P3D multicore usage anomoly

[SteveW 1,792]

1 minute ago, SledDriver said:

I don't understand why after so many years, with all this apparent understanding, a reliable, solid solution cannot be offered?

Why are we even allowed to push sliders to settings beyond what the system can cope with?

You are very quick to respond to my queries with techno stuff, yet it seems this knowledge isn't being applied to a commercial solution. The stutters continue.

The developers and the hardware should be working out the stutter limits. Not the sim flyer.

And nobody has yet responded with any definite reason why my fast hardware was 100% loaded the other day with everything on minimum settings.

 

In consoles this is done nicely, usually. Because in consoles we have fixed facet counts and that uses the same across the consoles for the same performance. On the PC with the flight sim, we can add what we like and set what we like because we can get a faster PC next year. That's exactly what we get for our money. The operating system and the simulator can't instantly tell how much of a setting will hold up or what partition of cores is better on a particular system. That's now up to us. On the consoles it's up to them.

[SledDriver 39]

2 minutes ago, SteveW said:

In consoles this is done nicely, usually. Because in consoles we have fixed facet counts and that uses the same across the consoles for the same performance. On the PC with the flight sim, we can add what we like and set what we like because we can get a faster PC next year. That's exactly what we get for our money. The operating system and the simulator can't instantly tell how much of a setting will hold up or what partition of cores is better on a particular system. That's now up to us. On the consoles it's up to them.

I don't agree. There are just too many variables to cope with.

What is needed is for the sim to monitor itself and learn from each and every overload/stutter and self regulate to avoid it happening again.

This is exactly what all those Ghz should be doing for us, otherwise it will never improve. There will always be another add-on to push the sim a little harder, and we will be in exactly the same position in another decade unless something like this is implemented.

The current situation is unsolvable.

[SteveW 1,792]

1 minute ago, SledDriver said:

I don't agree. There are just too many variables to cope with.

 

Irrespective, that's what they do - whether it's good enough for a particular game is another question.

[SteveW 1,792]

4 minutes ago, SledDriver said:

I don't agree. There are just too many variables to cope with.

What is needed is for the sim to monitor itself and learn from each and every overload/stutter and self regulate to avoid it happening again.

This is exactly what all those Ghz should be doing for us, otherwise it will never improve. There will always be another add-on to push the sim a little harder, and we will be in exactly the same position in another decade unless something like this is implemented.

The current situation is unsolvable.

That's what I said - it's up to you to set it so that it is OK for you.

[SledDriver 39]

There is obviously some fairly dumb code in amongst the good stuff though. I mean a sim which can't determine that it's going to need all the airport models for the airport you are approaching and indeed are locked onto the ILS of, until it's too late, and then tries to load them all at once in one big gulp when you are only a couple of miles out, pausing the sim itself, is not that clever, whatever anyone may say.

Some of this stuff desperately needs improving.

[SteveW 1,792]

6 minutes ago, SledDriver said:

There is obviously some fairly dumb code in amongst the good stuff though. I mean a sim which can't determine that it's going to need all the airport models for the airport you are approaching and indeed are locked onto the ILS of, until it's too late, and then tries to load them all at once in one big gulp when you are only a couple of miles out, pausing the sim itself, is not that clever, whatever anyone may say.

Some of this stuff desperately needs improving.

It doesn't do that. When set up properly the way the sim loads stuff is incremental so that it is ready when you get there.

So that's where we come to the fact that not only do we have an fps situation on our hands, we also have a background process building up the requirements of the scene ahead of time.

1. Run up an fps view

2. Load up what we are going to see as we fly ahead of time.

If that's not happening then you need to have a look at the sim and settings. Start low settings and build up with a VSync in place. Don't over-cook it with too much detail or too big textures.

Edited April 23, 2019 by SteveW

[SteveW 1,792]

Regarding consoles as you disagreed; to clear that up if you look, I am referring to the way they usually adhere to a limit of some kind when producing the outcome of the game so that the experience is similar across consoles. That might be a facet count, character count, or pixel rate or whatever is relevant to the game and console.

My point was that; instead on the PC, with  FSX and P3D we get to do what we want. That's not a fault with P3D or FSX, that's what we want.

Edited April 23, 2019 by SteveW

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

On 3/30/2019 at 8:30 AM, Bert Pieke said:

There has been some debate about how much control P3D has over which cores to use for its various threads, but the behavior that you noted is indeed typical. It looks to me that the first two available cores are specifically assigned by P3D, and the remaining cores get used as required for scenery loading tasks.

If you go and reassign the affinity, you change this behavior.. whether that is for the better or the worse I do not know..

Well, to my surprise.. with turning Affinity off and on repeatedly, I was actually able to see what others have reported, namely a more even load distribution across all cores.  Time to eat some crow..

The good news:  very smooth, fluid flight in most terrain.. very nice!

The bad news: in heavy scenery, fps drops and blurries, just as before, no difference. (but not worse either..)

None of the cores are maxed out, and yet, performance tanks.. just as I have seen before..

So... some more testing ahead

 

[SledDriver 39]

40 minutes ago, SteveW said:

It doesn't do that. When set up properly the way the sim loads stuff is incremental so that it is ready when you get there.

So that's where we come to the fact that not only do we have an fps situation on our hands, we also have a background process building up the requirements of the scene ahead of time.

1. Run up an fps view

2. Load up what we are going to see as we fly ahead of time.

If that's not happening then you need to have a look at the sim and settings. Start low settings and build up with a VSync in place. Don't over-cook it with too much detail or too big textures.

It just doesn't seem that predictable. You can set the sim up to run well, change planes, and it is problematic again. Obviously because the new plane is more demanding.

As a human, I can sit here for hours and days tweaking and adjusting and reloading the sim and trying and testing, and finally get something which works well, until I change one component, then it all has to be done again - it just seems like the sim should be doing this stuff. Dealing with multiple dimensional setups is just what computers are good at and humans are bad at.

 

[SledDriver 39]

13 minutes ago, SteveW said:

Regarding consoles as you disagreed; to clear that up if you look, I am referring to the way they usually adhere to a limit of some kind when producing the outcome of the game so that the experience is similar across consoles. That might be a facet count, character count, or pixel rate or whatever is relevant to the game and console.

My point was that; instead on the PC, with  FSX and P3D we get to do what we want. That's not a fault with P3D or FSX, that's what we want.

Is it? Really? Or is it just the real solution hasn't been developed yet?

I certainly don't want to spend half my simming time tweaking to try and avoid problems. I want to fly.

[SledDriver 39]

7 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

Well, to my surprise.. with turning Affinity off and on repeatedly, I was actually able to see what others have reported, namely a more even load distribution across all cores.  Time to eat some crow..

The good news:  very smooth, fluid flight in most terrain.. very nice!

The bad news: in heavy scenery, fps drops and blurries, just as before, no difference. (but not worse either..)

None of the cores are maxed out, and yet, performance tanks.. just as I have seen before..

So... some more testing ahead

 

I've continued to test my own propositions with affinities and HT on/off with different planes, in different scenarios, and I still find that for me, HT off, all my weather apps on core0 and P3D spread across all the other cores still delivers the best results.

I have listened with interest to all the other suggestions around here and tested them, but nothing has beaten my affinity tweak for me yet.

Also, I turned on FastSync in the nVidia control panel and that seems to have made an improvement to smoothness when combined with RTSS framelimiting at 30 fps (I can't use the sync/2 setting - it wont work for me here).

At this point, these are still the best settings for me.

Now I am trying to sort the large pauses I get when approaching airfields with air traffic enabled.

[SteveW 1,792]

 

1 minute ago, SledDriver said:

Is it? Really? Or is it just the real solution hasn't been developed yet?

I certainly don't want to spend half my simming time tweaking to try and avoid problems. I want to fly.

I'm not saying they try to make the games run the same speed on consoles. I'm saying they stick to a count of some kind for a similar experience, whereas we can put anything in we like to P3D and FSX.

12 minutes ago, Bert Pieke said:

Well, to my surprise.. with turning Affinity off and on repeatedly, I was actually able to see what others have reported, namely a more even load distribution across all cores.  Time to eat some crow..

The good news:  very smooth, fluid flight in most terrain.. very nice!

The bad news: in heavy scenery, fps drops and blurries, just as before, no difference. (but not worse either..)

None of the cores are maxed out, and yet, performance tanks.. just as I have seen before..

So... some more testing ahead

 

The cores AMs and HT thing rolls on.

If your mate has a four core PC how's P3D run on that with no AM? 1111=15.

How does your other mate's sim run with his six core and AM=15=001111?

I think the six core runs better because it's got slack.

Question - Does it run better with  AM=63=111111

??

 

 

[itsjase 52]

8 minutes ago, SledDriver said:

It just doesn't seem that predictable. You can set the sim up to run well, change planes, and it is problematic again. Obviously because the new plane is more demanding.

As a human, I can sit here for hours and days tweaking and adjusting and reloading the sim and trying and testing, and finally get something which works well, until I change one component, then it all has to be done again - it just seems like the sim should be doing this stuff. Dealing with multiple dimensional setups is just what computers are good at and humans are bad at.

 

I think you're asking for a bit much, Sled.There are so many different cases where different settings will have different impacts. Eg. On a cloudy day at certain times of day at a certain location, shadows might tank performance, but might have no impact in 99% of other cases. Almost all drops are different edge cases like this.

From what it sounds like you just want a smooth sim experience, so just lower some settings and you'll be fine.

You only need to tweak if you want to squeeze out the best graphics that lets you maintain a reasonable framerate.

Can't have your cake and eat it too.

[SteveW 1,792]

So AM=63=111111 six cores. what can that do better than the four core PC AM=15=1111?

It can load the scenario faster. And with that shows that it can load whatever, faster.

That's it. There's no hike in fps although there can be a small improvement with an optimised back end.

[SledDriver 39]

4 minutes ago, itsjase said:

I think you're asking for a bit much, Sled.There are so many different cases where different settings will have different impacts. Eg. On a cloudy day at certain times of day at a certain location, shadows might tank performance, but might have no impact in 99% of other cases. Almost all drops are different edge cases like this.

From what it sounds like you just want a smooth sim experience, so just lower some settings and you'll be fine.

You only need to tweak if you want to squeeze out the best graphics that lets you maintain a reasonable framerate.

Can't have your cake and eat it too.

😀 None of you are hearing what I am really saying.

You all keep telling me the situation is complex. Yes I know that. Which is why the computer should be dynamically controlling it and learning as it goes. Not me.

Anyway. Apparently no-one agrees with me and you all think its fine to spend so much time tweaking. I believe it could be done better.

The sim may be complex, but it is also a finite environment. It may not be possible for the sim to fix everything, but I think it should be making a lot better effort than it is after all these YEARS of development.

But I'll shut up about all that now. With no-one agreeing even here its not surprising nothing has been done about it.