I'm planning my new build for the beginning of next year (after SandyBridge and Bulldozer launch hopefully), and assuming the early low end chips aren't anything special (until the big boys later in the year), I'm probably going to pick up a cheap current chip and build off of that. Essentially, I'm torn between going for a 1090T or an i5, and then overclock the nuts off either one. The i5 (or i7 if I get some money for xmas) is clearly the faster chip clock for clock, but would the extra cores be worth more in FSX? My main issue is loading scenery textures fast enough, which my current E8400 @ 4.25GHz can't quite do (although my SSD can), and I'd like to be able to get solid performance in most weather situations, perhaps even extending LOD radius a bit. So keeping those things in mind, would FSX benefit from a faster quad, or from a slightly slower chip with more cores. If anyone has first-hand experience (with the 1090/1050T in particular) I'd love to hear your opinions. Thanks for reading.Dev

I'm planning my new build for the beginning of next year (after SandyBridge and Bulldozer launch hopefully), and assuming the early low end chips aren't anything special (until the big boys later in the year), I'm probably going to pick up a cheap current chip and build off of that. Essentially, I'm torn between going for a 1090T or an i5, and then overclock the nuts off either one. The i5 (or i7 if I get some money for xmas) is clearly the faster chip clock for clock, but would the extra cores be worth more in FSX? My main issue is loading scenery textures fast enough, which my current E8400 @ 4.25GHz can't quite do (although my SSD can), and I'd like to be able to get solid performance in most weather situations, perhaps even extending LOD radius a bit. So keeping those things in mind, would FSX benefit from a faster quad, or from a slightly slower chip with more cores. If anyone has first-hand experience (with the 1090/1050T in particular) I'd love to hear your opinions. Thanks for reading.Dev

Faster cores for sure. 4 cores is plenty enough for FSX.

Faster cores for sure. 4 cores is plenty enough for FSX.

Especially considering the FSX sim engine runs on a single core (other cores used only for scenery loading). So get the faster Quad.Cheers,- jahman.

Exactly. As crazy as it sounds, FSX is single threaded. Even if you go in and change the JOBSCHEDULER>AffinityMask to 15 (4 cores) or go into the Task Manager and set the affinity of fsx.exe to all 4 cores, the majority of the processes are still heavily put on Core 0. The reason for this is because an amazing amount of FSX's code is from the FS98 days. Watch, Microsoft Flight will be no different.

Okay cool, that clears it up for me. I was just hesitant as when I built my current rig everyone was like "nooo man, nothing actually uses quads anyway, just get a cheap dual core and overclock it" and now I'm generally bottlenecked by my cpu in current game titles lol. Thanks for replies, looks like I'll be getting a cheap 2nd hand i7 then!

Exactly. As crazy as it sounds, FSX is single threaded. Even if you go in and change the JOBSCHEDULER>AffinityMask to 15 (4 cores) or go into the Task Manager and set the affinity of fsx.exe to all 4 cores, the majority of the processes are still heavily put on Core 0. The reason for this is because an amazing amount of FSX's code is from the FS98 days. Watch, Microsoft Flight will be no different.

...Which is a good reason to set[JOBSCHEDULER]AffinityMask=14This way the main FSX load is on the second core, the first core can do OS related stuff and add-ons,and the last two cores handle scenery loading. On my quad, at least, this gives very smooth flight.

Okay cool, that clears it up for me. I was just hesitant as when I built my current rig everyone was like "nooo man, nothing actually uses quads anyway, just get a cheap dual core and overclock it" and now I'm generally bottlenecked by my cpu in current game titles lol. Thanks for replies, looks like I'll be getting a cheap 2nd hand i7 then!

and still overclock it as far as it will go!CPU speed is the single most important thing in FSX performance.

...Which is a good reason to set[JOBSCHEDULER]AffinityMask=14This way the main FSX load is on the second core, the first core can do OS related stuff and add-ons,and the last two cores handle scenery loading. On my quad, at least, this gives very smooth flight.

Very interesting, thanks! :Big Grin: