FS does not take advantage of four cores all the time, none of the physics calculations or object drawing calculations take advantage of quad cores. The only thing that will use four cores with the new service pack 2 is texture loading.
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Flight Simulator
- Thread starter Mad_CatMk2
- Start date
FS does not take advantage of four cores all the time, none of the physics calculations or object drawing calculations take advantage of quad cores. The only thing that will use four cores with the new service pack 2 is texture loading.
I think you mean Service Pack 1. SMP support was added in SP1. And, it's not just texture loading that is SMP aware. The spline loading and rendering is also SMP aware. But that's it. None of the AI or airfoil models are SMP aware, which are the real killers for FPS in a flight simulator.
DairyCreamer
n00b
- Joined
- May 13, 2008
- Messages
- 3
Ok... so.
Knowing what you just said, svet, should I look for the higher raw clock speed of 2 cores in the E8400, or go for the Quad?
It seems like getting to 3.6 GHz on the E8400 is fairly common, but getting there on the Q6600 is a bit of a feat, and "only" 3.2 GHz is common.
Seeing as the price point is so darn close right now, it's hard to know the best to choose. I just keep going back and forth in my head over it, and I feel like it's gonna end up as a coin toss. FS is THE game I intend to benchmark my system by, and if it's smooth, I'm happy.
~Nate
Knowing what you just said, svet, should I look for the higher raw clock speed of 2 cores in the E8400, or go for the Quad?
It seems like getting to 3.6 GHz on the E8400 is fairly common, but getting there on the Q6600 is a bit of a feat, and "only" 3.2 GHz is common.
Seeing as the price point is so darn close right now, it's hard to know the best to choose. I just keep going back and forth in my head over it, and I feel like it's gonna end up as a coin toss. FS is THE game I intend to benchmark my system by, and if it's smooth, I'm happy.
~Nate
My personal opinion is that a dual core is sufficient for the parts of FSX that are SMP aware to help your load times out. But, for actually flying, I'd get a CPU with the fastest clock rate I could afford.
Why is FSX so hard on modern hardware? It's not like it's a really pretty game or has intense action at every moment during flight. I use both FSX with all the Megascenery packs, as well as X-Plane 9 and the difference in framerates is like night and day. X-Plane is smooth as glass and FSX though smooth has a vastly reduced framerate. Is it just down to bad coding?
Just for a bit of an anecdote or "supporting evidence"...
At my last job we were demoing FSX at a few shows. We actually were quite successful running the demo on with a QX6700 and a 945 Intel board, using only the onboard GMA graphics accelerator. It worked great, with much of the graphics features enabled. I think we were just using a 19" LCD, but the demonstration remains relevant.
It just goes to show, this program really is CPU limited.
At my last job we were demoing FSX at a few shows. We actually were quite successful running the demo on with a QX6700 and a 945 Intel board, using only the onboard GMA graphics accelerator. It worked great, with much of the graphics features enabled. I think we were just using a 19" LCD, but the demonstration remains relevant.
It just goes to show, this program really is CPU limited.
Bleedblue12345
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 1, 2004
- Messages
- 1,942
FSX has an astronomical amount of of CPU calculations to do.
When you consider that you have to render hundreds of vehicles, thousands of scenery objects, astronomical amounts of texture data, physics data, the calculations really do add up.
When you consider that you have to render hundreds of vehicles, thousands of scenery objects, astronomical amounts of texture data, physics data, the calculations really do add up.
Aha, you just stumbled on one of the biggest tweaks in FSX. Depending on your complexity, cloud rendering can be a MAJOR drain on compute time. If you're doing a lot of IFR in the clouds, then you can (and should) scale back the draw distance since you can't see anything more than 15 feet in front of you anyway.
I guess the big lesson here is that there is no ONE set of settings that will work for all scenarios. Take your usage and then tweak the simulator to meet what you plan on doing.
FYI, most of the nVidia Crash to Desktop issues seem to have been resolved with Forceware 175.16. Several folks, myself included, have re-installed SP2 (never had any issues with SP1) and are happy to report that the crashes occurring in full-screen mode when trying to access the menu bar are largely gone. I've only read of one report of someone still experiencing a problem, but even that individual remarked that it cured about 95% of the problems he experienced.
As mentioned, FSX needs CPU power, particularly if you have a bunch of AI traffic in play. Test results I've seen don't show much difference between a 7900GT and an 8800GT, but OCing ones CPU or installing a faster CPU always seems to give a healthy bump in framerates.
As mentioned, FSX needs CPU power, particularly if you have a bunch of AI traffic in play. Test results I've seen don't show much difference between a 7900GT and an 8800GT, but OCing ones CPU or installing a faster CPU always seems to give a healthy bump in framerates.
Wow there is alot of conflicting stuff here. I just went off this : http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archi...envelopes-and-being-an-informed-consumer.aspx I did what he said and got a 9800gtx. It was the best single GPU I could afford at the time.
Edit: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-gpu-upgrade,1928-10.html
another good article, I dont see any GMA 945's on here???
Edit: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-gpu-upgrade,1928-10.html
another good article, I dont see any GMA 945's on here???
the conflicting information surprises me too
for me the game has always been about the cpu and clockspeed. I have gone from a 7600gt to a 7900gt to a 8800gt over the last year and a half and the performance increase has been minimal for fsx. I noticed a much larger framerate boost after I installed SP1, and when I increased the overclock on my cpu ("large" meaning a few fps).
When I have autogen (and by that I mostly mean the unique buildings, not the generic stuff) maxed in nyc with an air traffic addon running, high draw distance, highest quality graphics except for light bloom or whatever, even with zero boat or road traffic I get about 3-6 fps flying at low altitudes. If I change the 3d buildings from extremely dense to dense then the framerate goes up to about 12. In other words the 3d buildings (which I take to mean "autogen") are the biggest performance hit for me, so it puzzles me when people say that autogen hardly matters.
e6600@ 3.6
2 gigs
8800gt
for me the game has always been about the cpu and clockspeed. I have gone from a 7600gt to a 7900gt to a 8800gt over the last year and a half and the performance increase has been minimal for fsx. I noticed a much larger framerate boost after I installed SP1, and when I increased the overclock on my cpu ("large" meaning a few fps).
When I have autogen (and by that I mostly mean the unique buildings, not the generic stuff) maxed in nyc with an air traffic addon running, high draw distance, highest quality graphics except for light bloom or whatever, even with zero boat or road traffic I get about 3-6 fps flying at low altitudes. If I change the 3d buildings from extremely dense to dense then the framerate goes up to about 12. In other words the 3d buildings (which I take to mean "autogen") are the biggest performance hit for me, so it puzzles me when people say that autogen hardly matters.
e6600@ 3.6
2 gigs
8800gt
Anyone who says that FSX will be more GPU-dependent than CPU has never actually used it extensively. With a mid-to-high-end video card, even with everything turned up, your GPU will rarely hit 100% load. This is because it takes the CPU a lot longer to process all of the information than it takes for your GPU to render it.
SLI and CF are useless for this program, so you should avoid them unless you play other games that could benefit from running multiple high-end cards. Though, you could use SLI for lower-end cards on FSX.
Put your money towards a Q6600 or E8400 (preferably a Q9450 or Q9550 clocked beyond 3.4GHz) and overclock the shit out of it. From 2GHz to 3.4GHz, you will probably double your framerate.
Google "Flight Simulator X tweaks" and you'll probably come up with a few good results, but you need a very fast CPU for this game either way, unless you really tone down the air traffic and other settings (some settings improve performance not because the graphics become of lower quality, but because they also lower tree density and such).
SLI and CF are useless for this program, so you should avoid them unless you play other games that could benefit from running multiple high-end cards. Though, you could use SLI for lower-end cards on FSX.
Put your money towards a Q6600 or E8400 (preferably a Q9450 or Q9550 clocked beyond 3.4GHz) and overclock the shit out of it. From 2GHz to 3.4GHz, you will probably double your framerate.
Google "Flight Simulator X tweaks" and you'll probably come up with a few good results, but you need a very fast CPU for this game either way, unless you really tone down the air traffic and other settings (some settings improve performance not because the graphics become of lower quality, but because they also lower tree density and such).
Actually the inverse. The higher up you are, the more the game has to calculate and render.
Turn down the sliders that generate things like traffic, scenery, and even weather settings. You should see quite a difference in performance, without having touched any graphical options (though the scenery settings will make areas look overly simplified if you take them too far).
And you need to overclock your Q9450 further than that if you want to play FSX with everything turned up.
And you need to overclock your Q9450 further than that if you want to play FSX with everything turned up.
Remember how people were screaming few days ago that Nvidia was cheating with Vantage scores where they were able to offload CPU physics calculations onto GPU. Now that leaves open the question - are new Nvidia cards going to be able to take huge load off of a CPU and help with frames in FSX, as GPU's computing power is unmatched ? What do you guys think ?
No. Unfortunately, Flight Simulator X does not take advantage of PhysX. A shame, really, because it could really benefit from it. Then again, FSX is already missing a lot of small details that I'm assuming they didn't add in simply because of the lack of processing power
smileypaul
Weaksauce
- Joined
- May 5, 2008
- Messages
- 68
Bah, FSX is becoming a nightmare for me... I have to build a box for someone solely for the use of FSX ..
of course he wants 3 monitors.. and eventually to run it on 3 high def projectors...
all of which are basically impossible on FSX since its poor coding, and high dependancy on clock speed basically render all modern hardware useless
Stressful.
Now if i could only find out how FSX is reacting to the new video cards..
of course he wants 3 monitors.. and eventually to run it on 3 high def projectors...
all of which are basically impossible on FSX since its poor coding, and high dependancy on clock speed basically render all modern hardware useless
Stressful.
Now if i could only find out how FSX is reacting to the new video cards..
Bah, FSX is becoming a nightmare for me... I have to build a box for someone solely for the use of FSX ..
of course he wants 3 monitors.. and eventually to run it on 3 high def projectors...
all of which are basically impossible on FSX since its poor coding, and high dependancy on clock speed basically render all modern hardware useless
Stressful.
Now if i could only find out how FSX is reacting to the new video cards..
why not just use X-plane it has a better flight model any way
smileypaul
Weaksauce
- Joined
- May 5, 2008
- Messages
- 68
Thanks, I'll look into X-Plane
FYI, as a pilot that uses both X-Plane and FSX (as well as FS9), be aware that you'll run into some of the CPU/memory bottlenecks with X-Plane that you run into with Microsoft Flight Simulator as you turn more and more of the X-Plane options on.
This is just the nature of simulating flight. It has _nothing_ to do with coding practices (as was previously suggested). Especially since FSX represents a complete rewrite of the underlying engine (which coincidentally is the exact same engine being used for Microsoft Train Simulator II). I challenge anyone who thinks that it's a "coding practice" thing to give me tangible proof and not smoke and mirrors arguments.