Some of us cant help it, tweaking is half the fun of FSX, or maybe even more.My system has been running stable 17920 @ 3.8 Ghz.But recently after adding Fsforce, vista64 updates etc, and a couple of blue screens from trying to hit 4 Ghz on air, FSx just crahes after about 20 mins into flight. This is even after lowring cpu to 3.6Ghz. Just to think its was stable on 3.8.After a reinstall i also found affinitymask is not required if you want FSX to use all your cores.But turning off a core or two never fails to make things smoother, if you have tried everything esle.I am currently formating my FSX drive, cause i will reinstall vista then fsx, that is a few dsya work i dont need right now.luckily i adopted a policy of keeping addons as few as possible so reinstall does not take too long for me.

Some of us cant help it, tweaking is half the fun of FSX, or maybe even more.My system has been running stable 17920 @ 3.8 Ghz.But recently after adding Fsforce, vista64 updates etc, and a couple of blue screens from trying to hit 4 Ghz on air, FSx just crahes after about 20 mins into flight. This is even after lowring cpu to 3.6Ghz. Just to think its was stable on 3.8.After a reinstall i also found affinitymask is not required if you want FSX to use all your cores.But turning off a core or two never fails to make things smoother, if you have tried everything esle.I am currently formating my FSX drive, cause i will reinstall vista then fsx, that is a few dsya work i dont need right now.luckily i adopted a policy of keeping addons as few as possible so reinstall does not take too long for me.

I'm going to try this just to see if it makes any difference. I have a 2.40Ghz Core2 Quad with Vista64 Ultimate and 8Gigs of RAM. My mask was set to =15, so I'll try setting it to =12. I can always set it back if I want to, but since I do get poor FPS on the busy larger airports with some add ons, it will be worth a try. I'll let you know what happens. :(

I'm going to try this just to see if it makes any difference. I have a 2.40Ghz Core2 Quad with Vista64 Ultimate and 8Gigs of RAM. My mask was set to =15, so I'll try setting it to =12. I can always set it back if I want to, but since I do get poor FPS on the busy larger airports with some add ons, it will be worth a try. I'll let you know what happens. :(

turning off cores does not increase fps, it supposed to help with stutters and smoothness. Its more cores that help fps, so it getting a balance between the two. No point having fps of 70 and huge stutters.and try[ 14 1110 ] before you try [12 1100].

turning off cores does not increase fps, it supposed to help with stutters and smoothness. Its more cores that help fps, so it getting a balance between the two. No point having fps of 70 and huge stutters.and try[ 14 1110 ] before you try [12 1100].

How are you controling AA & AF? Through FS-X, nVidia Control Panel, or nHancer?? Just curious... I am planning on adding the affinity mask variable tonight....Phil R.

How are you controling AA & AF? Through FS-X, nVidia Control Panel, or nHancer?? Just curious... I am planning on adding the affinity mask variable tonight....Phil R.

AA and AF are set in FSX only, in GPU its left defualt as application controlled----------------------------I have only tocuhed 1 or 2 things in defualt nvida setting 1 - single GPU multiple monitor 2 - No of frames buffered is set to 5 ----- increases smoothness at low fps------------------bufferpools = 100 000 000-----------------------------TBM = defualt = 40----------------------------------If you have i7, try with HT on first, before you turn HT off, it appears the DISK which is very often the cuase of stutters due to texture/scnery loading, is much appear with HT on , so my limited testing is showing positive results with HT on.But HT on and possible smoothness, on wroks when FSX is not using any vritual cores.so for i7 affinitymask with HT off for FSX = 85 = 01010101!!!!!!!!!!this is the defualt setting!!!!!!!!!!!! so if this is setting you want , all you need do is delete the affinitmask entry from FSx.cfg alltogether.Even though HT on is a possibility of making things smoother, reducing FSx cores definatly makes things smoother, but will definatly not increase FPS. And using a core of just one is like a slide show. i have tested it. But then my settings are also pretty much all maxed out 90%.the 85 affinitymask setting is what i curretnly got on my [email protected] system (card = gtx285 vista 64)if it not smooth enough then i remove one core = 01010100 = 84 and things are definatly always smoother, from previous tests.However my current researh is to see the effect of HT on smoothness, and currently its looking good, even with affinity of 85.

I suspect I know what might be causing the issue you are seeing (where turning off cores is causing the sim to "run better"), I just read an article on multithreading issues, and one of them is cache line locking and I suspect that with the i7 triple channel ram interface, its cache line locks a larger chunk of RAM than Core 2 products. What happens with cache line locking problems, is you have several threads running, each one happens to access a particular variable (that only that thread accesses), but if those variables happen to be close enough to each other in memory to be part of the same cache line block, write contention on that cache block will actually cause the code to run slower the more cores you throw at it.I haven't done any testing or anything (I don't have an i7, anybody want to donate theirs :->), just seems a possible supposition :->Tim

I suspect I know what might be causing the issue you are seeing (where turning off cores is causing the sim to "run better"), I just read an article on multithreading issues, and one of them is cache line locking and I suspect that with the i7 triple channel ram interface, its cache line locks a larger chunk of RAM than Core 2 products. What happens with cache line locking problems, is you have several threads running, each one happens to access a particular variable (that only that thread accesses), but if those variables happen to be close enough to each other in memory to be part of the same cache line block, write contention on that cache block will actually cause the code to run slower the more cores you throw at it.I haven't done any testing or anything (I don't have an i7, anybody want to donate theirs :->), just seems a possible supposition :->Tim

I have mentioned this before, but i will repeat that.using vista64 resource monitor, in the section that shows hard disk activity, one of the vriables , i think data transfer rate reaches around 2000 to 4000, only when 1 - either 1 core of four core system is turned off with affinitymask2 -OR HT is enabled but remove affiitymask variable from FSX.cfg. So that FSX uses only real cores. and not virtual cores. Here also data transfer rate is higherduring fsx 90% of this data transfer is read activity from fsx\scenery folder.SO being able to load scenery and textures faster i suspect is what makes it smoother.And this will also fall in line with the thread and resource contention issues you mentioned as heppening down at the cache line level.Taking this theory to its extreme, i have also tried just using 1 core on FSX, and it was almost a slide show. 2 cores [email protected] is also smoother, than 3 cores. So the more cores you got going the higher the frame rate you get, And the more cores you turn off, the smoother is FSXSo i think one needs to find right balance for his systemBUT I AM CONVINCED HT ON gives higher data transfer rate and smoother flight than HT off, as long as FSX is not using any of the virtual cores. If FSX uses all 8 cores of i79201 - you are likelly to damage your cpu if you have OC'd, cause temps rise by about 30 to 40 %2 - And the stutters you get are heavy enough to shake the !!!monitor!!!3 - My rule is FSX should never use virtual cores, cause according to techis it cant use it, but it heats up your cpu anyway. But the Disks data rate is increased when HT is on.