On 28/06/2017 at 8:33 AM, Noel said:

I'm afraid progress CPU single-core performance has sadly come to near halt over the past 5 years

I think that statement is essentially the gist of the story, although IPC and memory improvements play an important role as well. 

 

Personally, I'm sitting on a good 4770k (4.6Ghz)  with 2400Mhz RAM and I haven't seen anything recently that convinced me it's worth my time and money to upgrade. Hopefully the next upgrade cycle will change that. 

I go to and use the Guru3d forums where the smart kids only overclock for bragging rights and numbers. There are some real gurus there that know their stuff so when I asked about trading my 5930k in for a 7700 they universally replied that I was crazy and that it would be a down grade. 

To go to all the expense and work to get new mb and ram and cpu for a couple fps is nuts so I will wait until something that is really much faster to hit the sales floor. 

Has anyone done a 'core utilization' type of analysis of P3D V4 to confirm that  single threaded performance is still a key CPU requirement for best sim experience ? I would appreciate a link to any such analysis. 

1 hour ago, warbirds said:

I go to and use the Guru3d forums where the smart kids only overclock for bragging rights and numbers. There are some real gurus there that know their stuff so when I asked about trading my 5930k in for a 7700 they universally replied that I was crazy and that it would be a down grade. 

To go to all the expense and work to get new mb and ram and cpu for a couple fps is nuts so I will wait until something that is really much faster to hit the sales floor. 

Well, that is where I am at right now, poised to spend serious $$ to do an 'upgrade' that barely is.  The GPU bump will be nice, but CPU/Mobo/Ram--nada.  I sent my dead ASUS motherboard for my 3930K in last week and should hear from them within a week as to whether something can be fixed on it, else off we go to do a new build.  The preposterous part is cooling needs have actually gone up!

I'm hoping Threadripper comes before I've lost my patience for not having a simming PC--I miss it!  I've been sim flying for 20+ years almost daily!

4 hours ago, odourboy said:

Has anyone done a 'core utilization' type of analysis of P3D V4 to confirm that  single threaded performance is still a key CPU requirement for best sim experience ? I would appreciate a link to any such analysis. 

All you have got to do, is run the Windows Task Manager..

Yes, P3DV4 still is heavily single core dependent (although more is being offloaded than previously).

Thanks Bert. I've monitored core and GPU with V4 but a) I see some behaviors I don't understand (not being privy to the guts of P3D) and b) my old 3570K may not be really indicative of how a more modern HT multi core processor runs the sim.

21 hours ago, odourboy said:

Has anyone done a 'core utilization' type of analysis of P3D V4 to confirm that  single threaded performance is still a key CPU requirement for best sim experience ? I would appreciate a link to any such analysis. 

Yes, and it is, but that's far from the whole story. The sim splits up its processes depending on how many logical processors (LPs) it sees.

It is important to understand how these processes split out across the CPU since some processes can happily share the LPs of the same core, and yet others are not so happy sharing a core as they want full bandwidth of that core.

So we can look at how the sim utilises cores for loading scenery, and how that can affect the rendering stage of the sim when the CPU is HT enabled - without care and the appropriate Affinity Mask we can instead lose performance.

Have a look at the following diagram for a four core HT enabled running P3D v4. HT disabled is basically ignored as in all systems it won't be so good on performance and anyway no Affinity mask is required for an ideal setup. Instead this diagram of Task Manager graphs concerns only four core HT enabled, which will work better with the correct affinity mask, and as always attention must be paid to where the addon exe apps run for the final outcome:

 

 

1. In above diagram could you clarify the result with AM=85 as I think it would give two loading cores similar to 245 and make rendering free from loading?

2. If I change p3d to high priority in task manager which should not hold up the process for other things as addons and some OS work, but with HT on and sharing one LP with p3d and other LP of the same core with addon or other app having a cpu demand, will it choke the p3d process despite the high set priority as from what I read windows sees them as separate physical cores and that should instead assign the addon process on the same LP as p3d thread to let windows priority work normally?

On ‎08‎/‎07‎/‎2017 at 3:22 AM, him225 said:

1. In above diagram could you clarify the result with AM=85 as I think it would give two loading cores similar to 245 and make rendering free from loading?

2. If I change p3d to high priority in task manager which should not hold up the process for other things as addons and some OS work, but with HT on and sharing one LP with p3d and other LP of the same core with addon or other app having a cpu demand, will it choke the p3d process despite the high set priority as from what I read windows sees them as separate physical cores and that should instead assign the addon process on the same LP as p3d thread to let windows priority work normally?

 

In the graphs the situation is loading scenery and objects. The red dots show where an LP is used when loading. In the second graph 85 with four LPs allocated, shows that LP0 top left is rendering and also charged with loading. The graph 245 with six LPs shows no loading on the first two LPs. However 85 has three cores loading but 245 only has two cores loading (4 LPs) which intensify work on those two cores and care should be taken when pushing an overclock, check temperatures during scenario loading.

If you change P3D to high priority it can't run any faster. Instead other processes are not provided the same bandwidth and since many of these are providing resources to the sim, irrespective of addons, this can hold up the sim.