I know it is too early to get any solid proof which one is best for the new MSFS2020, but I am starting to believe that

choosing on of the new multicore AMD RYZEN Threadripper CPU and a new AMD NAVI GPU could actually be a better hardware platform for flight simming until INTEL

catch up in a few years from now and NVIDIA brings out the new RTX 3000 serie.

What do you think?

 

 

There's just noway to know this, but if it's any hint, they used Nvidia cards at the creator event. 

My personal opinion is that you simply can't go wrong with Nvidia when it comes to gaming. I know of several games that don't play well with AMD but everything seems to play fine with Nvidia. 

Only a personal preference but I had a bad experience, albeit 13 years ago) with AMD on AMD and not once with Intel / NVidia. I've literally (just last week) built a new i9 9900k / RTX2080 Ti rig for my day job and in the hope I got in on the early alpha testing. It's an almost futile exercise to speculate what will be the best for FS2020, especially when, without a release date, we don't know what the best at the time will be. However, forums are for speculating, so why not.

I guess that if someone get hold on a Alpha Tech build for testing and it has enough of the rendering code in place, he/she could try to do some testing by scaling the number of chores and see if it makes any different and if the game throttles up when increasing active cores.  

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by nas123

All I can say is, "I cannot confirm or deny the hardware requirements for MSFS, or any future flight simulator not yet in development" lol

Since they are optimising the simulator for the Xbox One and its upgrades that have lots of cores and threads, I have the feeling it will either favour the Ryzen series, or move so much work on the GPU that the CPU will be a non-factor in most cases. And then AMD would still be the better choice due to value and energy efficiency.

NVIDIA drivers have worked better than ATi/AMD drivers for a long time, but more recently they've been getting worse, so I'd say they're about on the same level now. There are games that favour one vendor more than the other (much more than the margin of error), and AMD GPUs seem to be performing better with DirectX 12 while NVIDIA GPUs prefer DirectX 11. Microsoft Flight Simulator will be DirectX 11 at launch, but it could be upgraded at some point during its lifetime.

The XBOX Scarlett that MSFS2020 will be released for will be based on a AMD NAVI GPU, so it should also run fine with AMD NAVI GPU in a PC.

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by nas123

I can't imagine any way this could be validated at this point in any form that would justify a video card purchase for me.

Threadripper is not really designed for gaming.  If you want a top end AMD CPU for gaming then go for a Ryzen 7.  The Ryzen 9 will work too, but the extra cores won't be utilised that well in most if not all games so a bit pointless.

At the moment AMD is ahead of Intel when it comes to CPU's, I've always had Intel CPU's since I've been alive.  But if I was building a PC now, I would definitely go for a Ryzen 9 (just because I have the money to burn over a Ryzen 7).

part of it might depend on how much of a forward look they are placing on to the new Xbox. The suggestion from them so far is next to nothing, but if they are then given it will likely be some form of 3700x level chip and next gen navi then potentially it could work better on similar hardware combinations - at least after the Xbox version actually comes out. 
 

although, given that both main current consoles use amd chips now, you don’t see much benefit of that in the pc space as far as I’m aware, for x-platform games. 

59 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Since they are optimising the simulator for the Xbox One and its upgrades that have lots of cores and threads, I have the feeling it will either favour the Ryzen series, or move so much work on the GPU that the CPU will be a non-factor in most cases. And then AMD would still be the better choice due to value and energy efficiency.

NVIDIA drivers have worked better than ATi/AMD drivers for a long time, but more recently they've been getting worse, so I'd say they're about on the same level now. There are games that favour one vendor more than the other (much more than the margin of error), and AMD GPUs seem to be performing better with DirectX 12 while NVIDIA GPUs prefer DirectX 11. Microsoft Flight Simulator will be DirectX 11 at launch, but it could be upgraded at some point during its lifetime.

I kind of already made this point, but cross platform titles are already maximised for amd hardware in the current consoles and generally intel/nvidia combinations in PC still perform better (they are just more expensive £4£)

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by Superdelphinus

1 hour ago, Superdelphinus said:

generally intel/nvidia combinations in PC still perform better

That is only true in gaming, and only because gaming has traditionally been very single core heavy. Msfs devs have said they are trying to optimize for multicore much more so I don't think we should immediately assume the current results will hold. As has been repeatedly said in this thread, Wait. Unless you have some other game that makes an upgrade now imperative there is no reason to upgrade until more is known.

3 hours ago, KillerKlient said:

The Ryzen 9 will work too, but the extra cores won't be utilised that well in most if not all games so a bit pointless.

How do you know? If MS comes out with a new game in 2020 and not utilize all cores available, they haven't made a good game.

The code will hopefully be scaleable so it can utilize 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 cores.

This is the only logical way of improving games today as the CPUs have already reached their max frequency.

 

We will never see 6 or 8 Ghz CPU. At least not with the technology we use today.

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by nas123

32 minutes ago, nas123 said:

How do you know? If MS comes out with a new game in 2020 and not utilize all cores available, they haven't made a good game.

The code will hopefully be scaleable so it can utilize 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 cores.

This is the only logical way of improving games today as the CPUs have already reached their max frequency.

 

We will never see 6 or 8 Ghz CPU. At least not with the technology we use today.

It's not that simple, back in the days games just didn't do a lot of multithreading so you would see high CPU usage on a limited number of cores.  It takes extra effort to make your code use more cores and a lot of new games these days actually have started to take advantage of that.

But the problem is, it's not a simple thing to implement.  There is no on/off switch, it has to be done throughout the code and so there will always be places in the code where multi core use simply does not happen, because some tasks just cannot be split into multiple threads, others are too big or complex to split and in some cases it may just not be worth the effort to make the code that way.

That's why it starts to become a bit pointless when you have 12 cores and 24 threads, because the reality is that the big tasks (especially in gaming) will still be limited to single cores and adding more cores won't make a difference.

CPU's like the threadripper are designed for doing many many many small jobs that can very easily be split into multiple parallel tasks.  With gaming it is much much much more complex.

EDIT: A very abstract and simple example is, if you had a program that simply counts to 5 and you made it multithreaded, with each thread counting + 1, then you can have a max of 5 threads doing that work.  If your CPU has 24 threads, you have 19 going to waste and you would have wasted valuable processing time splitting such a simple task across 5 threads when it would have been quicker to run it on one thread and not spend time splitting it up.  Games have many small functions that have problems like this - this is just one simple example, there are many other problems like this.

Edited October 22, 20196 yr by KillerKlient

24 minutes ago, KillerKlient said:

Games have many small functions that have problems like this - this is just one simple example, there are many other problems like this.

Here's another example often used in project management. One woman can have a baby in nine months. Why can't 9 women have one baby between them in one month?

Many tasks in computing are the same way and can't be split into multiple threads. And some that can are very difficult to do so, to the point it may not be worth it. With the new sim, I'm sure the developers are doing their best to make the most of modern hardware possible.