AMD Or Intel for Flight Simming (FSX/P3D)

[bramlaurens 0]

Hi everyone,

I am building a flight simulator at home and have now come to the conclusion that my current PC is severely lacking in terms of power. So I decided to build a new PC and my main obstacle now is mostly choosing the right CPU. I've done some digging online and many people say Intel is always the way to go. However, since I am on a budget limit because I originally didn't plan on building a new PC, I've also been looking at AMD's Ryzen series.

I am planning on running FSX and P3D. 

I also do video editing and music production so for that having many cores will be very useful. Because of this, right now AMD's risen 7 1800x compels the most to me. If I were to go with intel I think I would choose the I5 7600k. I read that Ryzen's many cores will not be very useful because FSX is mostly single core demanding but I did read somewhere that P3Dv4 is way better at multi-threading. 

 

My maximum CPU budget is €300. It would be great to see some thoughts on this.

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

Just read all the previous discussion on this topic..

Both P3D and FSX are still single core dependent and Intel has the proven architecture solution..

Spend the money and get the best!

[SierraHotel 982]

I have an AMD 8350 which runs P3D v4.3 with no problems, when I upgrade it will b to a Ryzen.

[Greggy_D 936]

Ditto.  I also have the Ryzen 2600x and it burns through P3D.  There isn't any reason to spend all that money on Intel for 5fps more.  

[BaldyB 20]

3 hours ago, Greggy_D said:

Ditto.  I also have the Ryzen 2600x and it burns through P3D.  There isn't any reason to spend all that money on Intel for 5fps more.  

Running FSX-SE. Asus HERO Crosshair VII, ASUS Strick RX-580, !6GB Ram at 3600. Ryzen 2600x.  This runs as playable as FS9 on the dual CPU Asus work station board I had without the annoying screaming of the old AMD heat sinks. I'm getting 35-40 FPS at high density air ports. I will admit I was surprised. Getting 4.1 GHz on the CPU, not to bad in IMHO. I't still a guess but some are saying AMD's 7nm form factor will run at 4.7GHz?  If that's true it will be a real game changer for AMD. The chips are sampling now from what I hear. Eventually we will see more Flight Sims running multy core 64 bit operating systems. I wish Microsoft had sold the rights to PMDG. LM is a defense contractor funded by taxpayer money. Seems to me they could go a little easy price wise on their FS software, they never seem to get enough.

The old 4X4 AMD dual CPU system would run FS9 at 90-100 FPS with 2 FX57 CPU's. It would I suspect run FSX at a very playable rate. The setup had one problem outside of expense, it was to word not allowed loud. At that no DIY water cooling was readily available. If you were doing softhing other than flight sims the noise would drive you crazy. I got so I could not take the noise any more.

Best BaldyB

     

 

 

Edited September 7, 2018 by BaldyB

[himmelhorse 1,276]

Bert,

Have you, or anyone else for that matter, got some sharable thoughts on more threads with regard to the upcoming(?) Vulkan engine in P3D and Xplane? Will the new engine, whatever it is make P3D less single core dependent? I also do not think that the old adage of fastest is bestest is going to go away in the short term at least, and consideration should be given to that as well when looking at an upgrade.

I am holding off on an upgrade mainly because of this aspect. Having said that though I am unsure whether having 32 cores as opposed to 28 (ficticious numbers here) would really make that much of a difference. If it does, however, it may well be that AMD (in the future) could be a better choice. At the moment, I don't believe there is really such a huge or really significant difference between the best CPU of each manufacturer.

In essence, I am just wondering what the new engines will actually achieve and how they will do it.

Regards

Tony

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

We all wonder... but time will tell 

[lownslo 592]

FSX will always be CPU bound, so the faster the CPU the better.  More cores will not have as much difference as a faster CPU.

From Beau Hollis a few weeks after P3Dv4 was released.  His replies are in bold.

What is better, a 4.0 GHz processor running 4 cores or a 4 GHz processor running 6 cores? Does it make a difference?

If they are all the same speed, more is always better. Prepar3D can and will use all cores.

What is the return on processor speed vs processor cores?

The speed of the primary core will be the determining factor FPS assuming your settings have you CPU-bound. For raw FPS, less cores at a higher clock will yield better results. On the other hand, more cores will improve the speed at which new terrain textures, and autogen data load in. Maxing out the new draw distance and terrain resolutions setting will request several times more data than v3 was able to. When paging performance isn't fast enough to keep up with flying speed, you will get blurry textures, models popping in, and reduced autogen draw distances.

Is Hyper threading relevant in P3d v4 because I read it wasn't in P3d v3. If so, briefly, how?

We create a job queue per core (including HT cores). Background jobs do tasks like generating textures and loading terrain data.

[westman 257]

Have one AMD 1800X 4.1ghz , I7 8700k 5.3ghz, I9 7920x 5.1ghz 

run 2 P3D-v4 PC.s its not the AMD its the single core is way off i want +220 cinebench single core for a good P3D performance

The FX 57 from 2005 was fine back in the golden AMD days, 8350 check the singlecore performance , had both and lot of other AMD CPU.s

Edited September 8, 2018 by westman

[W2DR 1,860]

And never forget...Ford is better than Chevy, Ferrari is better than Lamborghini, and Sofia is better looking than Gina...

PS: I'd go with Intel...it's better than AMD for both FSX and P3D...

Edited September 17, 2018 by W2DR
edditted becuase i kant spel........

[joemiller 269]

On 9/16/2018 at 7:30 PM, W2DR said:

And never forget...Ford is better than Chevy, Ferrari is better than Lamborghini, and Sofia is better looking than Gina...

PS: I'd go with Intel...it's better than AMD for both FSX and P3D...

Please post a picture of Sofia and one of Gina so we can make a sound decision.

Thank you