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I have an Intel i7 processor with 4 physical cores and 8 logical cores. If I were to use the software renderer with multicore enabled, would I select 3 or 7 in the multi-threading option?

You'd want 7

As many as it takes before fps falls, or at least till it stops gaining fps with each incremental increase in number of threads being used.

I've been testing the difference between 3 cores and 7 cores and it seems to not have any effect at all. Should there be a noticeable difference?

In SW mode, the GS% cranks up to 99-100% as the GS work from the gpu is now being absorbed by the cpu (EE% is pure cpu regardless). So when you want extra SW rendering threads you are trying to disperse the workload among the threads..

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So if you are not getting anywhere increasing the threads you are a) probably not in SW mode or b) as good as your cpu is going to get.

I'd go with somewhere around 4 sw rendering threads. The more threads you use, the higher the management overhead and the smaller the gain becomes. 3 or 4 is very nice already.

On default settings PCSX2 already uses 2 cores - EE+VUs and GS. If you use MTVU, then already 3 cores. Assuming that HT logical cores are not nearly as useful as physical cores, you're left with 1 extra rendering thread to use before you start taking resources from the other cores (which could still be ok if on a specific game they're not fully used anyway), or 2 extra threads if you don't use MTVU.

But much simpler, a method which will work on any system and take into account all relevant parameters: per game, as long as you add threads and your (unlimited) FPS rises, that's good. Once it starts dropping, you've added too many.

Share your results.