Is SL Core 2 Duo (Conro) ready?

I should be one of the (luckiest?) PC users when I get my hands on a Conro based PC's. Now for most of the non-PC-happy people who don't follow such developments, here's a link to a renowned (and one of many) websites which show Intel's new CPU to be very much king of the hill: Game Over? Core 2 Duo Knocks Out Athlon 64

Now for those who do care, and for those in the know, what will this mean for SL? Blazingly fast frame rates? An end to lag? Or terrible crashes followed by crashes and maybe some buggy game play followed by crashes?

Oh yeah, I'm going for an E6600 and will O/C the heck out of it *grins sadistically*. Has Linden Labs been paying attention and got their code ready for rapid execution? Please excuse my temporary nerdieness.

P.S. did a search before hand and couldn't find any similar topics, Core 2 Duo shipping to anticipated consumers on Monday.

I imagine it'll run fine, but not take advantage of the 64-bit architecture. It'll probably be a while before it does.

How exactly will it address lag (latency)? Does it upgrade me to fiber?

Sadly not Moran, but it could help reduce my problem of the screen updating slowly, and my AV moving slowly - as Webster defines it, " To walk or move slowly; to stay or fall behind; to linger or loiter." Which is exactly what it's like playing SL for me right now on my very old machine!

As for latency, it's well known that slow PC's can exhibit latency (another use of the word lag) when the CPU is so busy doing other thing's, it doesn't have the time/resources to deal with the little bits flying in from the weird wired web. So maybe it will? I don't know I don't have one yet I do sometimes experiance latency spikes when I'm multitasking

When you get your new computer, let us know how it works.

hehe will do, have to put it together first I just hope to be playing SL in it's true graphical glory, instead of just seeing pictures of it and wishing

Unfortunately, nothing.

A dual core CPU is pretty much the same thing as having two CPUs, just in a somewhat different format. As an owner of a dual Athlon MP 2000+, I can tell you that having more than one CPU does absolutely zilch for SL performance. SL maxes out one, the other one remains idle.

Now, if you have something else that requires a noticeable amount of CPU time running, then it will help by putting one task on one core, and one on the other. But SL on its own is completely incapable of taking advantage of it. So if all you have running is SL, you won't see any noticeable difference as compared to a single core CPU with the same characteristics.

This might change in the future however, as dual core CPUs are starting to become more popular. But supporting this kind of thing in a game is complicated, especially in one that wasn't designed with that in mind, and given how SL is currently going I'd say it would be a quite low priority change as well.

Actually, if support is added, the crashes are a quite possible result. Multithreading is a pretty tricky thing, and if not done right easily results in very nasty bugs that are impossible to reliably reproduce, and stuff that works well for some time, then suddenly breaks horribly.

If done right, you'd get higher framerates, but this kind of thing is tricky. Work would have to be split between processors, and an even division isn't always possible. So it could be very well that instead of doubling speed it increases by just say, 25%.

Single core is going the way of the Dodo, however untill game companies start to make thier games take advantage of multithreading having a multi core proc (2, 4, 6, 8, ect) will only benefit you by shifting single threaded work loads to lower worked cores.

However with a new wave of specility processors now (CPU, GPU, and PPU) game companies might take a baby step and allocate certain work loads to individual cores (core 1= physics, core 2= AI, core 3= mapping, ect).

Oh yeah, I know SL doesn't implement 64bit or multi core support, but the fact is just one core in Core 2 Duo kicks serious butt. Although dual core support would be great, I would be happy with just one core dealing well with SL. Considering an E6600 competes toe to toe with an FX-62, I'm expecting big things!

Good points guys.

I'd have to ask, if Windows is ready not SL.

Yeah, works great with Windows XP so say all the tests, shouldn't be an issue.

I just read up on it a bit and it appears to be mainly a notebook architecture.
I think there may be a couple of exceptions

http://www.intel.com/products/processor/coreduo/

this thread was sort of interesting.

http://www.devhardware.com/forums/intel-processors-30/intel-duo-processor-vs-intel-pentium-4t-75281.html

This is an interesting note.

Local forum member Gamer casually posted his first overclocking results with an Intel Duo Core T2600 clocked default at 2.16Ghz. Using a modified subzero cooling he was able to push the CPU to 3.4Ghz and run a CPU intensive SuperPi 1Mb calculation in 17.75 seconds; which is slightly faster than the current world record hold by Tom Holck with a P4 670 at 7.2Ghz! With less than halve the CPU cycles the new Duo Core proves to be quite the performer!

Of course that is hardware performance and does not address the issue of the software utilizing that cpu arrangement.

There are also core duo's available for the mini and Imachttp://www.ecost.com/ecost/ecmac/shop/showcaseb/default~showcaseb~mac_desktops~SubShowcase~Mac_mini.asp

The about-to-be-available New Intel Stuff is all Desktop based (although apparently one or two laptop mfrs will be putting them into portables just to be awkard). Don't confuse the existing "Core Duo" chips with the new Core 2 Duo range - the internal changes between them are extensive and result in a vast performance improvement for C2D.

Windows XP, both Home and Pro, have no deep-seated problems with dual-core processors (I can't guarantee you won't have a crap device driver which may cause problems, but it should be pretty unlikely). Depending on how you use your system, they probably won't give you anywhere near "double the speed" of an equivalent single-core CPU.

Precisely how much of an improvement a C2D processor would give to your SL experience depends on a whole bunch of factors - most notably, how fast your current system is! I'm making plans to do A Major PC Upgrade because I know the improvement from my creaky old AthXP1800+ setup will be very obvious - if you have a high end P4-type chip already, you may not be so impressed.

The best-case improvement of a dual-core cpu over an equivalent single-core one is for multitasking. One core can be looking after most of Windows's code, and various other bits (virus scanner, photoshop, firefox, etc.) and the other one is left free to run SL without those distractions. For this to be most effective, you'll need as much RAM as you can possibly afford. Given how much the SL client will use if given the chance, I'd stick my neck out and say that an SL "power system" will greatly benefit from having 2gb of RAM installed (that's how much I'm planning to have in my upgraded system). An adequate graphics card should, hopefully, go without saying.

To give you a sense perhaps of what to expect, I recently upgraded to a Athlon 64x2 3800+ along with a gForce 7600GT - my fps are usually in the 40-50fps range - with Photoshop and way too many web pages open. I have opened a copy of the main and preview at once and both running at the same time still have impressive performance (I locked a core per client).

One thing though - whenever I start SL, I have to manually set the CPU affinity or else SL runs like crud.

Eww Alondria, that's no good. If SL isn't going to take advantage of the second core, I would have guessed a tiny bit of code to somehow take care of it running poorly would be used.

Buxton Malaprop, heres what I have: A P4 1.6GHz, 512MB DDR 266, GF2 Ti.

And I'm going to a self built: E6600, 2GB DDR 667 CL:3, HIS X-1800 GTO (unlocked to 16 PP and overclocked when I'm done with it) along with lots of other goodies which I won't bore people with. I know a 76000 GT is supposed to be the card to get when using SL, but, I will be playing other games so went for the better card in general.

Infiniview Merit, it's so much more than that, but does take a lot of key notes from the successfull Dothan architecture. I.e. low power consumption, better heat dissipation, things AMD were the best at and Intel got terribly wrong unto Conro. I won't be breaking any world records with my O/C but I guess theres potential for someone to, 5GHz has been suggested as reachable for the X6900 that's comming shortly - maybe more.

I've been running dual-core for a little over a year now. I purchased it because I am always multi-tasking, and for that, there is a very notciable difference. As others have noted, there is no significant difference in performance when running SL alone. As far as I can tell, the two most important pieces of hardware that determine SL performance are your RAM, and your graphics card.

btw, SL has amazing performance with 2 x 7800 GTX in SLI config. I was getting FPS of 100-250 pre-1.7, but it has dropped since then. The only problem with running it in SLI, is that I can't then use more than one monitor, so it's rarely used.

So if looking to upgrade specifically for SL, I would first look to the graphics card and RAM.

the Core 2 Duo's will defintly run great, no question. There is nothing in them that is new that SL will support for a long long time, if ever... but they still will perform very good.

I have a Core Duo in my Macbook Pro, and its amazingly fast... cant wait to get a Core 2.

I think there is a way to do a slight edit to the .exe file to lock it to a single CPU, however I haven't actually done it and in reality, I should not have to do it - LL should either have it support dual cored cpu's or lock it to a single themselves, IMHO. Actually, I am okay with the fact it doesn't use both cores - I could see if they started to support it to max out both cores and I'd loose the ability to run whatever else at the same time as SL without speed issues.

Hiro Queso, I was really curious about what the real limitations of SL would be. I assumed it would be more to do with the un-optimized-code, that simply could not handle everything that was going on around it, and this would become a problem first in the CPU before it got to the GPU.

Compared to games like HL2, F.E.A.R, X3 etc, SL does not have top of the line eye-candy. I don't think it uses Shader 3.0? I could easily be wrong as I never looked hard into the real workings of SL, and got the impression also that everything was a generation behind at least (due to it being a perpetual-live-game, no criticsm intended).

Various websites have been showing that high end GPU's become the bottleneck in resolutions of 1280x1024 and above, with AA and AF turned up high/max. This often includes huge amount of bumpmaping, real time lighting with real time shadows, and various other pieces of wizardry (its magic to me because I dont know how it works properly). So, surely in SL, because it does not include as many top-features, the bottleneck would be the CPU?

Of course, this isn't including the RAM, I'm going for 2GB now and 4GB later idealy, but at that point 32bit code under windows becomes fairly limited (I think) because a single application can't address more memory than that?

I really look forward to pushing SL and seeing what's possible with the next generation of CPU's. I'd really love to get the game running at constant frame rates nearing 60FPS in highly populated rooms, but that may be a dream, who knows.

Missy Malaprop, I hear Apple are going to be putting Core 2 Duo in their new machines within the next few months. Imagine that will be totaly kick-ass, as they make such lovely computers/laptops.

And finally, yes, come on LL, auto assign to one CPU if you're software isn't going to use two. Surely all new software will have such a basic feature?