]

that's odd, it shouldn't rly have that much of an effect

 

[Snakebyte]

So how would you go about disabling Hyperthreading?

 

[Ren.182]

You can enable/disable Hyperthreading in the BIOS when you start the computer up.

 

[Lahire149]

and to make sure that u disabled it, u can check to see if you have only 1 processor in your device manager

 

[Shamrock]

HL2, Warhammer Dawn of War and other games have been skipping framerates recently. Basically the game runs smooth for a second, freezes for half a second, runs smooth again and so on. I read on another forum that Hyperthreading is the thing that is causing the problem (at least for me). So I turned it off and now all my games run smoothly. If any games are doing this to you, you can try this..it should work...but only for Intel Processors...at least that's what I read.

Can you tell me your specs?

 

[furiousV]

HT is disabled in BIOS.
Press control-alt-delete once booted and see you only got 1 CPU graph, you would have two if HT is enabled.

Some games are actually programmed to take advantage of Hyper Threading, unfortunately this is not the case with Half Life 2 and the likes.
Perimiter does. And I think Quake 3 Arena does also, but there is some crazy console command and I dont even know how well it works, its like for dual CPU machines.

Keep Hyper Threading disabled for your games PC, I gained alot of FPS for UT2004 by doing so.

Does anybody else notice that Dell's uber gaming systems XPS or sommin, designed for the gamer, and they highlight it with Hyper Threading and all?

 

[Beerdude26]

I've been gaming with Hyper-Threading since it existed, and I have never encountered problems that fit your description.

 

[Ren.182]

I used to have a P4 with HT before this current set-up. I never had problems either. Wierd.

 

[dream431ca]

Can you tell me your specs?

Hmm My computer specs are:

Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz

P4P800 Deluxe Asus motherboard

2Gig of ram

180GB hard drive

Radeon X850 XT (256MB) Videocard.

 

[Asus]

HT has been known to do that. If one thread stalls then the CPU has to clear it's cache and start over since they are sharing resources (1 CPU, 1 L2 cache etc).
There are a number of other applications (not just gaming) that there is actually a small decrease in performance with HT on although they generally arn't normal desktop apps.

 

[dream431ca]

HT has been known to do that. If one thread stalls then the CPU has to clear it's cache and start over since they are sharing resources (1 CPU, 1 L2 cache etc).
There are a number of other applications (not just gaming) that there is actually a small decrease in performance with HT on although they generally arn't normal desktop apps.

Cool. Thanks for the explanation...is there anyway to solve this?

 

[duffers20]

Cool. Thanks for the explanation...is there anyway to solve this?

Dont' know if there is any windows app that you could use to turn on/off HT because restarting and turning it on/off in the bios is a bit of a pain, but I have heard that it does cause a slight performance decrease in a number of different situations. Will try and find the benchmark tests I say ages ago on this.