The cost of the system doesn't magically go away if you're upgrading. Yes, you've already spent it, but it's still there, and buying a cheapo cpu means you aren't leveraging your initial investment as well as you could have.oogaBooga wrote:We're talking about people who don't _need_ a new computer, just a new processor, so the cost of the system (which they already paid for) isnt being factored in.
Anyways, for the purposes they would use it for, the 53 dollar processor is much faster than they're used to, and for very little money. Nobody is suggesting they go out and buy an entirely new system.
Besides, I wouldn't pay 200 dollars for a CPU unless I had money to burn, and most people these days don't. I was appealing to the average joe, not MoneyBags McGee. Just enlightening people who may have the misconception that you have to spend in excess of 150$ for a CPU that meets their needs.
(Of course, if buying a more expensive CPU would also require a new motherboard, that would have to be taken into account.)
The multithreaded OpenGL driver needs to be explicitly enabled by a system call, and can actually decrease performance if you have too many state query calls which kill parallelism.haravikk wrote:I'd just like to throw in that for Mac users Leopard actually uses a helper thread for OpenGL (not always though, I've yet to find anything that describes the process properly), so running Myth with OpenGL rendering you may get that extra thread which makes it play a little bit nicer on multi-core machines as well.
I'm not sure making Myth support multi-threading better would help that much with hi-res content, as the main issue is loading the textures into VRAM and keeping the ones you need in there at all times. Unless a lot of swapping in and out of memory is occurring then the processor shouldn't matter that much.
source: http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/ ... n2085.html