Hi,

 

Yes, your monitoring graphs show this, but the programmers from ACES confirmed this years ago. You are correct in saying that SP2/Acc has improved this.

 

To test this out, use the affinity mask to disable any cores after core zero and one and run FSX. You will see the same performance as you are now. Yes, things change if you are running stuff outside of FSX at the same time.

 

Hi Jim, OK. But. My cores are in use now at the fullest. So, even if FSX would be implemented in another way, there would not be any resources available for it.

 

And I disagree about the Aces developers announcements. If I may, a qoute from another thread on this matter ( I hope the author doesn't mind)

 

http://www.microsoft.com/Products/Ga...InstallIt.aspx

 

Phil Taylor (Pgm Mgr, FS Program) about FSX SP1 on 07/03/07 (an excerpt)....

 

"We are rebuilding the binaries from scratch. That's not trying to patch the old binaries, it's replacing them with new files, many of which have quite a bit of new code. The multi-core work, for instance, went through the terrain code stack from top to bottom. That's one reason why SP1 took so long. The multi-core infrastructure is solid, will use up to 256 cores if available, and will continue to be used as we migrate systems to it when it makes sense. Terrain and Autogen are it for now; we'll be evaluating when to do more."

 

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...microsoft_.php

 

Phil Taylor again, about FSX SP2 on 06/19/2008 (again, an excerpt)....

 

"The latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator X Service Pack 2 (SP2) is a great match for the extreme multi-core processing delivered by the new 45nm Intel® CoreTM2 Extreme processors. Flight Simulator X SP2 greatly increases multicore utilization and will scale as more threads are available leading to reduced load times as well as frame rate improvements and great visual complexity during flight."

Are you stating Moore's Law isn't correct anymore? You should write an article if so.

 

I don't think that anything is wrong with the software as such, just I had read that the parallel development practices on FSX where not what they are in modern games. I stand by that

 

That has nothing to do with Moores Law. Clock speeds have not been getting faster, the CPUs have been growing "sideways" if you will. AFAIK semiconductor technology is pretty much at it's end when it comes to that. But multiple cores can only be used when you write software specifically for them. A lot of titles weren't and aren't though. Lucky that MS made Windows runtime environments like .Net and Visual C++, that do some of this automatically. Maybe there was a little improvement in instruction sets and ALUs, but by and large a good old single instance binary will run just as badly on a Pentium 4 3,4 GHz than on an I7 with the same clockspeed. But we happy consumer sheep had to think that every new CPU generation was vastly improved - even if we couldn't make use of it in the first years. Not like it used to be in the old days, where you could rely on a massive performance jump just by buying the next CPU generation.

 

And don't be so sure about FSX and multi core in-efficiency. I suggest reading up on it. I still think that it actually is pretty good, and that Aces did an amazing and commendable job. The continued existence of the platform is proof enough for me.

I think I read your comment on "faster" as something to which you didn't intend.

 

But you're speaking of clock speed hasn't improved, but to use the term "faster" I wouldn't not say that CPU's have not become "faster" in recent years. But, as that came be a difficulty with the English language, it really comes down to what you mean by the word "faster"

In the context of old software (like FSX) I tend to be old school too - so 'faster' means more FLOPS. Sure, a quad core can do 4 times as many FLOPs than a single one - but not if they depend on each other, as they do in a sim. I my world, the CPUs have not been getting faster, but I as a developer have more of them available. And if I do things right, and if the task permits, I can of course make my software run faster. But that would be the software, not the hardware doing the trick.    

 

 

Flight Simulator X SP2 greatly increases multicore utilization and will scale as more threads are available leading to reduced load times as well as frame rate improvements and great visual complexity during flight."

 

Hi,

 

Notice he said threads not cores. And the number of threads that FSX needs is way less than what is available on even 2 cores.

 

In another P.T. blog post he does get into that anything after 2 cores is not touched with a stock FSX install. With add-ons all bets are off.

Just to bring it back on track, has OP even come back to this thread? We're going way off topic here (yes I've been part of the problem, full disclosure)