Hello everyone this is my first post and I wanted it to hopefully be a helpful one. 

Background on me.. I work for a major Hardware Manufacturer as an Enterprise Architect building large scale Data Center solutions. It has been an interesting journey to say the least trying to optimize my desktop PC to work WELL with P3D over the years. It is a unique animal as most of the approaches you would take towards getting better performance with any game is throw more GPU power at it. This is not the case with P3D. Everything has to work well together and overclocking one component can yield worse results without looking at your system holistically. So i tried to take an approach I would take when looking at bottle necks in an enterprise system.

1st Attempt at Reasonable Performance after upgrading twice from a 2700k followed by a 4770k:

6850k overclocked to 4.3 GHz with 2133 RAM and a 1080ti on a SATA based 6 GB/s SSD. G-Sync Monitor with 100Hz refresh rate

About 90-99% CPU utilization and 60-70% GPU Utilization. Lots of stutters with High CPU activity. 

30 FPS on the ground in lean scenery and 15-20 in Heavy Scenery. 60-70 FPS at Cruising Altitude. 

Thought my PC would be a rockstar at running P3D with most sliders maxed out. Not the case.

 

2nd Attempt:

8086K overcloked to 5GHZ initially with my old sticks of 2133 RAM and a 1080ti and a NVMe Samsung M2 SSD

Higher FPS by 10-15 FPS but still lots of stutters... was going to pull my hair out. Had some 3200 sticks of RAM on order as Coffee lake is certified with 2666 or higher. 

Once I put the RAM in the stutters are gone. My guess is the following:

Through sheer luck I managed to find a sweet spot between the speed of components. I had a CPU that was screaming with RAM not being able to keep up. I had an overclocked GPU and disk which was so fast at 32 GB/s that I dont think it was bottle necking there. So for me the RAM was the smoking gun and the weak link between all my settings. 

I used to think overclock the CPU and RAM with ok timings and speed wont make a difference as it does not in most games. With P3D everything seems to need to work in unison and quite effectively. 

 To try to prove my theory I went back to the 1st attempt build and replaced the 2133 RAM with 2133 with way better timings and reduced the overclock on the CPU and GPU. Stutters gone.

This is a lot of information and also minimal information so if you need more help message me and I can help you find your sweet spot.  

Not claiming to be a magician or to have found the cure all.. just thought i would share something that might be useful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 28, 20187 yr by hatata

Excellent observations and testing!

Thanks for the info.  Yours is yet more empirical evidence that a balanced system is critical for this sim (and any others as well).

🍻

Greg

I always used speech therapy to cure my stutters

 

all these threads about tweaking and stutters and no one has posted a graph,

baron hasnt cut and pasted "everyone system is different"

poppet hasnt cut and pasted "delete your shaders, and rebuild your prepar3d.cfg

there slow today. 

in all seriousness i think it does depend on your system and if you got a hookey AM or fiver in your config your knackered.  I for one cant use HT it turns my machine into a stutterfest

Edited August 29, 20187 yr by tooting

8 hours ago, hatata said:

 To try to prove my theory I went back to the 1st attempt build and replaced the 2133 RAM with 2133 with way better timings and reduced the overclock on the CPU and GPU. Stutters gone.

 

Interesting. So the idea is that a balanced system is more important than the fastest hardware, although the latter of course helps, but then everything has to be the fastest, CPU, GPU, disk and RAM.

BTW I can't remember ever reading that RAM with a faster timing actually had a noticable effect.

Out of curiosity: what would happen if you used that older and slower 2133 RAM again and lowered the overclock of CPU and GPU even more (for a similar balance)?

It would be great if there was some sort of list with various possible balanced hardware combinations in various price ranges... Not everyone has the possibility to try various combinations of hardware to see which work best. ;) 

The only real solution to stutters that works for everybody:

FSX: 1/2 refresh rate vsync.

P3D: 30Hz monitor.

Intuitively, I agree with your observations. In my case I even noticed that running at 4.8 Ghz instead of 5 Ghz (7700K) yield more smooth performance. My explanation was that the higher temperature needed to maintain 5 Ghz (1.36v) compared to 4.8 Ghz (1.3v) played a role.

Regarding your RAM observation, it makes sense. The big question is what is the correct CPU/RAM overclock ratio to get the best performance..we would need a computer expert for that. I'd be very interested if such a 'formula' exists.

Edited August 29, 20187 yr by Daedalus

Everyone talks about stutters, but is everyone actually referring to the same type of stutter? The only stutters I experience are ones that can last up to 20 seconds in a handful of specific locations around the UK, and (after checking) seem to be caused by AI planes being loaded at certain points. If I disable the AI planes completely, those same stutters seem to vanish.

The stutters that you guys are talking about are almost certainly not the same as mine.

15 hours ago, hatata said:

To try to prove my theory I went back to the 1st attempt build and replaced the 2133 RAM with 2133 with way better timings and reduced the overclock on the CPU and GPU. Stutters gone.

I'm a little confused. You modified three variables.

Cheers!

 

55 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Everyone talks about stutters, but is everyone actually referring to the same type of stutter? The only stutters I experience are ones that can last up to 20 seconds in a handful of specific locations around the UK, and (after checking) seem to be caused by AI planes being loaded at certain points. If I disable the AI planes completely, those same stutters seem to vanish.

The stutters that you guys are talking about are almost certainly not the same as mine.

We agree on something for once Chris!! 

The biggest factor for stutters for me is ai. And we all know its way down, if not at the bottom of  LM's let's fix it to do list, the military are more concerned with VR than ai traffic 

Edited August 29, 20187 yr by tooting

On 8/29/2018 at 5:21 PM, J van E said:

BTW I can't remember ever reading that RAM with a faster timing actually had a noticable effect.

I recall NickN posting extensively on SimForums about the importance of RAM. His “FSX Bible” had a chapter devoted to memory, it’s selection and configuration.

Edited August 30, 20187 yr by paj

Memory bandwidth and timings can have a significant impact on sim smoothness. The trick is to try and get them as fast / tight as possible with a solid overclock.

It is fairly easy to test the impact as you can downclock the settings to see how much worse the sim can run based on these two variables...

 

If you're going to be messing with memory then there is a good tool here to check your settings. Ideally you'd want to do a 3000% run to confirm stability. 

 

Thanks for that 

1 hour ago, djbully said:

If you're going to be messing with memory then there is a good tool here to check your settings. Ideally you'd want to do a 3000% run to confirm stability.