dual core cpu program support?

Question

is it really that even if i have a dual core processor, if the application doesn't support multithreading, the process time will take exactly like what it take on single core?

does games like battlefeild 2, are non-multithreaded applications?

how about other applications like office, explorer, will they benefit from the dual core?

Answer 1

the operating system spreads the threads running on the machine as evenly as it can, if a program is single threaded, it cannot split it, but it can move all other threads to the other processor, so for gaming with single threaded games, this generally means the operating system running on one core and the game on the other, generally resulting in a gain of aproximately equal to 100mhz-200mhz faster in terms of if it were a single core processor, so its not much

i do not know how many games are multi threaded, but they dont really make single core processors fast enuf that ud be able to play the latest and greatest anymore, now its all d core so u dont have a choice anyways

the only game i know is oblivion which is multithreaded

also its not just like either 1 threaded or 2 threaded, there can be any number, and there are such thing as quad core processors, having more threads than cores is ok, but having less will result in the inability to spread the load evenly among cores

Answer 2

Correct.
But there are some downloads for the AMD dual core units (posted by AMD) that allow games to benefit from dual core technology.

* AMD Dual-Core Optimizer - The AMD Dual-Core Optimizer can help improve some PC gaming video performance by compensating for those applications that bypass the Windows API ...
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html

If you have an Intel .... no such luck.

regards,
Philip T