Tech question for the Valve Guru's

[What the Hell?]

I have noticed that at times the Lords of Valve saunter amongst the unwashed fans of Half life 2 here, so I am sending out an open question in hopes that one may walk by this post and pass me a suitable answer.

Looking at just how much better the athalon 64 processors work with HL 2 compared to Intel cpu's, I wanted to know why Valve didn’t use any of the Intel’s advanced features, such as SSE3 or Hyper-Threading, which would have significantly sped up Intel Pentium 4 based platforms when playing the game.

I'm seeing about a 15 - 20 FPS difference between the 2, which surprises me. ( this includes a d9c compliant high end video card, and 2 G of memory, the only difference would be the cpu)

Can anyone from Valve explain the reasons? Thanks in advance

 

[moominpapa]

Coding in specialisations like that would have taken a long time, and would have only benefited a small percentage of users, since looking at previous Steam surveys not that many people have Hyper-Threading CPUs. This would have made further delays in the release of the game, and I think Valve were far more interested in making the game as good and bug free as possible as they could prior to launch, rather than trying to gain 5-10% performance enhancements (which aren't that noticable) to only some users.

I seem to recall that being the answer in some interview somewhere, but I cba to look.

 

[Cole]

You know why?
Athlon 64 Processors are simply better for gaming.
Think of it like this:
An Amd Processor is at 2.0ghz and an Intel processor is at 3.6ghz
The intel one looks faster right? Well Ghz arn't everything. AMD uses a very smart design for there bandwidth, and they can do much more at once.
So what does that mean?
Lets say you have a Truck named Intel that can go 80mph and carry 2 tons. Now lets say you have a Truck named AMD that can go 40mph and carry 5-6 tons.

Half-Life 2 dosn't treat intel or amd better than one another. That hasn't been there big marketing, its been ATI that has been it's big marketing partner.

So it is a simple fact that AMD processors are better for gaming than intel processors.

 

[DiSTuRbEd]

If you have a tech question for VALVe Guru's best idea would to be to go to their forum.....

 

[Sheikah42]

i coudln't get my new laptop with an amd :-(

but i have a question now, since amd's are better for gaming, is there anything that pentiums are better for?

 

[Tomarru]

Video encoding or rendering is generally where intel shine however with dual core processors emerging even that could be a level playing field.

 

[Cole]

Multi-Tasking. Like normal desktop applications. I also believe there better for video editing and stuff like that. You could put this in the hardware forum, I think Asus could answer this the best.

 

[DrDevin]

I have noticed that at times the Lords of Valve saunter amongst the unwashed fans of Half life 2 here, so I am sending out an open question in hopes that one may walk by this post and pass me a suitable answer.

Looking at just how much better the athalon 64 processors work with HL 2 compared to Intel cpu's, I wanted to know why Valve didn’t use any of the Intel’s advanced features, such as SSE3 or Hyper-Threading, which would have significantly sped up Intel Pentium 4 based platforms when playing the game.

I'm seeing about a 15 - 20 FPS difference between the 2, which surprises me. ( this includes a d9c compliant high end video card, and 2 G of memory, the only difference would be the cpu)

Can anyone from Valve explain the reasons? Thanks in advance

Hyper threading only allows 2 programs that need different parts of the CPU to use each part at the same time increasing multitasking performance. Since HL2 is single threaded and needs every part of the CPU at once HT would probably slow down the game, since it would be trying to use 2 CPUs that only have the resources of 1. Also SSE3 is avaliabe on the AMD platform. With SSE3, Intel added 10 new instructions targeted at SIMD as well as 3 other instructions that don't touch the SSE registers (fisttp, monitor, mwait). Here's a brief list of SSE3 instructions and what they are for:

x87 floating point to integer conversion (fisttp)
Complex arithmetic (addsubps, addsubpd, movsldup, movshdup, movddup)
Video encoding (lddqu)
Graphics (haddps, hsubps, haddpd, hsubpd)
Thread synchronization (monitor, mwait)

Info and performance: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2350

There does not seem to be much performance gain and they would have to recompile everything for maybe a little extra performance. Also HL2 is sensitive to memory bandwidth as is shown here:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2330&p=3
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2330&p=4

AMD's CPU's can provide a lot of bandwidth and a shorter pipeline architecture seems to be better for gaming so I just dont think intel could catch up to the athlon 64 even with more optimizations (besides AMD would benefit too).