With regards to the latest CPU’s, our hobby is a niche area when it comes to the latest and greatest. I personally found that older chips still hold up to the current ESP standards.

As you may already know, our beloved 32bit platform only utilizes single cores. So when we look at the previous 5 generations of intel chips, the single core performance hasn’t really improved that much. Of all the chips to come out, I believe the biggest jump was the (2500K/3770K) era of chipsets. Still a great chips for FSX & P3D use. Has a great single core clock and can still hold up very well.

The main reason for upgrading the CPU is to keep up with recent technical aspects (GPU, DDR5, DDR4 RAM, etc). Since P3D v3, the use of GPU’s have improved a little with X11 but, still not enough to warrant a massive system upgrade (In my personal opinion). Would the latest and greatest still be better performance wise? Well, sure but, by how much? Is it worth the upgrade? That’s the real question.

The only time a significant upgrade would matter is if we get a 64bit platform that can utilize all cores and every aspect of current hardware. I’m still not even sure if P3D 64bit will allow that. Heck, It may only let us 70% of our system potential at first. That capability may come after that.

I’m still running an older CPU and get great performance out of my chip and hardware. It’s all about the settings. It always has been. With the latest and greatest hardware, there is no reason why you shouldn’t able to achieve great frames and performance, as long as you are being conservative with your settings. By setting the “I want everything on max, in 4K and with 100FPS” expectation ahead of time, you will always end up being disappointed. It’s hard to take in sometimes. I should know, I’ve been there! Once I’ve got my settings to a conservative level, I’ve never been happier.

For example, What type of flying are you after? (Airliners? General Aviation? Fighters?) For me, it’s Airliners. I have a list of settings for flying my PMDG 777\ NGX and different settings for my occasional GA flights. With that, you can determine which settings you can turn down and some that are actually necessary.  Below are the settings I use.

For Airliner Flights:

LOD Radius of Large 

Texture Resolution of 1024 within my .CFG

Mesh Complexity of 100

Mesh Resolution of 10m (Helps with conflicting with aircraft at certain airports near water).

Texture Resolution of 7cm

Water Effects are set to 0. When you are flying at 37,000 Feet, You don’t need to see the details of individual waves. I set that to zero. As long as it looks blue, you won’t notice a difference.

AI Traffic? None. I utilize my own custom traffic for Vatsim (Via Vpilot).

Scenery Complexity set to Normal. Most developers will create their airports with this setting in mind. Normal setting will show 100% of the custom objects within a detailed payware scenery. (90% of the time). You should always refer to the manual for recommended settings but, I haven’t run into any issues on this setting.

Autogen is set to sparse. Just enough to show some trees and general autogen.

AS2016 with 256 or 512 textures for clouds. You can even use 1024. No reason to run 2K or 4K. There is little visual difference.

I have never run into any performance issues or CTD’s with those settings. I am running a very low end PC compared to the newer stuff out there. It’s all about being frugal with your settings and trying to determine what your goal is, within your sim.

Cheers.

I upgraded in January from a 4770k @4.5 to a 7700k @5.15 I swapped my gtx 1080 into the new rig. High end ram in both rigs.

I left FSX a few years ago and fly P3D and Xplane. 99% of my P3D flying is the west coast with Orbx AS16 etc. etc.

The difference in performance was significant, I'll take a stab and say about 20-25%. My issues went from moving sliders to the left to achieve a personally acceptable frame rate, to moving sliders to the left to avoid OOM's

P3D 64bit can't come soon enough :)

I'm happy with my upgrade.

12 hours ago, Tino said:

With regards to the latest CPU’s, our hobby is a niche area when it comes to the latest and greatest. I personally found that older chips still hold up to the current ESP standards.

As you may already know, our beloved 32bit platform only utilizes single cores. So when we look at the previous 5 generations of intel chips, the single core performance hasn’t really improved that much. Of all the chips to come out, I believe the biggest jump was the (2500K/3770K) era of chipsets. Still a great chips for FSX & P3D use. Has a great single core clock and can still hold up very well.

 

Indeed. We might never enjoy our "flying" the way we would like- or as close to or as near to what we see in real life. However, we can take what we have and pretend we do...it is what we have, and we need to accept it. 

Joe - did you buy the 3600mhz RAM?

And if so, what (if any) difference did it make?

Oh and there is one other possible bottleneck in your system:

 

Those with long memories might recall that a Microsoft guy used to make occasional pronouncements about FSX matters. I can't remember his name or most of his details but one thing that stuck in my mind was when he talked about video cards. When he described the burden placed by FSX on a graphics card, he did not mention bus speed, or GPU speed, or DRAM speed, or any other metric apart from ... bus WIDTH.

And sure enough, back in the day, I tested for myself and found that a 512bit width card (gtx8800 I believe but this is ancient history so I might be wrong) held up really well against nominally faster cards that had narrower bus width. I've lost the details but I remember that it was an appreciable point.

Nvidia play a naughty game of fiddling with their bus widths, presumably to restrict the performance of the first round of each new generation artificially so that they can more easily make the next round perform faster even though it's basically the same kit. Thanks to this trick, the gtx 1070 and 1080 have narrow widths (256bits I believe). This has been increased for the new 1080ti but only to 312 or something - and even the Titan has only 384! 

I have heard that faster DRAM makes up for a narrower bus, but that makes limited sense to me: given any particular DRAM speed, the bigger the bus the better. (Also from a pure technical point of view based on discussions I had ages ago with a hardware engineer I am not sure that having faster DRAM can ever fully overcome the limitations of a relatively narrower bus - but I admit this is beyond my expertise.)

I'm not suggesting that any improvement from a wider bus would be big enough, on its own, to justify spending another £600! But perhaps for your next GPU upgrade, make a note of the bus width and perhaps wait for a new card with >256 bits.

Anyway, just a thought from an old timer.  

 

.

3 hours ago, tfm said:

Joe - did you buy the 3600mhz RAM?

And if so, what (if any) difference did it make?

I did.. unfortunately it made no difference ! I OC the RAM to 3800Mhz and brought the CAS latency to 15, but really- no difference comparing to 3600Mhz or even 3200Mhz.  It was great for benchmarks but for P3D, no difference!

4 hours ago, joemiller said:

I did.. unfortunately it made no difference ! I OC the RAM to 3800Mhz and brought the CAS latency to 15, but really- no difference comparing to 3600Mhz or even 3200Mhz.  It was great for benchmarks but for P3D, no difference!

Thanks for the update.

20 hours ago, joemiller said:

I did.. unfortunately it made no difference ! I OC the RAM to 3800Mhz and brought the CAS latency to 15, but really- no difference comparing to 3600Mhz or even 3200Mhz.  It was great for benchmarks but for P3D, no difference!

You most be the first one??? Probably you don't have the skills or you only ???? 

No skills will make 200MHz or one CAS level less increase FSX/P3D performance in a way you can measure. It's just not going to happen.

I also read that our sim is single threaded up above, this is also highly inaccurate, please review your information sources.

If it not give any best to stay with 2133 its ok for me, have not say its singletread but you have a main tread , the esay way to see how it gone work in FSX P3D is mesure the singletread performance not the multitread, just my two cents.

I have to agree that a processor with better single thread performance should be a better option for P3D although it is multithreaded. It's not optimized that way, not yet.

This is why those new AMDs with 8 cores and 16 threads can't beat an 'old' quad with HT by Intel just yet.

On 4/20/2017 at 8:12 AM, tfm said:

Those with long memories might recall that a Microsoft guy used to make occasional pronouncements about FSX matters. I can't remember his name or most of his details but one thing that stuck in my mind was when he talked about video cards. When he described the burden placed by FSX on a graphics card, he did not mention bus speed, or GPU speed, or DRAM speed, or any other metric apart from ... bus WIDTH.

And sure enough, back in the day, I tested for myself and found that a 512bit width card (gtx8800 I believe but this is ancient history so I might be wrong) held up really well against nominally faster cards that had narrower bus width. I've lost the details but I remember that it was an appreciable point.

Nvidia play a naughty game of fiddling with their bus widths, presumably to restrict the performance of the first round of each new generation artificially so that they can more easily make the next round perform faster even though it's basically the same kit. Thanks to this trick, the gtx 1070 and 1080 have narrow widths (256bits I believe). This has been increased for the new 1080ti but only to 312 or something - and even the Titan has only 384! 

I have heard that faster DRAM makes up for a narrower bus, but that makes limited sense to me: given any particular DRAM speed, the bigger the bus the better. (Also from a pure technical point of view based on discussions I had ages ago with a hardware engineer I am not sure that having faster DRAM can ever fully overcome the limitations of a relatively narrower bus - but I admit this is beyond my expertise.)

I'm not suggesting that any improvement from a wider bus would be big enough, on its own, to justify spending another £600! But perhaps for your next GPU upgrade, make a note of the bus width and perhaps wait for a new card with >256 bits.

What Phil Taylor was talking about was video memory bandwidth. You can get bandwidth two ways; either increase the frequency or increase the bus width. Bandwidth is essentially just frequency x width.

From a hardware engineering standpoint, increasing bus width isn't a great solution. You need more traces (connections), more pins, more of everything. All things being equal, you're better off with a faster, narrower bus. Keep in mind that storage devices have gone to a completely serial design (that's the S in SATA) away from Parallel ATA because it's so much easier (you don't need to keep multiple paths synchronized).

It's not some nefarious plot by nvidia; they're trying to make economical cards that have a particular RAM bandwidth target (and keep in mind that different GPU designs can be limited by clock or bandwidth).

Unless one designs GPUs for a living, I would be very reluctant to focus on bus width, any more than I would on raw Ghz on a CPU. FSX may be VRAM-bandwidth sensitive, so it's worth looking at that, but not so much how it's achieved. You were probably using a GTX690, which was SLI-on-a-card; it's worth noting that each of those GPUs only had a 256-bit memory interface. I think the only folks who went 512-bit on a single GPU were ATI.

Cheers!

Luke

 

 

Ehhhh, well let's just say I've been simming, building, and oc for about 17 years... not  much but I learned a few things.