Is the hyperthreaded feature much different from what my Athlon can do?

from Stardock Forums
Is it mostly a time saving thing, or will the AI behave smarter with hyperthreading on? Sounds like it might jsut be something that would be useful on Gigantic size galaxies.

~SDC~
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Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
Galciv is multithreaded and will work just fine on an athlon system. Intel has hyperthreading for their top of the line processors which will speed up multithreaded programs.
I am running galciv on a 1900+ athlon XP, and I am having no performance problems at all.
No, the AI won't be any smarter one way or the other.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
I asked a question before relating to hyperthreading, and the only response I got said you have to activate it in the pref.ini file in the GalCiv directory. When I did enable the hyperthreading, the game crashed. And yes, I have a hyperthreading enabled machine (3.06 Ghz CPU, Granite Bay MoBO, Win XP Pro, etc). It makes me curious as to whether the multi-threading is actually functional now or not, but the game plays fast enough on my machine that I'm not sure I'd know the difference.

~SDC~
Elemental: Reforged
Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
As an aside, bear in mind that I never got an official company response on this issue.

~SDC~
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
Hyperthreading is a processor-level technology that should be more or less transparent to user-level processes. Essentially what it does is prevent the need for context switching to handle multiple threads. Previous Intel and AMD CPU's were basically single-threaded devices, that would switch between different threads regularly, making it look like more than one process was executing simultaneously. These switches cost processing resources, however, and by reducing or eliminating them Intel can improve performance in certain types of applications. The application itself doesn't have to realize it's happening at all, and it won't make the game any smarter, just somewhat faster. I'm not sure what "activating" it would accomplish, though I would be interested to find out.
The bottom line is that, if your processor has HT built in, it's being used, whether the program knows it or not.

DC
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top
Oh. And hyperthreading is not the same as multithreading. Multithreading will work pretty much regardless of what CPU you have (the last single-threaded OS in common usage was DOS). Hyperthreading will simply may multithreading more efficient.

DC