I am running new FSX on a 3930K system with one GTX 580 and Windows 7 Professional. No other add ons besides PMDG 747. and REX clouds 2048 textures. Not using REX weather engine. With this aircraft or even default aircraft most of the time I get frame rates locked at 35 no problem and great fluidity. But sporadically the frame rates drop to 8 to 9 with terrible stutters and I cannot figure out why. Not related to any specific situation/location and not eliminated by changing display , scenery etc etc.I thought it was Norton Antivirus but I disabled everything and it still happens, even sitting at the airport with engines running and not moving if I wait long enough. Then it pops back up to fluid 30's after about a 30 secs minute. If I go out of full screen mode it seems to break whatever is going on and rates are in the 30's again.

 

1. Is there a way to find out what background acitivity is possibly contributing to this using the resource meter? I have tried but not been successful in sorting this out. Any other way to figure it out?

 

2. I have tried some affinity mask settings to see if that would eliminate this that I gleaned from this forum.

When I tried 1364 when I load a flight with my PMDG 747 FSX hung on loading the flight and I had to kill the process. That never happened before. Once I got rid of 1364 the hang never happened again

 

With mask 254 the system fans for the first time markedly increased in volume and RPM using FSX. I was worried I was overheating the chip somehow and stopped using that one. That seemed however to reduce but not eliminate the frame rate drop frequency.

 

HT on, not interested in messing with bios to turn it off.

 

So can affinity mask settings harm the computer? I was hoping to unload core 0 where perhaps the backgournd process was running to interfere and cause frame rate drop could run on an unused core and leave others for FSX.

 

Thanks

I use affinity mask setting of 1344 and it seems to give the best results out of all the settings I've tried. Since your system is very similar to mine and you have HT enabled maybe give that number a go and see if it helps.

 

Also it might be worth running your fsx cfg file through "bojote's tweaking tool" if you haven't already done so, this improved my FPS considerably.

Greg

Affinity mask was not needed after SP2 (accel/Gold) was released so its a meaningless tweak, SP2 allows FSX to use multicores to a degree so by adding these settings may in fact be counter productive.. I have forced via 'set affinity' ie using command options various core settings and saw no change in overall core usage using Perfmon. We need to remember that FSX is not a true multicore app it is much better to let Windows via the scheduler handle what core is used or not used. See http://blogs.msdn.co...multi-core.aspx

 

The reason to turn HT off is because if you don't, you may experience thread collisions = stuttering and the cpu will often run much hotter. (http://blogs.msdn.co...ntel-quote.aspx).

 

You may be better looking at programs like 'Process Lasso', Prio, etc which can help with core priority and because of the large amount of RAM that you have something like 'Fancy Cache' may be useful.

 

Take my advice use the leanest fsx.cfg that you can, and only use the tweaks that are necessary like wideaspect, highmemfix etc.

Good Luck

PeterH

I've found that with hyper-threading enabled, FSX does the right thing on its own to manage the cores properly. Only in cases where one needs to restrict FSX from executing on a specific core should one specify a fsx.cfg affinity mask. With the configuration I use I see no benefit when hyper-threading is disabled ; but then again top-end overclocks may need HT disabled for stability.

Asus Rampage Formula IV | Sandy Biidge-E 3930k @ 3.2 | 16G RAM

 

 

HT is on and 12 cpu's (6 physical/virtual) are running.

 

I have set AM = 4092 and the ten cpu's (5 physical/virtual - 2 thru 12) all share the "loading of scenery, auto-gen & objects etc..." till I'm in the pit at a very fast rate from 10,000 R0/128k striped Velociprator HD's.

 

Two cpu's (1 physical/virtual - 0 thru 1) deal with 7 x64

 

My flight is smooth with a CRANKED settings.cfg and running 3 24" 1920 x 1200 LCD's in "Surround" @ 6120 x 1200 bezel corrected from two SLI'd GTX 570 (stock clk)

 

Try this app to visually see whats going on with your various hardware components during loadup.

 

App: http://www.moo0.com/.../SystemMonitor/

 

ref: http://fsxtimes.word...8/affinitymask/

 

The two links above (post #3) are from five years ago. Do you remember systems from five years ago? They were no where near the tech advancements of what you and I are running now.

Nothing wrong with this PC, everyone with the SB-E platforms seem to have these kind of stutters in FSX.

While I'm not experiencing stutters, I cannot seem to solve the "white artifacts" while zipping around.

 

I've searched within avsim a bunch and have implemented suggested fixes but to no avail.

 

Is it a big deal? Not really, it is just annoying at night over water while landing on a CV.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xh8iSWeIJ0

 

add:

 

That tube was captured a year ago from a EVGA GTX 590 Classified. Since then I've built a new sys that's using the aforementioned GTX 570's in SLI and the artifacting is not so prevelant but still happens.

can affinity mask tweak harm computer

 

 

 

No. Definitely not.