Hi,

 

Last year I bought an AMD FX6300 @ 3.5Ghz, Turbo up to 4.1Ghz (technically a 3 core 6 thread CPU)  and recently an R9 270 GPU. It greatly improved performance in FSX compared to a previous old core2duo. Even better in Prepar3D.

 

Recently I got an Acer laptop, thin and portable with only moderate casual gaming in mind, it has a Core i5-4200U @ 1.6Ghz, Turbo up to 2.6Ghz (a 2 core CPU with 4 threads) with an NVIDIA GT750M GPU (in optimus) and in turns out that this laptop runs just as good if not sometimes better than my main desktop rig?

 

I compared settings and loaded up addon scenery with addon aircraft and the FPS is mostly similar (in Prepar3D)

 

In FSX the desktop is somewhat faster but also not much.

 

In other first person shooter games (BF4) or Watch_Dogs the desktop rig is considerably better, but still the laptop is not too far behind if I slightly dial down details.

 

Now I am wondering, are games so well optimized these days or is AMD just really bad?

 

I know vishera/piledriver and whatnot wasnt a hit but I didnt expect it to almost lose out to a mobile CPU found in ultrabooks.... this i5 is the U version with low TDP....

 

Also I recall usi some msi tool to see CPU core usage in-game and it was constantly dropping and rising, I have a low end ASUS mainboard could this be a bottleneck and have trouble handling the FX CPU?

Have a look at Windows Task Manager \ Performance tab.

 

Are you seeing three or six active threads?

 

You should have one core running flat out and the other two varying, depending on scenery conditions.

 

Are you running any AffinityMask setting in your fsx.cfg?

As Bert mentioned check your affinitymask. but I would hazard a guess that its down to it being a decent i5 rather than an amd, as we know INtel's single thread performance dumps all over the amd