Hiya folks...

 

Quick question, or possibly a can of worms...

Does having more CPU cores really help FSX and can FSX use hyper-threading at all?

 

I bought the Intel Socket 2011 Core i7-3820 which is 4 Core/HT (8 cores) @ 3.6gHz stock, but endless amounts of reading leave me baffled as to the advantages of HT enabled or disabled?

 

Is it really best to have 4 cores?

Does hyper-threadding benefit FSX at all?

 

I did try a search for this info here but only found stuff on over-clocking..

 

I stuck my CPU onto an ASUS P9X79-Pro board, but am kind of thinking I should have gone with the ASUS Rampage IV extreme instead...

 

I assume that something like X-Plane, being more up-to-date, would probably be ok, but as FSX is old (Somewhat) I wasn't sure, so was hoping for some real world experience feedback?

 

Look forward to hearing from some of the more experienced folk out there on this....

 

Cheers me dears :-)

The four cores definitely help, just look at Task Manager with FSX running.

 

Some folks (myself included) find that FSX runs slightly smoother with FSX running on Core01, rather than Core00, which can be accomplished by setting Affinitymask=14 in fsx.cfg.

 

Hyperthreading does not help FSX, and most guides I've read, tell you to turn it off.

Hyperthreading has shown to reduce ground blurries. Besides that, there is little to no known benefit.

Hi Bert

 

I've tried to bring up my Task Manager when running FSX, but everytime I do minimise FSX, I can never, ever bring it back up again, it just stays minimised and the only way-out is to close FSX completely.

 

Thanks Ben.. I'm still a newbie yet, and getting to grips with my new ATI HD6990, which has caused me some agro so far so have turned the Overdrive off, and have water-cooling on order for the entire system to get it down from 95deg full load to room temp (20deg loaded)

 

Would you guys reckon the ASUS P9X79 board and my CPU (Or PC as a whole) is a good combo for FSX?

Don't minimize FSX, just go to windowed mode.

Thanks Bert... I'll have to look that up.. Is it common for FSX to do that when minimised then?

Not necessarily - it works OK on my system, but if it screws things up, don't do it... :huh:

You can read more about your question here: http://forum.avsim.net/topic/377105-texture-loading-ssd-vs-hdd/

 

Basically, FSX speeds up texture loading and load time with more cores and HT. At the same time your FPS will reduce slightly. Using HT introduces two problems. 1, your maximum overclock might reduce. 2, There's a (higher) risk of temporary FPS loss by threads being executed on the same physical core as the Main Thread that produces the FPS.

 

If you only care about the highest FPS possible anything over 3 cores is useless. In special cases like high resolution photo scenery more than 4 cores and HT can be of good use. I'd say that in general a quad-core without HT fulfills most peoples FSX needs but there are exceptions=)

I'm mostly learning to fly the PMDG-737NGX, and use FS2Crew too, so high res 3D V-Cockpit are important, but the view out the window, I want it to look nice, and see runways from miles away but not too bothered about other fluff so much...

 

Panicked a bit the other day when I installed FS2Crew and my FPS went from 30+ to 10fps, but I havent tweaked my fsx.cfg file at all, its however FSX put it when installed.

 

A lot of these tweaks are confusing because nobody ever says "This is already in the fsx.cfg file, just change it" or, the worst one and most common, is people saying your fsx.cfg file needs this, but not telling you that your meant to put it in manually, and where it goes or should go, thus I havent touched mine at all.

 

Be great if somebody could clear that up in Word Not Allowed's guide and any other cfg tweaks..

 

That link you gave also, is seriosly long, and keeps referencing something called "AM"??? I must have missed it if its in there but I have no idea what this "AM" is?

 

That link you gave me SAAB, none of the pictures are showing, thus its almost impossible for me, a newbie to understand most of it..

 

I have 2 x 480GB SSD drives in RAID0 too, which is why I couldnt understand why I was getting 10fps with my system after only installing FS2Crew, so I disabled it, and rebooted, and still got 10fps...

I find leaving, to be honest HT ( Hyper Threading ) on works best for me. I don't see stutters, but do believe it runs better for me at my current OC. The Temperature difference is only one degree so that does not concern me.

 

Other stuff you do though with your computer will benefit from having HT on, and it is a waste to have a powerful computer with it turned off.

Indeed, I think I will be leaving it on, and let the motherboard figure out its own overclock, as it claims to be able to over-clock itself to the point of maximum speed/stability, then see how it goes. I'm installing water-cooling this weekend, so that should be a big help.

 

I do get the odd black square when I look up from the MFD/ND to the runway, but no stutters as yet, so far..

 

Was just this massive frame drop that was kind of the last straw, in that all the tweaks and mods to FSX I "could do" but nobody ever bothers to make it clear how to do them for newbies where its not obvious what/how to do it, and I'm 20yrs in I.T, website coding no problem, etc etc, and I'm getting stuck with this stuff, so imagine what a non-I.T guru is doing..

 

I'd really like to see these tweak guides everybody keeps pointing to cleaned up with proper instructions..

Absolutely useless telling people "X needs to be set to 6.5000" if you don't tell them where it is, or if they have to insert it themselves, and where it needs to go. Might as well be written in double-dutch.

That link you gave also, is seriosly long, and keeps referencing something called "AM"??? I must have missed it if its in there but I have no idea what this "AM" is?

Richard

Word Not Allowed have a list of abbreviations used at the beginning of his thread. AM is short for Affinity Mask. The Affinity Mask assignes what/how your computers CPU cores(threads) will be used by FSX. As FSX is quite old software it doesn't assign this in the best way for modern CPUs with Hyperthreading as multi-core cpu's with hyperthreading barely existed when the code was written.

 

the worst one and most common, is people saying your fsx.cfg file needs this, but not telling you that your meant to put it in manually, and where it goes or should go, thus I havent touched mine at all.

 

Do you know how to find your fsx.cfg file to start with? If you do a bit of searching there will be loads of previous posts that will tell you about the cfg. But I'll give you a quick explanation here.

The .cfg is grouped in to "sections". Each section has a name and that name is written within brackets "[..........]".

Underneath each section name you have the individual entrys and each entry has to be put under a specific section. Thats why Word Not Allowed allways has a line with [.....] above each entry so you know in wich section it belongs. Within Kostas guide I believe the only two sections that doesn't already exist and have to be entered manually in the cfg are [JOBSCHEDULER] and [bUFFERPOOLS]. You should be able to find all the other sections in the original cfg.

I'm not sure about what entrys that don't already exist but you should be able to see if the actual entry exist or not once you found the section it belongs under in the cfg.

 

When it comes to the AffinityMask=x entry you'll have to manually put in the "[JOBSCHEDULER]" line first and "AffinityMask=x" on the line underneath. It doesn't matter in what order the sections or entrys within sections are put in, but when adding a new section make sure you don't put it in the middle of an old section. If you decide to keep hyperthreading activated on your CPU I'd recommend using AffinityMask=84.

For the AffinityMask to actually work you also have to have an updated FSX install. It wasn't included in the original release code. You need to have either of SP1, SP2, Accelleration or FSX Gold installed. When you have one of these updates installed FSX will use a default AffinityMask value (never shown in the cfg) depending on how many cores/threads your CPU has unless you manually enter an AffinityMask value. The default value FSX will use is 15 for quad-core without hyperthreading and 85 for quad-core with hyperthreading on.

 

That link you gave me SAAB, none of the pictures are showing, thus its almost impossible for me, a newbie to understand most of it..

 

Sorry, I didn't know the pictures had dropped out. I can understand that it's a bit hard to make sense of it without them :rolleyes: . I wonder if I can get a moderator to add them again.

That post is very long and technical as I was trying to explain a lot within a single post with a lot of evidence and references. There are loads of reccomendations to use this and that tweak but very little evidence why. I agree with Word Not Allowed that there should be a specific reason for you to add tweak to the cfg. Not just because someone says... I was also showing how FSX can actually make use of Hyper threading. To say that has almost been as swearing in church as it (previously?) has long been common knowledge that HT does nothing for FSX. Kostas guide still incorrectly states:

"FSX has no benefit of it and it should be turned off in BIOS. If you need HT for some other applications, by all means, use it, but do set the correct Affinitymask to force FSX to use all cores but Core0, and no HT cores."

It is correct that you need to set an appropriate AffinityMask if you have it activated but there are very specific cases where you can actually make use of hyperthreading in FSX.

 

Finally, your storage won't affect your avg FPS.

 

I hope this helps you with your tweaking. Oh, and learn to overclock your computer manually. It will give you an overclock at either lower voltage, higher speed or both.