The BIG question: Multicore usage in MS2020

[ca_metal 2,024]

The problem isn't wanting all cores working 100% all the time. The big issue with the current sims is seeing our GPUs idling on heavy sceneries and knowing they are like that because the CPU is bottlenecking the system, because the engine is really dependant on one core and it's clock.

[Greazer 1,320]

FSX was always a dog of a sim.  It should have been recalled it was that bad.

[G-RFRY 1,712]

I don't use AM and HT is off and all four cores are working and have seen 2 at 100% this tells me my next upgrade will be CPU but I will wait till next year, a new MB 390 or 400 series due out next year.

[G-RFRY 1,712]

4 minutes ago, Greazer said:

FSX was always a dog of a sim.  It should have been recalled it was that bad.

Millions of copy's sold some dog that, I suspect Microsoft will settle for that for MSFS which is possible with a wider user platform on the console, in the super market I see pre-order cards for  the next Call of Duty, next year it could be MSFS when was the last time you saw flight sim on pre-order in a shop.

[Superdelphinus 718]

The trend in modern games certainly seems to be towards using many cores. There was a good article about this in digital foundry not that long ago. Think it was around the time the new amd chips were coming out. 

[threexgreen 3,139]

21 hours ago, rjfry said:

So you have one core at 100% and you want all cores at 100% then what are you going to do after that.

No idea where people get the idea from that we want all cores on 100%, I certainly don't. My point is I'd like more even core utilization than what I'm seeing on my system. I run reasonable settings after doing some testing. Rob's response about what you can achieve with the right balance of settings, addons, etc. shows there's apparently better CPU utilization than what it looks like which is a good thing.

Yet, I can't imagine there is nothing to the long prevailing notion of FSX/P3D being overly CPU bound and taking away from the benefits of better GPU utilization so I do think there are things a modern, new sim will do better in this regard and that's certainly one of the reasons we're all (most of us?) looking forward to MSFS.

[anden145 2,285]

19 hours ago, Greazer said:

FSX was always a dog of a sim.  It should have been recalled it was that bad.

[vortex681 806]

19 hours ago, Greazer said:

FSX was always a dog of a sim.  It should have been recalled it was that bad.

And yet it still peaks at around 3000 concurrent players every day just for the Steam Edition. They obviously don't know how bad it is.

[nickhod 425]

Short answer: Yes, the MSFS dev team will have optimised to saturate GPU capability and minimise CPU activity as much as possible. It's what anyone developing a commercial game in 2019 would do

Long answer: FSX, P3D and X-Plane have their roots in a time when GPUs weren't especially powerful and CPUs were expected to become incrementally more powerful for the foreseeable. Those sims do use multiple cores (though often weighted towards one), but do too much work on them. As a result they can't drive the GPU hard enough (or smart enough) and frame rate suffers.

Many modern games will happily eat up as much GPU resource as is available at higher detail levels, yet can run great on a an i5 processor. In those cases, as much work as possible is being offloaded to the GPU, often including object physics.

So, I think people will be surprised at how modest the recommended CPU spec for MSFS will be, and how your CPU will make little difference to frame rate above a certain level.

[F737MAX 5,606]

I'm fully expecting MSFS to make the best use out of multi core CPUs - both speed and core count.

More than 8 cores? I don't think there are any games out there that have been coded to take advantage of more than that. It becomes diminishing returns, but a higher core count will be good for running other programs simultaneously (video recording, flight sim external apps and web browsers) without an impact on the performance of the sim.

The trend of making the most out of GPU hardware will continue.
I only hope that my o/c'd 1070 will be able to run the new sim to acceptable levels as I don't want to upgrade until more affordable 12GHz+ VRAM cards become mainstream.
 

[vortex681 806]

1 hour ago, nickhod said:

Yes, the MSFS dev team will have optimised to saturate GPU capability and minimise CPU activity as much as possible. It's what anyone developing a commercial game in 2019 would do

It depends on the type of game. Flight sims and racing sims make a lot of physics calculations so still need plenty of CPU power.

1 minute ago, F737NG said:

More than 8 cores? I don't think there are any games out there that have been coded to take advantage of more than that.

There aren't that many games which make proper use of 4 cores so I think that expecting any modern game to use more than 8 is highly unlikely.

[Superdelphinus 718]

I think this has changed a lot over the last 18 months or so - having a decent cpu is important in many of the newer, aaa type games now in a way that it wasn’t for about 10 years previously. Having massive budgets and access to the best programmers means things run better. 

[vortex681 806]

2 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

I think this has changed a lot over the last 18 months or so - having a decent cpu is important in many of the newer, aaa type games now in a way that it wasn’t for about 10 years previously.

But you still need to look at your market. On Steam (perhaps the only reliable, large source of stats), the overwhelming number of gamers are still using 4-core (or less) CPUs. The same applies to monitor resolution - again, the vast majority of gamers seem to be using 1080p or less. The prevalence of QHD and 4k monitors in the flight sim community is certainly not the norm. Based on this, even though MS talks about 4k resolution in the new sim, it will still need to look good at 1080p to get the biggest market.

[Ted Striker 338]

I remember that you recently posted a video showing that you were already using more VRAM than the 11gb my 1080ti has. So 8k will probably need some 40 gb plus of VRAM. Not to worry, I'm sure Nvidia will give us a great deal on a video card with that.

Edited September 16, 2019 by Ted Striker

[TechguyMaxC 516]

What's important is that MSFS (2020) maintain "good performance" (e.g. consistent 33ms frame times or less) while providing superior visuals to existing sims.  This could be achieved through the use of multi-threading, off-loading to the GPU, or even processing on Azure (or some combination of all 3).  This only matters if you don't have access to one of these items, i.e. if you can't afford the components or internet connection to achieve the desired results.  Since most people around these parts aren't afraid to drop a couple thousand dollars to obtain the means to achieve this goal, I don't think this question really matters in the end, at least not on this forum.  

We are talking about a hobby afterall, one which can either be of minimal cost, or extremely expensive.  The bottom line is that this is up to you.