I've recently repeated some testing on the effects of the number cores used in FSX. With each additional core used frame rates dropped, my conclusion is that there are significant overheads for the main sim engine in passing off and retrieving work from each additional thread. I noticed a significant improvement in the rendering of autogen going from 2 cores to 3 but no real difference going from 3 to 4 cores. I came to the conclusion that for my personal preferences and hardware using 3 cores gave me the best compromise between frame rates and smoothness. If I had an additional 2 cores to play with I'm not convinced I'd use them for FSX, they might come in useful if I were running add-ons outside of the sim, which I don't.

what about faster texture loading with additional 2 cores? I noticed when I turn off a core or two FSX takes longer to load the ground textures, i.e. it takes longer until they come out

of their blur state to a clear state. while having all 6 cores enabled it goes much quicker.

so I am assuming the same would be true if I add additional cores. thought?

Go for the 3930K Joel,

Texture loading scales very well with clockspeed. It doesn't scale as good when adding more cores so [email protected] will load textures faster than 8cores@3Ghz and will at the same time be able to give you 40% higher FPS. The lack of clockspeed lets the new Xeon down big time.

According to FSInsider for SP1:

• Moved DEM loading to threads.
  
• Moved terrain texture synthesis to threads.
  
• Moved Autogen batch rebuilds to threads.
  

What do #1 and #3 mean?

The DEM loading is the terrain mesh. You can see how the form of the landscape changes slightly as you fly along. That's it in action.

 

As for nr3, Even thou I call it a texture & terrain loader (t&t loader) or just texture loader, it is true that they do autogen as well. If I can remember things correctly without digging out my notes you'll get full autogen batching on a Lynnfeld@ stock speed with 2 t&t loaders and with a healthy overclock I get full autogen coverage with just 1 t&t loader. And once you have maximum coverage it won't get any better.

 

I don't have smoothness issues with my FSX really, only FPS issues.

but faster Texture/Autogen loading is more then welcome

 

what is a strange to me the fact that when I lower my CPU core speed (today I am running on X5670 6 Core) to as low as 3GHz (from 4GHz of today), I really see no difference in FPS at all

strange..

 

That is why I wasn't totally sure GHz would help

me much, hence I was aiming for faster Autogen/textures, which lead to the question "would extra 2 cores would help"

To be either GPU limited or PCIe bandwidth limited are two scenarios where increasing CPU speed doesn't actually yield better FPS.