Hyperthreading: Should I Care?

R3D

Just wondering what applications, and what functions in each application actually use hyperthreading, at least from a game art standpoint (there's no doubt that it greatly increases rendering performance).

I know that for the most part Substance Painter and Maya's viewport is GPU bound and that Marmoset is 100% GPU bound.  So I was just wondering, if I'm looking to buy a new CPU and only really intend to make game art, should I bother look at hyper threading performance?

poopipe

Yes.  There's plenty of stuff that isn't done on the gpu and the big name packages all take advantage of multithreading in one way our another. 

SonicBlue

You have to consider that the CPU has to feed information to the GPU, so, what you need to look for is a fast CPU that won't bottleneck your GPU, usually it's better to search for the one with fast single thread performance, I would avoid Xeons, usually they have slower clock speed (compared to i5 and i7) and as a result even if they may offer more cores, they'll be slower in general usage.

From what I can see Maya uses the CPU to navigate on the viewport (~50% CPU, 10-15% GPU) while Houdini uses more the GPU (~25% CPU, ~40% GPU). Compiling shaders on UE4 needs CPU power, not to mention if you want to bake Lightmaps, the same thing for the nodes in Substance Designer.

Which CPU were you considering?

R3D

poopipe said:

Yes.  There's plenty of stuff that isn't done on the gpu and the big name packages all take advantage of multithreading in one way our another. 

It's the "Or another" that i'd like to know specifically, since I dont use everything in each package.

SonicBlue said:

You have to consider that the CPU has to feed information to the GPU, so, what you need to look for is a fast CPU that won't bottleneck your GPU, usually it's better to search for the one with fast single thread performance, I would avoid Xeons, usually they have slower clock speed (compared to i5 and i7) and as a result even if they may offer more cores, they'll be slower in general usage.

From what I can see Maya uses the CPU to navigate on the viewport (~50% CPU, 10-15% GPU) while Houdini uses more the GPU (~25% CPU, ~40% GPU). Compiling shaders on UE4 needs CPU power, not to mention if you want to bake Lightmaps, the same thing for the nodes in Substance Designer.

Which CPU were you considering?

Just comparing the i7-8700k (3.7 ghz, 4.8ghz boost, 6 cores, 6 threads, 12 hyperthreads), since it has a similar real world performance to the i5-8400 (2.8ghz, 4.0ghz boost, 6 cores, 6 threads, 0 hyperthread) but is about $250 cheaper here.

There's no question that 8700k is a better cpu, I just don't know how much better it'll be in my specific user case. The money I can save will go to more RAM.

Blender rendering (Again I don't render much, mostly just painter/photoshop/maya viewport)



Video game performance

SonicBlue

I've looked at some benchmarks in the various websites, and the i5-8400 looks like a really nice CPU, though, at the same price range there's the newer Ryzen 5 2600X, while not being as fast in single thread performances, it offers multithread.

The question is, do you max out easily your whole CPU (100%), or you see mostly the usual 30-40% usage and everything slows down?