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Author Topic: i5 or i7?  (Read 2136 times)

dorf

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Re: i5 or i7?
« Reply #15 on: August 31, 2011, 05:04:09 am »

The answer is yes, you need an OpenGL-compatible gfx card (you probably have one of those).
Though, the answer is probably no, if you are on Linux and use the TEXT rendering mode.

DF uses more than one thread, but most work is indeed done by a single thread.
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maanahr

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Re: i5 or i7?
« Reply #16 on: September 02, 2011, 08:48:14 am »

The i7, and I believe the i5 as well, use Intel Turbo Boost, which means it'll dynamically over/underclock cores based on their usage (and temperature/power limits), which in my experience does help a bit.

But if your OS isn't aware of this and naively spread's DF's cycles across multiple cores, those cores run at an average lower speed. Restricting DF's affinity to a single core can help it in that case.
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Putnam

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Re: i5 or i7?
« Reply #17 on: September 03, 2011, 11:58:02 pm »

The i7, and I believe the i5 as well, use Intel Turbo Boost, which means it'll dynamically over/underclock cores based on their usage (and temperature/power limits), which in my experience does help a bit.

But if your OS isn't aware of this and naively spread's DF's cycles across multiple cores, those cores run at an average lower speed. Restricting DF's affinity to a single core can help it in that case.

Oh, is that what's going on? I was like "oh, worldgen uses 100% of the CPU? Well, that makes perfect sense anyway..."

Then I set the affinity to use two cores

"Wait, why is it suddenly using less than 100% on the second core?"
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