So I just bought a sweet AMD Hex. And was wondering what multi-core support will be like. Dual, Quad? I can only hope they will patch in Hex support but at the very least this game should be optimized for Quads. If it is optimized for 4+ cores then we should expect an HD experience probably crisper than what we see with Rage or Arkham City. With all that said, anyone know or have an educated guess?

Exactly what I expected it to be about.

And I doubt there is 6-core support, but 4 cores is plenty anyway. It's a good buy for the future though.

yup, exactly what we thought it was about.

there has been no official word on this but it is being developed for xbox which has 3 cores. how many cores it will support for pc will depend on how much work they put into porting it over. later today we should get official specs (crosses fingers) so we should know for sure then.

I wouldn't be surprised if it distributed workload across all 6+ cores, but it's unlikely it will be CPU bound enough to make a difference beyond 4 cores.

Well if its any consolation, I would be willing to bet that any increase in graphics in Skyrim over Oblivion would be because of multi-threading efficiency. Multiple cores and programming to utilize that many were just beginning when Oblivion was being created. Its doubtful that the developers really knew how to fully utilize the 6 cores that the xbox had. Its multiple cores being its only real technological achievement at the time. Skyrim is likely to use more cores and be more efficient at using them to squeeze whatever capability out of that old box that it can to make up for the serious memory restriction.

How much of that will carry over to the PC version, who knows.

AFAIK the Xbox has 3 cores and 2 threads per core; not 6 real physical cores on the chip.

Games dont make any use of multithreading, only actual physical cores.

And more cores =/= better. AMD hex / octo core CPUs are consistently behind the I5 2500k in every single game.

False. My hex's benchmark blew every i5 out of the water. Plus with the AM3 Socket It is future proof up to 6 cores and still cheaper than intel. My room mate has a Intel build he paid $200 more for and it trails behind my AMD build.

Hopefully it will be optimized for 8 integer cores and 4 floating point cores. Just wishful thinking.

Completely wrong, you dont know what you're talking about.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/203?vs=109

The slowest I5 CPU consistently beats the fastest X6 Phenom

Now if we try looking at a stock speed I5 2500k:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/203?vs=288

The 2500k 'blows every Phenom X6 out of the water'.

Theres a reason why AMD CPUs are cheap - you get exactly what you pay for. AM3 is no where near as future proofed as Ivy Bridge ready P67 / Z68 boards are. Number of cores is 100% meaningless on AMD CPUs when none of them can even match an Intel quad core.

I'll believe it when I see it. I'm expecting to see one of my cores doing all the work, while a few others barely have anything going on. I doubt they will have optimized it enough on pc to use a full quad, I doubt the game is stressful enough to use even 2 cores full potential. Having 6 cores is a waste for gaming too IMO. I hope you do a lot of video editing etc.

Honestly I'd like to know what the hell else you thought this thread would be about

Uhm, probably not 6 cores, but it will support quad cores, so it'll be fine.

But that's good. It allow you to then shift other programs to the unused cores to alleviate stress on the "gaming" cores

Even while gaming and having other programs running, a quad core isnt going to reach anywhere close to 100% load, so setting thread affinities to every program you have running is simply going to a pointless waste of time.

I'm interested in that myself.

I understand, but you must agree there are times when it will. Also you don't know what those other programs assigned to the cores may do, and if one of them suddenly uses 75% (antivirus) and your game starts to lag you'd be glad you set them.

Floating point, you say? Well, the game is supposedly set to be released on the PS3...

I asked this in another thread, but this seems a more appropriate platform for this question:

Can someone with Skyrim confirm if it takes advantage of the multi-core CPUs prevalent in the market today? Unlike Oblivion

Yes, it does. However, I read one problem someone with an i7 had was the game using only one core until he disabled multi-threading. Not sure how common this problem is though.

On my i5 2500k setup, I'm seeing 70+ percent load on all four cores by way of the Task Manager performance tab viewed on my secondary display while playing, so it certainly appears to me that it supports quad core setups.

Awesome - thanks for the responses guys!

Didnt expect to see my own threat come back from the dead at 3am. But so far so good im running skyrim at max no issues on my hex