Nehalem-What does this mean for us?

[tfm 169]

Yes, you make a very fair point about the low graphical detail in the "real world" simulations. As I remember it, Heathrow consisted of a couple of runways and a tower. London - the whole city - consisted of about 3 tall blocks representing Canary Wharf. 60fps with FSX-quality graphics is just a pipe-dream with today's kit, but one day, who knows?Tim

[Mace 1,902]

>>>I guess I only mentioned it because I overclocked my CPU>>once>>>to 3.8Ghz and I cannot really say that I saw a significant>>>improvement. >>>>Glad to hear I'm not alone, I've had my cpu just past 4GHZ>and>>haven't really noticed much of a frame gain - very slight,>at>>best over my e6750 @ 3.2. Kinda dissappointing as I>expected>>at least 2-4 FPS increase and it's just not there when one>>needs it most. At least I didn't have to pay anything for my>>upgrade.....>>>>Maybe your graphics card replaces the CPU as the system>bottleneck at higher clock speeds?>>Ulf B>What tim says an what you say ulf are the only logical conclusions that a person can draw from seeing this I think.CLOUDS are the bottleneck. This tells us that clouds are rendered using a lot of gpu. More evidence: clouds killed the ATI 3870/3870x2 cards; but even an 8800GTX, with it's larger bandwidth, still gets knocked down a notch by clouds.I got the same results as Tim did; without much wx (fair weather theme in fSX) I was getting 60 fps in my test scenario at Heathrow. But as soon as I added in some cloud layers, BOOM!, instantly down to 35 fps, with no other setting changes.RhettFS box: E8500 (@ 3.80 ghz), AC Freezer 7 Pro, ASUS P5E3 Premium, BFG 8800GTX 756 (nVidia 169 WHQL), 4gb DDR3 1600 Patriot Cas7 7-7-7-20 (2T), PC Power 750, WD 150gb 10000rpm Raptor, Seagate 500gb, Silverstone TJ09 case, Vista Ultimate 64ASX Client: AMD 3700+ (@ 2.6 ghz), 7800GT

[Guest jwflowers]

It remains to be seen if you will see as big of a performance gain as the Core 2 architecture gave us, but you'll probably see a little gain at similar clock speeds. The power management of Nehalem allows the power to be diverted from the other cores to one or two when the other cores are not in use and should theoritically allow for higher clock rates on those two cores. Intel is calling this "Turbo" mode, but with Hyperthreading returning you should also get 8 logical cores with will help with autogen. The final numbers will determine what kind of speed we can expect from Nehalem, and we can't really base anything off of these beta drivers. There is always hope!!!! If you want to know something really cool, check out Lucid's Hydra multiple GPU solution which allows an older video card to be used with a newer generation (from the same manufacturer due to limitation with Windows and not the technology) to get true 2x or more scaling with multiple GPUs.Just my two cents,John Flowers

[RobbieHe 0]

"The power management of Nehalem allows the power to be diverted from the other cores to one or two when the other cores are not in use..."I can see it now. Just as you are clearing the runway things are running rather smoothly...oops, now some clouds (now time for the INTEL power management system to divert power from the other cores to one or two)...stutter, stutter, pause, pause, ...back now to flying through the clouds (as the super-duper INTEL power managment system yields an extra 2 frames per second)...now time to come out of the clouds...sputter..sputter...pause...pause...and so on and so forth...Come on guys, you can figure INTELASARUS REX did not have us in mind when designing this chip.RH

[Guest JIMJAM]

I am going WAY out on a limb and make a bold prediction.In 2 years say, late 2009,2010, it will be a great time for the Zombie,Alien,Space 1st person shooter fans.I remember the good ol days when flight sims were a developers flagship product and the vid card,proc makers catered to them.The machines were always behind the flight sim curve and it usually took 2 years to be able to run a sim wide open.I still remember loading Falcon 3.0 after it had been out at least 5 years, cranking up all the options and screaming, "take that" as my computer devoured it.Now its all about craming as much graphics and effects into a 100 yard or smaller area and keeping up a fast fps whether its a fps or racing game.Trying to muscle the graphics with brute horsepower IMO is not what I hope Aces are hoping will be available ala FSX in a few years.Hopefully a way to harness all this video card memory and have all this information stored and available.Couldnt a second proc like the AGEIA PhysX accelerator be used to handle some of the load?I am just amazed that I see guys spending 6 grand plus on Alienware rigs and resort to flying without autogen or real weather just so they can get 15-20 fps into large airports.

[irocx 292]

>Maybe your graphics card replaces the CPU as the system>bottleneck at higher clock speeds?>>Ulf BGood point Ulf, but then when I look at frame comparisons between boards over at Tom's Hardware I don't see much difference between my 8800GT and most of the others, including the GTX's.Very true Rhett - but I'd love to have your 35. :-beerchug As it stands it's hard for me to get a consistant 20 flying in metro areas with RWW - yep those pesky clouds (and traffic and....).Regards, Kendall#1: E8500 @ 3.95 - HyperTX2 Gigabyte P35-DS3L 4GB Ballistix Tracers PC6400 EVGA 8800GT - XG's 174.74 Seagate 250GB 7200.11 CH Yoke/Pedals/Saitek Throttle Dual Monitor: Dell 2405/1905 #2: Dell 8400 3.2 H.T. 3GB PC4200 - X800XT Diamond Xtreme/Logitech X-530's

[Guest SuperFortress]

>Come on guys, you can figure INTELASARUS REX did not have us>in mind when designing this chip.>>RHAhh but just to be fair, one could also say that ACES did not have multi-core CPUs in mind either when they were designing FSX :)

[Guest UlfB]

>>Good point Ulf, but then when I look at frame comparisons>between boards over at Tom's Hardware I don't see much>difference between my 8800GT and most of the others, including>the GTX's.>Kendall,That's true. I'm no expert on hardware and the architecture of FSX and can't predict the behavior of FSX running on different hardware configurations. We know that FSX doesn't benefit much with multiple GPU solutions. Maybe the bottleneck is within FSX itself? Increased CPU speed maybe results in an increased internal overhead in FSX? Maybe FSX spend a lot more time handling threads and waiting for running threads to finish? I don't know. But it seems strange that increasing CPU speed and graphic card performance don't have any real impact on FSX. I guess we have to wait and see.Ulf BCore2Duo X6800 3.3GHz4GB RAM Corsair XMS2-8500C5BFG 8800GTX, Creative SB X-FiFSX Acc/SP2, Vista 32

[Mace 1,902]

>>Maybe your graphics card replaces the CPU as the system>>bottleneck at higher clock speeds?>>>>Ulf B>>Good point Ulf, but then when I look at frame comparisons>between boards over at Tom's Hardware I don't see much>difference between my 8800GT and most of the others, including>the GTX's.>That's because Tom's didn't do heavy wx testing, which is what any of us flight-sim type people would do, since in real simming, you are not likely to see clear skies all the time. What do they say, "It has to rain...sometime"?>Very true Rhett - but I'd love to have your 35. :-beerchug As>it stands it's hard for me to get a consistant 20 flying in>metro areas with RWW - yep those pesky clouds (and traffic>and....).>You can get 35 fps at Heathrow in wx too, with your E8500. I'm not even clocking quite as high as you are.I was testing "big iron" configs. 35 fps was with AI airliner slider only at 25. Road car traffic 10. It was with autogen on Sparse. But ASX real weather (cloudy conditions) loaded. Also Scenery Complexity on Dense (scenery complexity is only a minor fps killer though).I normally run more AI than that, and more autogen. But I like to keep a "big iron" cfg around that I can use at places like New York, LAX, Heathrow, Tokyo, when I get sick and tired of 20 fps in those situations. For those places I would need to reduce settings to maintain 25-30+ fps in all situations...and I think I have found a nice sweet spot on my setup.I was pleasantly happy with 35 fps at Heathrow, even with some Autogen and some AI **and** real weather. That was the LOWEST fps I saw, too. I took off did a circuit in the DC-10, landed and it never went below 35. I'm likin this E8500.But no question, if I run my NORMAL config: Dense autogen, Scenery Complexity maxxed, AI at 60...I will indeed only get about 20 fps at a place like Heathrow. That's actually acceptable to me, but as I said, sometimes you just want 25-30-35 fps there.RhettFS box: E8500 (@ 3.80 ghz), AC Freezer 7 Pro, ASUS P5E3 Premium, BFG 8800GTX 756 (nVidia 169 WHQL), 4gb DDR3 1600 Patriot Cas7 7-7-7-20 (2T), PC Power 750, WD 150gb 10000rpm Raptor, Seagate 500gb, Silverstone TJ09 case, Vista Ultimate 64ASX Client: AMD 3700+ (@ 2.6 ghz), 7800GT

[RobbieHe 0]

That was MS's fault. They thought, as we all did, that the CPU speeds would continue to increase (that by now we would have been up to about 10Ghz). The INTEL Prescott came along and overheated at 3Ghz. Chip makers then realized that the speed increases would not continue as thought. However, MS was already in the middle of FSX development. Instead of stopping and going back scratch with a multicore solution (now to be FS11), they plugged along and come up with FS2000 version II. RH

[Guest SuperFortress]

Another interesting blurb on Toms Hardware regarding Nehalem.Supposedly multithreaded apps will see a dramatic boost while single threaded apps might see about 10%. FSX is single threaded right?http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nehalem-i...clock,6214.html

[flying_w 58]

FSX is multi-threaded to an extent. But I don't think it can take advantage of hyper-threading. That was disabled due to thread collisions in SP1 if I remember correctly, so I presume that remains the case with nahalem. What I got from the article is that if you have a super-cooler on your processor it will automatically overclock itself until it runs too hot?

[RobbieHe 0]

All that switching cores or reducing cores or whatever during flight simulation still bodes to me of pause, pause, stutter, stutter...RH