Quad core vs single?

Seeing as vvvv isn’t multithreaded, would a pentium 4 outperform a quad core (with comparable clock rates)? what are the best benchmarks to look at - games?

my quad core q6600 rated at 2.4ghz maxes at 25% pretty rapidly and then the frame rates and video playback start suffering. I was wondering if it’s worth getting a cheap single core pentium 641 (3.2ghz) or similar off ebay, just for vvvv?

i’d say dual core with a very high clock rate would be better than a single core, because videos and other DirectShow stuff gets calculated on the other core…

if you have the time, try to play 3 hi-res videos with vvvv and see if they get distributed to the other cores…

i had to deactivate all cores except one for several projects due to lags and missing performance. so i guess, quadcore !can! be good, but can be pain as well…

i’m losing lots of time to the preparegraph, i think the following are my mine time takers:

  • Midi control devices
  • EX transformations

Are either of these likely to be shifted to other cores?

If i make my own dll plugins to take on processor intensive tasks, can these be easily shifted to other cores?

Also Core 2 Duo’s have a much more advanced instruction set than P4’s. Each core of a c2d will blow p4 out of the water

i’m losing lots of time to the preparegraph, i think the following are my mine time takers

This morning I updated my ATI driver and suprinsingly my patch was runnning faster → 7fps. It gave me a remarkable boost at preparegraph. But I guess you’ve already the latest driver, dont you?

Once I tried V4 at a quadcore: two CPUs were running high, the rest were relaxed.
May be it does make sense to run two instances of V4 simultaneousely and bound them to two CPUs each

while vvvv itself currently uses indeed only one core, there are many operating system functions (video decompression, directx functions, file io, etc.) which may take advantage of multi-core cpus. so its not a bad idea to use multicore processors, but it will very much depend on your patches.

i bet its possible to spawn separate threads from plugins, which allow you to use multiple cores, but you might run into synchronisation problems: by actually taking advantage of parallelism it will generally not be clear that the output of your node in one frame belongs to the input of the same frame.

its one of the great things in vvvv is, that with the most nodes calculation takes no virtual time.

oschatz, should 2 core may successfully used one for a tracking task, the other for rendering ?
be aware , i m until now ( snif snif) monocore… that s why i m asking … before buying…