What to upgrade?

Honestly, you would be surprised. some games have my friends i5's pinned at 100% usage while my friends i7 4770 is at 60% and my 5820K is at 45%

 

Well which i5? There's a lot of performance variation in the different models (lots of differences in an i7 too). My college slapped bottom of the barrel i5's in all the desktops and they are really not that quick. (I think they are 2500S's) For an i5 to do gaming, I would recommend a 4690(K if desired) or you can buck up the extra $75-100 and get an i7 4790K which will out perform the i5 in single core performance, also gives you 8 cores (4 physical, 4 hyper-threading)

 

The issue with an i7 for gaming is simple. Threads. Games dont tend to use more than 4.

 

This is true however, more threads is amazing for BeamNG (using multiple vehicles) and intense video rendering.

 

Video rendering does indeed love to use everything that is available.
BeamNG likes to throw each vehicle on its own thread too so thats a nice benefit, although whether its worth getting an i7 over an i5 just for BeamNG is upto the end user.

 

the i5 in question was a 4460
As for threads more games are deciding that they can utilize them hence why I went with a 5820K over a 6700K, also compute performance.

 

Cant argue with more games deciding to use them as there is 1 other game besides BeamNG that will. The Witcher 3, partly due to being a console port. The new consoles are octa core (although the task scheduler prevents anything but OS tasks on one of those cores leaving the game with 7).

 

Are games today suppose to use hyperthreading so lessen the load on a processor....I was just wondering

 

lessen the load less so, spread the load.

 

I knew it was that, I mean I have 16 theads and stuff so I dont see much of a load on my system but when I load up more cars and do stuff with AI the load increases because of what BeamNG is doing I suspect

 

A program on a computer runs as a thread. A single sequence of instructions.
A processor (and here I am counting a single CPU core as a processor) can only run 1 sequence of instructions at a time. A single sequence of instructions can only be executed by one processor at a time.

There is a timer within the processor that triggers a part of the OS to "pause" a thread and run another one, so 2 threads can share 1 core. Say this timer triggers every 10 milliseconds, a thread will run for 10 milliseconds and then another thread runs for 10 milliseconds and then another runs for 10 milliseconds. Slowly impacts performance, but this is how your PC manages to have over 50 tasks going at once when it only has say 4 cores.

But if a program can be multithreaded, say it consists of 3 threads. Thread 1 can run on one core, thread 2 can run on the second core and thread 3 can run on the 4th core (and windows has stuck other random shite on the 3rd core, because it can). All 3 threads get to run at once.

Windows doesnt use a fixed 10ms timer for each thread btw. It is flexible, it varies with load. Its quite good at finding a particular task needs a huge amount of time and just letting that task hog an entire core while windows then chucks all the other minor tasks on a different core out of its way.

But threads let you break a program across cores. Either because you need more raw performance, or because its blocked for I/O. I've written a project on a raspberry pi where I had the pi interfaced to some electronics for an elevator. Had a motor, some sensors to detect where the lift actually is and some buttons to call the lift to different floors. It also had to present a web server so my lift can be monitored from a webpage and also have it be called to different floors from the webpage rather than the buttons if need be.
Web server programming would involve the program stopping and waiting for the web connection, but what if there is no connection? My program stops at that point and cant do anything, it cant read the buttons, it cant operate the motor. The solution, break it down into threads. The webserver thread can sit waiting for a connection (and used a whopping 0% CPU time, until it served a page at which point it spiked to 1%) without stopping me being able to press the buttons to have the lift called to a different floor. All in all I broke it down far too much actually, it was 5 threads total when it didnt need to be, but it worked very nicely. I even had a PC application that could remotely control it rather than a web page being required.





Threads exist as they do allow easier multitasking mainly. And with that comes the ability for a game to have a thread dedicated to physics and a thread dedicated to AI, break the tasks down and spread them across cores to leverage the CPUs performance a little better.

BeamNG has its main thread. It then runs each vehicle in its own thread.

 

Weakest part in that build is the GPU. You might also want to get a better CPU (an i5-4460 would be a good choice) if you can afford it, but the graphics card should be a priority.
What's the upgrade budget? I could make some actual suggestions if I knew how much you can spend.

 

Upgrade budget is set at about 200.00 for now.

I am seriously considering the GTX750ti. I have a fairly good 550 watt PSU. Aside from the components listed , I have a single DVD drive ....

 

For $200 you can get something much better than a 750Ti. You can get a 2GB R9 380 for $190, you might even find a 4GB for that price.

Your PSU should be good enough if it's a decent unit that won't blow up at >300W load.