Some of you can slice and dice it to your heart's content in trying to say HT ON is nonsensical but the fact of the matter is that I was not able to use TileProxy at it's highest setting without it.

 

Go back and check the settings I am using on TP and FSX. If you can run such settings without HT ON and stutter free, then you have a point.

 

- Sent from my rooted, Verizon Samsung Galaxy Nexus LTE smartphone via Tapatalk because haters gonna hate.

 

 

Some of you can slice and dice it to your heart's content in trying to say HT ON is nonsensical but the fact of the matter is that I was not able to use TileProxy at it's highest setting without it.

 

Not trying to slice or dice (OK, maybe dice a bit), just trying to understand. As mentioned earlier, I run with HT enabled because I only modestly OC, have plenty of thermal headroom and have also found that the sim seems to run more smoothly (not higher framerates - improved smoothness) on my system if I do that. What I'm still struggling to understand is the logic behind the specific mask used.

 

Scott

 

Not trying to slice or dice (OK, maybe dice a bit), just trying to understand. As mentioned earlier, I run with HT enabled because I only modestly OC, have plenty of thermal headroom and have also found that the sim seems to run more smoothly (not higher framerates - improved smoothness) on my system if I do that. What I'm still struggling to understand is the logic behind the specific mask used.

 

Scott

 

LOL It's ok, Scott. As for understanding the mask thing, I gave up because I was getting a headache. Hahaha I just took SAAB340's advice and ran with it. Haven't looked back eversince!

 

- Sent from my rooted, Verizon Samsung Galaxy Nexus LTE smartphone via Tapatalk because haters gonna hate.

 

 

Yes it makes sense that TileProxy would take advantage of multiple threads (virtual cores) as the more active http connections to the tile server the better. This has nothing to do with the FSX AffinityMask setting however other than for the physical cores assigned to FSX. Just keep in mind that FSX has nothing to do with HT and virtual cores. So with TileProxy we are talking about 2 distinctly different processes. One is getting tiles from a web service (Tile Proxy using virtual cores) and one is displaying them in a virtual world (FSX using physical cores). Seems like a match made in heaven. Cheers jja

TT, check these settings out:

 

3770 @ 4.9 with HT ON

 

 

[Display]

BLOOM_EFFECTS=1

TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=40 Try 400 just for giggles

UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=30

[Main]

FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.66

DisablePreload=1

[DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680.0]

Mode=1280x800x32

Anisotropic=1

[GRAPHICS]

TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096

HIGHMEMFIX=1

[TERRAIN]

LOD_RADIUS=6.500000

MESH_COMPLEXITY=100

MESH_RESOLUTION=25

TEXTURE_RESOLUTION=27

AUTOGEN_DENSITY=4

DETAIL_TEXTURE=1

WATER_EFFECTS=6

[bUFFERPOOLS]

Poolsize=0

[JOBSCHEDULER]

AffinityMask=249

[/code]

 

Rock solid 30FPS stutter free through out the flight and the videocard VRAM usage pegged at 2.6-2.8GB. Since you also use TP, you really need to get a 4GB card!

 

Efrain, you can crank the TBM up a lot...try it, I always used HT.

One is getting tiles from a web service (Tile Proxy using virtual cores) and one is displaying them in a virtual world (FSX using physical cores).

 

Try it. With HT enabled, set an affinity mask of 84 - the normally recommended value if you don't disable HT in BIOS. Fire up FSX and nothing else with a quiescent system and hit Fly, watch Task Manager and you'll see exactly what you expect. A bit of activity on the first core, and a lot of activity on the 3rd, 5th and 7th (the so-called physical cores). Exactly what you've set with affinity mask.

 

Now do the same thing with 249, and... again, the activity will mirror the mask, with lots going on on the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th cores. The question to me isn't whether or not FSX uses what the mask tells it to, but whether it buys you anything - well, that and why THESE particular cores are the ones to use for something like TileProxy or photoscenery.

 

Again, if you overclock close to your proc's limits, HT isn't an option and you'll certainly buy frames going that route. But if you have the thermal headroom to do so and you leave HT enabled, FSX does appear to use what you tell it to use and from my limited experimentation it does seem to buy some smoothness and perhaps some decrease in the blurries. But again, my question goes back to why this particular odd mask which mixes physical and "virtual" in such a strange way.

 

Scott

 

A quick edit - on some systems, you'll need to be sure you don't have core parking enabled. On mine, I never saw activity on the "virtual" cores with FSX until I disabled parking.

The difference is that 84 gives you 2 texture loaders, where both have their own core. While 249 gives you 5 texture loaders where one has its own core while the others are hyperthreaded. 84 gives you higher FPS while 249 gives you faster texture loading at a slightly lower FPS. Texture loading can benefit a lot from hyperthreading. FPS won't.

 

I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who finds affinity mask theory hard...

 

Saab, for on-disc photoscenery: what affinity mask would you use with an i7 950, and what would you use with an ivy bridge? I'm guessing 249 would still make sense with an Ivy if the scenery is on disc?

 

And if there is keenness here for leaving HT on in BIOS to do this affinity masking - how substantial is the impact on ability to overclock?

it's not til you try and place the order that they say 'sorry, not available in your country.'

 

Hi Rob,

 

I tried the one I linked through to checkout and it is all good for shipping to Australia. If you don't mind me asking, how much was the shipping/escrow service you used?

 

Hi Rob,

 

I tried the one I linked through to checkout and it is all good for shipping to Australia. If you don't mind me asking, how much was the shipping/escrow service you used?

 

No shipping/escrow service. Just a fellow simmer helping a brother out.

 

 

And if there is keenness here for leaving HT on in BIOS to do this affinity masking - how substantial is the impact on ability to overclock?

 

In MY case, I am able to run 5.0Ghz stable with HT OFF and 4.9Ghz stable with HT ON.

 

- Sent from my rooted, Verizon Samsung Galaxy Nexus LTE smartphone via Tapatalk because haters gonna hate.

Nice one Efrain! Us simmers have to stick together! haha

Nice one Efrain! Us simmers have to stick together! haha

 

Efrain claims he's not going to use my board - but watch out for a 'GTX 680+4gig+SLI - runs like super butter' thread.

 

Ant, I think it depends on the discount Amazon is offering at a given time. I've found that things that are heavily discounted tend to get the 'we do not ship to your country' once you've checked out. From memory, it doesn't actually tell you this until you actually push the 'purchase' button - it will often say during the previous steps that shipping to Australia is available - but then it gives you the 'sorry' message.

 

If it's working now, it may be that you haven't actually got to the 'action button' stage, or that the item is no longer discounted at a rate that it was (I note the EVGA 4 gig classy - which I originally wanted and tried to buy - is no longer $100 off).

 

Despite this, I'll probably give Amazon a go for the bits for the Ivy build that this thread has made me do! Unlike NewEgg, they do ship lots of stuff to Oz.

 

Any comments on my previous affinity mask question? Lots of good stuff about it in this thread, but it makes my brain hurt...

I'm definitely no expert when it comes to the affinity mask settings, currently I'm running with an AM of 14 but I have HT off. I found as most others have, that HT pushed up temps a fair bit when overclocking.

 

I could quite happily do 4.8Ghz with HT on for my 2600K but it did push temps up a bit, so I ended up settling on 4.9Ghz HT off. I mainly decided on this as it yielded the best FSXMark result for me. It's worth a look at that pinned thread.

 

I may revisit this at some point though. I kept a notebook of all my stable OC settings from 4.5Ghz through to 4.9Ghz so I can change it up pretty easily if I want to.

The AffinityMask setting in FSX will always be a slippery slope because no matter what it is set to the OS will be the final arbitrator as to what cores an app can use. So whether you set AF or not the OS will give FSX what is available. When you think about it an app should never be able to tell the OS what resources to use. It would be like letting the inmates run the asylum. So maybe it is best to think of the AF setting as a request and not a demand. Cheers jja

he AffinityMask setting in FSX will always be a slippery slope because no matter what it is set to the OS will be the final arbitrator as to what cores an app can use. So whether you set AF or not the OS will give FSX what is available.

 

Sure the OS is involved, but again... try what I suggested above. There is absolutely no question based on my tests that changing the FSX affinity mask heavily biases FSX towards the cores set by the mask even with HT enabled. Again, if you're running HT on Win 7, you may need to disable core parking before trying this as FSX may not use virtual cores that have been parked. Until I disabled parking I would have also said that FSX makes no use of HT.

 

I found as most others have, that HT pushed up temps a fair bit when overclocking.

 

As you would expect.

 

If you clock close to thermal limits, you want HT off and conventional FSX wisdom suggests this is the best course. But you can OC and HT if you don't clock as close to your proc's limits and have good cooling. Most fine-tuning is about tradeoffs and which ones balance best in your system and what you most want to optimize. I don't OC that heavily for a variety of reasons (including that my PC has to do double duty and has chores other than just simming) and I have a good cooling case with great airflow and a good CPU HSF so I have the headroom.

 

And if there is keenness here for leaving HT on in BIOS to do this affinity masking - how substantial is the impact on ability to overclock?

 

See above. In my case it seems like a no-brainer, but for those that clock higher I have no idea if the tradeoffs are worth it or not. Benchmarks indicate that all other things being equal, clocks rule for highest framerates, but there's most to life than just framerates. :-)

 

Scott

FSX can not utilize virtual cores (HT) and that is straight from the project lead Phil Taylor. Cheers jja

Please read my rather long post that Scott linked. The absolutely vital images are linked in a reply further down in that topic. I quote Phil Taylors blog post that you refere to there as well. What he ment was that if you put a texture loader on the same physical core as the main thread you'll get stutters. So they decided to treat HyperThreaded (single-core) CPUs as single-core and therefore use AffinityMask=1 for both. You still get way better texture loading by having HT activated on a single-core CPU, even without assigning a texture loader with the affinity mask. Multi core hyperthreaded CPUs were not really around back then,

 

FSX can make good use of viritual cores for texture and terrain loading.

 

Given that virtual cores are unsupported this appears totally nonsensical.

 

Sigh, please read my topic. I've used soo much time producing that data so I do know what I'm talking about. I'm glad to see that Efrain can get use of it.

Take a quad-core with HT activated.

Using just one texture loader on its own physical core with AM=17 loads textures in 33 seconds.

Hyperthread a second texture loader on the same physical core with AM=47 and all of a sudden textures load in 24 seconds.

Give each of the two texture loaders their own physical core instead AM=84 and texture loading takes 20 seconds.

Using viritual cores is not far off using physical cores for texture loaders.

 

A quad-core with HT activated and AM=249 loads the textures in around 2 thirds of the time compared to a quad-core without HT and AM=14 while still allowing for FSXs other-threads (most of you probably know these as fibers) to be offloaded from FSXs main threads physical core. (I don't reccommend AM=253 or AM=254 as these do not allow the other threads a vacant viritual core separate from the main threads physical core)

 

If you use scenery that has unique textures for each tile. For example high-res photo scenery or in this case TileProxy, you can make good use of the extra texture loading that HyperThreading enables.

 

Saab, for on-disc photoscenery: what affinity mask would you use with an i7 950, and what would you use with an ivy bridge? I'm guessing 249 would still make sense with an Ivy if the scenery is on disc?

With on disc I take it you mean not TileProxy but stored on a harddrive? Yes AM=249 is good for an i7 950 with HT activated. Your storage do affect texture loading as well. Velociraptors or SSDs are needed to get best texture loading with high res photoscenery.

 

Back to the original post. I guess the 4GB of vRAM only comes to use when you use the very high res scenery so bear that in mind that its probably only needed if you use 35cm scenery. Can you try with 70cm res and see how much the vRAM usage goes down?