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Does Hyper Thread help multitask?

M

mrthanhnguyen

Joined
Aug 27, 2011
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System Specs
Processor Intel core i9 13900ks sp117 direct die
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I have 2500k and have problem when playing bf4 in 1 screen and youtube or watch some flash movie on the second monitor, I will have some lag in bf4. I don't know if 3770k with HT on will give me lag free while doing 2 things on 2 screens? thanks.
 
That's likely more of a GPU/GPU driver issue. Hyperthreading (Symmetrical Multi-Threading) is effectively two doors to each physical core and the physical core switches between the two. It is very well done and, without benchmarking, really shows no loss of performance.

If you're using the 670 in your specs, I'd start with updating the drivers if you haven't already.
 
I always use the latest drive. I don't have any issue while playing bf4 and doing nothing else on the second monitor. It lag only when i do something on the second screen like watching youtube, watch flash movie. I ask the 3770k because while playing bf4, i see some core of 2500k jumps up to 90% usage. that explains why i do other task while playing causes lag. The cpu can't handle it. I google the 4770k and found it uses only 50% while playing bf4 and 2500k uses over 80% on that site. Maybe more room to do something else when playing bf4 with a better cpu?
 
why not use the HD3000 to drive to the 2nd monitor for video watching and using your 670 to play the games. That's how I use the HD4600 from my 4790K. However, i think windows 7 isn't as robust in supporting this configuration as Win8.
 
mrthanhnguyen said:
I have 2500k and have problem when playing bf4 in 1 screen and youtube or watch some flash movie on the second monitor, I will have some lag in bf4. I don't know if 3770k with HT on will give me lag free while doing 2 things on 2 screens? thanks.
Click to expand...

Everyone has lag in BF4.......its BF4.

I doubt you'll notice much difference going from an 2500k @ 4.5GHz to 3770k. If your only issue is bF4 I would suggest living with it.

Have you monitored your RAM usage. BF4 uses a lot of RAM by itself . The activity the other screen could be eating into the memory resources? EA's recommendation is for 8GB of RAM. Which you only barely meet. Once you factor in all this extra multi-tasking you might require more.

http://www.battlefield.com/uk/battlefield-4/pc
 
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ram usage is about 6gb when playing bf4. I don't know how much if i have youtube on the second monitor, but I think the problem causes lag when I have 2 things running on 2 monitors at the same time is the CPU. BF4 eats too much cpu. It shows 100% cpu usage when playing bf4. Msi afterburn shows each core jumps randomly from 50-90% usage, so there is no much room left for other application. The system is fine if I play some MP3 in the second screen or watching some downloaded movie. The lag just kicks in when I watch something online like youtube or streaming netflix, or local flash based movie.

this guy has 4770k and cpu load is only 50%
 
Multithreading might help, though you didn't post how much memory you have (or you did and I didn't see it)

Dent1 said:
Everyone has lag in BF4.......its BF4.

I doubt you'll notice much difference going from an 2500k @ 4.5GHz to 3770k. If your only issue is bF4 I would suggest living with it.

Have you monitored your RAM usage. BF4 uses a lot of RAM by itself . The activity the other screen could be eating into the memory resources? EA's recommendation is for 8GB of RAM. Which you only barely meet. Once you factor in all this extra multi-tasking you might require more.

http://www.battlefield.com/uk/battlefield-4/pc
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I get 60+fps on my rig while watching a movie and downloading at the same time, all on different monitors. Not everyone lags.
 
I have 144fps when playing and watching on 2 screens, but when there are 2 things on 2 screens ,fps sometimes goes down to 70-90 for a few seconds and it makes a little jerking and may cause 1 death. Im not sure a 4770k will give me butter smooth or not if I do 2 things on 2 screens. If anyone here has a 4770k and similar to gtx 670, I want to see if u can play bf4 on 1 screen and watching something like youtube on the other screen to see if fps goes down below 144 or not.
 
mrthanhnguyen said:
I have 144fps when playing and watching on 2 screens, but when there are 2 things on 2 screens ,fps sometimes goes down to 70-90 for a few seconds and it makes a little jerking and may cause 1 death. Im not sure a 4770k will give me butter smooth or not if I do 2 things on 2 screens. If anyone here has a 4770k and similar to gtx 670, I want to see if u can play bf4 on 1 screen and watching something like youtube on the other screen to see if fps goes down below 144 or not.
Click to expand...
What settings are you playing on..? Because my 660 doesn't come close to 100fps on ultra.
 
all low, blur amount is 0, 1080p 144hz
yes I never get close to 100 fps on ultra too.

ultra: this is when I played on an old monitor
 
Why would you do both at once? Not trying to be funny
 
coz my brother wants to watch some movie and take a peak at me while Im playing. Sometimes I listen to youtube while playing too.
 
Have you tried running BF4 on low settings to see if both run smooth?
 
More things to try : turn off GPU acceleration in browser for flash and similar ... also it may have something with gpu having exclusive fullscreen mode on the first monitor - try also running BF4 in windowed borderless.
 
To answer the title question :

I have a 4770K - and It's a bit of a mixed bag with HT for me.

Anything that is NOT really really well optimized for many threads ( MOST games - and yes many games do use more than one core but when you step from 4 cores ALREADY on a 4770K to 8 virtual cores with HT it usually makes no difference or gets even slower ) seems to do better with HT off , but things like video rendering or properly optimized multi-threaded benchmarks / winrar and such seem to do better with HT on.

For me it really depends what I'm doing I normally leave HT OFF because the large majority of games run better, but if I am doing any real amount of video recoding (xx264) or similar it really does make enough difference to turn it on for that, because it really is faster.
 
Well your ,memory comes into play with multitasking. Especially if your editing video and have a gaming running and trying to do something else at the same time. But I always leave HT on and my CPU just eats stuff up. So with a GTX 670 on Ultra your not going to see 100 fps
 
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BazookaJoe said:
For me it really depends what I'm doing I normally leave HT OFF because the large majority of games run better, but if I am doing any real amount of video recoding (xx264) or similar it really does make enough difference to turn it on for that, because it really is faster.
Click to expand...
I play most games with HTT on and BOINC at 100%. The only ones I have to stop BOINC on are heavily multithreaded games that have one thread waiting for another so things get choppy.

Jetster said:
Well your ,memory comes into play with multitasking. Especially if your editing video and have a gaming running and trying to do something else at the same time. But I always leave HT on and my CPU just eats stuff up
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I think this might be the crux of it. 8 GiB is barely enough for BF4. It's likely having to shuffle memory around a lot and when you throw another program in on top of that (browser + streaming) it makes the memory fight even bigger. Also can't forget that the GPUs and operating system need a lot as well.

I'd recommend leaving the Task Manager open on that second monitor, start everything up and keep an eye on CPU usage and Memory -> Available. If Memory -> Available falls to three digits or even two digits, there's a big problem. If your CPU is hitting 100%, that's also a potential problem and you should investigate the Processes tab to figure out what is fighting over it.
 
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Try manually increasing the page file system as well.
Going by info I read last week on a Microsoft knowledge base article virtual memory can assist with intensive applications.
 
BiggieShady said:
More things to try : turn off GPU acceleration in browser for flash and similar ... also it may have something with gpu having exclusive fullscreen mode on the first monitor - try also running BF4 in windowed borderless.
Click to expand...

Yeah.
Been into computers since Windows 95, even if little noobish about it, and was amazed when facing similar problem.
Realized that there are still things very unoptimized, or bugged, as web browsing.
Flash based thing might be a problem.

Another simple thing, is to try a different browser.
Simple as that.
I had a very weak computer not so long ago, and was amazed to see that Firefox and Chrome gave much different results on performance, CPU usage and GPU usage.
(even if I don't like google that much...)

If it gives nothing for you, sorry.
 
interesting. So I really debated about the 4770k and the 4690k when I was building my machine. Looks like I would have saw no difference or even a gain.
 
Champ said:
interesting. So I really debated about the 4770k and the 4690k when I was building my machine. Looks like I would have saw no difference or even a gain.
Click to expand...
Well games are like that. Even when they are multithreaded that is largely asymmetrical ... one heavy thread and couple of light to medium ones - that heavy draw calling thread needs to finish the current frame for the next frame to be processed, so in the end that draw calling tread sets the limit and only performance per core and higher clocks really pushes the fps up.
 
its definitely a video issue - flash is terrible for it, make sure hardware acceleration is disabled in the browser and in flash.
 
BiggieShady said:
Well games are like that. Even when they are multithreaded that is largely asymmetrical ... one heavy thread and couple of light to medium ones - that heavy draw calling thread needs to finish the current frame for the next frame to be processed, so in the end that draw calling tread sets the limit and only performance per core and higher clocks really pushes the fps up.
Click to expand...
New engines like Frostbite 3 and I assume Unreal 4 are pretty good about synchronous multithreading for drawing frames. Games a few years ago were (still are) pretty bad about this.

We also can't forget Mantle and Direct3D 12 significantly reducing the CPU load for GPU tasks.
 
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