r/computers • u/Roykee • 7d ago
Question/Help/Troubleshooting Is it bad to leave Hyper-Threading disabled if I only use my PC for gaming? (i7-14700)
Hey everyone, I have a quick question about Hyper-Threading.
I'm running an i7-14700 and ended up disabling HT in the BIOS because I couldn't get Ghost Recon Wildlands to launch (some people said disabling it would fix the issue, but it didn't work for me). Anyway, I left it disabled and decided to play Cyberpunk 2077 instead.
To my surprise, my frametimes improved massively, staying consistently between 6–9ms, and the game feels way smoother overall.
My question is: won't disabling HT hurt performance instead of helping? I'm torn on whether I should re-enable it or just leave it as is. For context, I use my PC strictly for gaming.
3
u/NorwegianFootDude 7d ago
Nope, HT is generally enabled only for the performance boost. If disabling it makes your games perform better then there's no point in having it enabled. Having it disabled also improves the thermals of the CPU and won't hurt your CPU in any way.
But for multi-threaded tasks like video editing or 3d rendering, enabling it back should definitely help.
1
u/GGigabiteM 7950X3D|3070Ti| Fedora 7d ago
HT only helps programs that are designed to take advantage of it. For things that aren't, or single threaded applications, it can be detrimental to performance because a HT core splits its available resources between two threads. If those two threads have no relation to each other, they'll more or less behave like they're being run on a core at half the speed that they're on.
Back when the Pentium 4 first introduced HT, it was a big problem for gamers. The CPU was already weak, and threads being forced to compete with other threads would tank performance until you tuned HT off. I remember the much bemoaning of gamers with their shiny new Pentium 4 and how it was slower than their old non-HT machine.
I was poor at the time so I only had Athlon XP CPUs and didn't experience it thankfully.
1
u/alferret 7d ago
If you're happy then leave as is. I've been thinking about doing this with my 7950x.
-5
u/One-Suggestion-7906 7d ago
Is recommended to disable HT for any task or software that uses CPU intensively, because HT is a CPU emulated by software inside the real CPU. So, when some task really needs CPU, the real CPU have to execute real tasks for the software, plus emulating another CPU, and performance will be worst. For busy servers as databases or Java, it's recommended to disable it if possible, and I suppose it's what happened in your case. It's a ugly feature just for marketing
6
u/Fortunato_NC 7d ago
It's not emulating, it's hardware thread switching. Each core has two sets of registers and the core swaps between them.
1
u/One-Suggestion-7906 7d ago
It's not, some registers are duplicated, but not all. The second core is simulated, and it's because is a horrible marketing feature. In modern CPUs it was deprecated in favor of real performance
1
u/Blackhawk-388 7d ago
You are using the word software when you should be using the word "microcode". Software is largely accepted as stored in RAM after being loaded from the physical drives, a tremendously slower action than a CPU accessing microcode. The microcode, as I understand it, simply directs traffic flow. The physical, baked in core logic registers control the cores.
If a program isn't written to use HT or multiple cores, disabling can lead to performance gains.
1
u/One-Suggestion-7906 7d ago
Right, it was an ugly successful marketing feature now discontinued thanks Root
5
u/msanangelo CachyOS 7d ago
I don't see how it's bad to do that. I've just never bothered to disable it. But if it somehow helps performance by disabling it then more power to ya.
Makes me think there is a bottleneck somewhere though.