It appears that Intel

From prior postings it appears that FSX barely makes use of two cores. I think there is no chance that a quad-core chip will make any difference. Maybe Mike or Jason could add more.Doug

I think that I saw a posting somewhere stating that quad-cores will not be supported by FSX.Pat

I see where you

I wonder if things like the Garmin G1000, Avidyne, Garmin GNS530 and FMS and other addon stuff can use these extra cores.I have been meaning to ask these add on vendors if they have a choice or do they just rely on FSX/FS9 to do that part of the "process management". I would like to think.. these add on aircrafts that has all these cutting edge avionics stuff can use these extra cores instead of it using the prumary cpu core that FSim needs.Manny

For that to happen FSX needs to be recoded as a multi threaded program. Very broadly in a PC based sim CPU does-flight model, gauges etc the per frame stuff-these can definitely be made multi threaded and use different cpus.Next are the LODs, objects etc. These also can be multi threaded and can be done on different CPUs.At present 3-d cards dont have ability to do this so CPU does it.The polygons and pixel stuff like shading etc these days are done by 3-d cards atleast good programming should make use of the cards and relieve the CPUS.If you look at FSX development you'll see today it being a single threaded program the last two points are being improved and not much improvement in flight dynamics part. The day MS makes FS multithreaded then it will use much better co-efficient buildup methods and much more flexible and elaborate look up tables, function tables etc for FDM and you'll see great improvements there-atleast thats how I see it!For all the bashing MSFS gets vis-a-vis X-plane there is lot of truth which gets hidden. The co-efficient buildup method, which MS uses, is a far more accurate method if you have large and accurate wind tunnel data of the aircraft you are modelling. The summing up each part method which x-plane uses is an approximate method in a very narrow pre-processed envelope,and is good if you dont have much data on the aircraft. MS gets the bad publicity because its codes are not open so to decipher the look up table variables becomes difficult.The day MS decided to make it multi threaded to make use of these powerful multi-core CPUs that day they'll put in much more data on their aircraft FDM and it will seriously rock!!But, recoding and making use of the new additional instruction set of the modern CPUs is a herculean task even by MS standards I guess!!

babua,I don't think it's a matter of making the FS series multi-threaded as much as making it multicore. According to the article linked below its more about changing the architecture of game engines to be multi-core or multi cpu aware and make aggressive use of those cores buy logically separating the major components of a game engine and dedicating each of them to one core. Yes, I imagine that would be a monumental undertaking from a design, implementation, debugging and testing standpoint. The ACES team may surprise us but I wouldn

"If you look at FSX development you'll see today it being a single threaded program"Not true, as has been discussed and confirmed by MS many times on here. Just do a search.There was even a test done by a user with the demo that showed around 15 - 20% FPS improvement using a dual core CPU comapred to a single core CPU.

Last time I checked we were running with about 15 threads but of course this varies as new threads are added/removed all the time.

Apologies, I was talking about CMT not software multi threading. Most OSes and most modern games do use software multi threading.

There are some but not many games like Doom3/Quake4 Series and Far Cry x64 Editon with multiple Core support. The number of threads in a program is unimportant, but the way they are used decides if they can be pushed over to the other Core or not. In FS they have to start over and not just tune up always the old FS-Engine. Throw it away. FS is a cash cow like Office: Some visual enhancments and sell them as a new product ... Also the x64-Games have proven very well that they have a higher average framerate and run "smoother" as when they run in 32-Bit XP.

>The day MS decided to make it multi threaded to make use of>these powerful multi-core CPUs that day they'll put in much>more data on their aircraft FDM and it will seriously>rock!!You are missing one important detail. The game can be multi-threaded but still when run on multiple CPUs you would hardly see any performance gain. It is not only whether it is "multithreaded" but to what degree threads are truly independent. If there is a lot of synchronization between threads - for example one thread can't proceed because it is waiting for another thread to complete, etc - you may see very little performance gain on multile CPUs.Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/for...argo_hauler.gifhttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6-banner-beta.jpg

Why the speculation and arm-chair quarterbacking? Its all documented:"Many of the tasks performed by the terrain engine, including the ones described in this paper, cannot be started and run to completion in the interval between consecutive rendered frames. Some of them would take several seconds to run even if 100% of the processor time was devoted to them. What

Nice info about their engine structure, indeed.