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hawkeye Mar 4, 2016 @ 11:19am
Does turning off i7 hyperthreading increase game performance?
I discovered an article that said the i7-6700K has "inverse hyperthreading" which boosts single-thread performance.

http://www.myce.com/news/skylake-cpus-have-inverse-hyper-threading-to-boost-single-thread-performance-77011/

Out of curiosity I turned off hyperthreading on my i7-2600 today to see what would happen. Passmark single-thread score went from 1850 to 2300, which is a significant improvement and is near i7-4790K performance.

Has anyone tried this in practice with games?

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Showing 1-5 of 5 comments
Bad 💀 Motha Mar 4, 2016 @ 12:14pm 
No; it used to back in the days when games ONLY could use 1 - 2 cores and HT could get in your way of performance when u were using say Pentium4 or Core2Quad and using say Win98 or Win2000; Today this is a NIL issue.
Last edited by Bad 💀 Motha; Mar 4, 2016 @ 12:14pm
#1
_I_ Mar 4, 2016 @ 2:39pm 
on the first gen i7, possibly depending on the game
but ht does make the cpu run hotter when overclocked
#2
Bad 💀 Motha Mar 4, 2016 @ 5:59pm 
Which shouldn't matter cause if u even think about OC'ing; u should invest in good cooling.
#3
FluffyPinkDecoyBunny Mar 4, 2016 @ 7:08pm 
You shouldn't have to turn it off. I know there was a CoD game or maybe a Battlefield game that came out 3, 4....hell, maybe 5 years ago that had issues with HT. The game would run so much better when it was disabled.

I do believe the issue was eventually fixed from a game patch, but it was rather annoying for those that did have i7 CPUs.

I can't say I've heard of any recent issues with games and HT.
#4
Azza ☠ Mar 4, 2016 @ 7:48pm 
An i7 CPU is similar to the i5 CPU, with quad core, but has Hyperthreading.

So what is Hyperthreading? It's two threads to each of those cores.

This allows applications/games to stack different processes on each of those cores, maximising their work load greatly, rather than idling or just half used. However to do this, the app/game must be coded in a certain way.

Quite a few games (specially the older ones) don't make use of Hyperthreading, therefore i5 CPU can be more optimal for them to game upon.

Multi-tasking, multi-threaded apps and games will however benefit with Hyperthreading.
#5
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All Discussions > Steam Forums > Hardware and Operating Systems > Topic Details
Date Posted: Mar 4, 2016 @ 11:19am
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