4 hours ago, TechguyMaxC said:

Pausing the sim in order to dive into settings menus is somewhat immersion-breaking, I would rather attain the requisite performance necessary to avoid this endeavor altogether, but to each their own.

My point is no matter what hardware you have you must make peace with the fact these sims easily overtax any system--so you need to adjust them be it before and or during a flight.  Squeezing out a few % more Ghz just will never obviate this reality you just bump up the sliders a very small amount between 4.8 and 5.2Ghz and youlre not going to see any difference except with a benchmark tool and even then the improvements are minuscule relative to the total power requirement.  Hence, I don't buy into the 'enthusiast' orientation as a means to get anything more meaningful out of the flight sim experience itself.   It's for its own sake, for bragging rights, or something other thing.

Edited December 5, 20196 yr by Noel

15 hours ago, Noel said:

My point is no matter what hardware you have you must make peace with the fact these sims easily overtax any system--so you need to adjust them be it before and or during a flight.  Squeezing out a few % more Ghz just will never obviate this reality you just bump up the sliders a very small amount between 4.8 and 5.2Ghz and youlre not going to see any difference except with a benchmark tool and even then the improvements are minuscule relative to the total power requirement.  Hence, I don't buy into the 'enthusiast' orientation as a means to get anything more meaningful out of the flight sim experience itself.   It's for its own sake, for bragging rights, or something other thing.

It's "some other thing" for me...in a word--"headroom."  Having reserve processor capacity can and does make the difference between saturating the CPU when workload hits peaks, and frame production momentarily slows down, inducing stutters, or cruising through workload peaks smoothly.  I work to get the most out of my CPU that I can, given voltage, power, and temp limits, but I don't just use that as justification for moving the sliders to the right...often, the advantage gained is that subtle existence of extra headroom to absorb workload surges with minimum visible effect.

The difference between 4.8 and 5.3 GHz here is a marked improvement in smoothness.  It's acceptable at 4.8, but really silky smooth at 5.3.  Perfectly smooth?  No, but the difference is real, and worth the additional effort and occasional aggravation.

Agreed, I prefer the term "Liquid' when it is a bit better than only "smooth". For gliding where lots of turns are made, I prefer to set up for Liquidity rather than object counts. But headroom is the name of the game.

33 minutes ago, w6kd said:

The difference between 4.8 and 5.3 GHz here is a marked improvement in smoothness.  It's acceptable at 4.8, but really silky smooth at 5.3.  Perfectly smooth?  No, but the difference is real, and worth the additional effort and occasional aggravation.

You're talking to someone running a 6.5y/o processor and who experiences near perfection in smooth video--that would be looking out the window at anything, while flying thru clouds, taxiing, everywhere--PROVIDED I keep tuned to what this platform can realistically do.  I have all sliders near max except play w/ autogen and if really severe settings in say PMDG 777 I've had to dial back some other sliders.   My GPU is old as well and I have to be careful running cloud/terrain shadow distance but these are a function of what hardware I have.  As say near perfection because as long as 30 frames are maintained it's liquid smooth--on a very rare occasion in an area where I'm getting near the top of the headroom I have to play with I'll get a brief 'hang', but again runtime video is exceedingly smooth--on a 6.5y/o platform.  If you're experiencing a substantial difference w/ the small difference in thru put that sort of increase in clock speed that is simply a function of how you're setup is all, as I've already stated.   

Edited December 5, 20196 yr by Noel

32 minutes ago, SteveW said:

But headroom is the name of the game.

And...'headroom' is a function EQUALLY of what your total processing power is VERSUS how you're set up, and this is my only point.  You can chase headroom by tacking on a few Ghz but unfortunately instantly kill that half of your 'headroom' by setting up the sim beyond what your 5.3Ghz can handle.

Naturally.

First set up with VSync=Off and Unlimited on the slider.

Adjust settings so that we can still see greater fps (SHIFT+Z) than the refresh rate of the monitor.

Now back in Display Settings, set VSync=On.

The simulator should show an  average fps around the Monitor refresh frequency.

Task Manager graphs should show no 100% Tasks. In HT systems count in each pair of Sister LPs together so that two at 50% is actually means one core at 100%.

Use the number of LPs that load the sim fastest. Avoid adding LPs to only see a decrease in loading time of a few seconds.

Corral addon exe apps onto the unused LPs, avoid cores of the sim, at least the most significant cores. Use at least two LPs per exe app.

Do not apply Affinity to programs that have their own affinity settings, such as the simulator itself and things like DASH 8 and GTN.

 

 

Here's my page on headroom: P3D VSync and Performance Tuning

http://www.codelegend.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=698

 

Edited December 5, 20196 yr by SteveW

Note that the Locked fps on the slider continues to build the next frame even though one has completed, it builds look ahead frames. That's hard on the system

The VSync = On + Unlimited setting allows the system to relent after frame building.

The Triple Buffer increases flow of frames in the GPU and can help if flicker is experienced on a particular system.

Systems vary widely with cores, HT, GPU strength, Display Port and hdmi connections and so on.

Comparing fps is a waste of time because we can drop a setting to increase fps by doing less work per frame.

Increasing draw distance is like increasing pixel count with a double size monitor increases by four time. So move sliders up a notch one at a time. Start with low settings.

23 minutes ago, SteveW said:

Note that the Locked fps on the slider continues to build the next frame even though one has completed, it builds look ahead frames. That's hard on the system

The VSync = On + Unlimited setting allows the system to relent after frame building.

The Triple Buffer increases flow of frames in the GPU and can help if flicker is experienced on a particular system.

Systems vary widely with cores, HT, GPU strength, Display Port and hdmi connections and so on.

Comparing fps is a waste of time because we can drop a setting to increase fps by doing less work per frame.

Increasing draw distance is like increasing pixel count with a double size monitor increases by four time. So move sliders up a notch one at a time. Start with low settings.

You got me on to this basic approach a while back.   I use the vsync to 30mHz, unlocked frames in sim, monitor set to 30mHz, which was the beginning of complete freedom from stutters for me even on old hardware.  Like magic.  I always had 'okay' performance but that trick really nailed it.  Going from 3930K at 4.4gHz to 9900K at 4.8 or better I'm certain I will be able to get away w/ considerably more eye candy and less need to adjust settings in mid-flight if not set up correctly at departure.   Looking at CPU single-threaded benchmarks this upgrade should get around 35+% more CPU processing power.   My old GTX Titan appears to be around 50% of the thru put of RTX 2080Ti so that should get a few more GPU related sliders up enough to justify it but with any luck the old hardware will last until RTX 3080Ti arrives which is my current guess about what I will invest in.  

Edited December 5, 20196 yr by Noel

That's good Noel.

The Unlimited VSync=Off setting is basically a test setting. Although it won't display more frames than the monitor can do (refresh rate) it shows how much computation time there is available between frames.

The basic simulation is governed by how fast a couple of cores can run coupled to a data gathering process in the background that takes seconds to complete, that will occupy as many cores as we have available.

On many cored systems excess cores not making a big difference to the background task (depends on a lot of factors, scenery scale) are loading the sim with unnecessary work, as if you included extra detail you can't see. In other words many cored systems can make demands exceeding the base capacity of the PC and so that will slow down the sim. Small variations in that flow often appears as stutter, hence the overhead allows for soaking up changes in demand..

Edited December 5, 20196 yr by SteveW

53 minutes ago, SteveW said:

That's good Noel.

The Unlimited VSync=Off setting is basically a test setting. Although it won't display more frames than the monitor can do (refresh rate) it shows how much computation time there is available between frames.

The basic simulation is governed by how fast a couple of cores can run coupled to a data gathering process in the background that takes seconds to complete, that will occupy as many cores as we have available.

On many cored systems excess cores not making a big difference to the background task (depends on a lot of factors, scenery scale) are loading the sim with unnecessary work, as if you included extra detail you can't see. In other words many cored systems can make demands exceeding the base capacity of the PC and so that will slow down the sim. Small variations in that flow often appears as stutter, hence the overhead allows for soaking up changes in demand..

FWIW I do run the 6 core 3930K w/ HT with an AM of if I recall 4084 and I don't get stutters thankfully.  Now if I had a system with 200% of the processing power I currently have I would change to vsync to 60mHz refresh and I'm sure that would add a level of liquidness you can't get at 30.

When the sim starts a scenario you see many cores maxed. When the sim is settled in to a flight those background threads are operating in a more relaxed fashion as they pull in more scenery. So no need to over use those LPs. Always go from small counts and add. The AM4084 keeps the second task from the sharing the first core with the main task. That's a key arrangement.

Edited December 5, 20196 yr by SteveW

2 minutes ago, SteveW said:

When the sim starts a scenario you see many cores maxed. When the sim is settled in to a flight those background threads are operating in a more relaxed fashion as they pull in more scenery. So no need to over use those LPs. Always go from small counts and add. The AM4084 keeps the second task from the sharing the first core with the main task. That's a key arrangement.

Well, I've tried both HT enabled and not and there was a definite improvement w/ HT on.  Perhaps there was a red herring or hidden culprit involved irrespective of the HT on but I don't think so!  I think I tried back and forth a few times and I do believe the issue now that I recall was I was getting some of those 'hangs' started happening in complex scenery that I didn't see w/ HT on.

Edited December 5, 20196 yr by Noel

13 minutes ago, Noel said:

Well, I've tried both HT enabled and not and there was a definite improvement w/ HT on.  Perhaps there was a red herring or hidden culprit involved irrespective of the HT on but I don't think so!  I think I tried back and forth a few times and I do believe the issue now that I recall was I was getting some of those 'hangs' started happening in complex scenery that I didn't see w/ HT on.

That's true. If you can get HT working right you should see a small improvement overall.

Regarding the monitors.Have a think about pixel size or density.

For example I had two 24" 1920x1200 side by side. Then swapped for a 43" 4K which is just as wide as the two side by side - bit more up top. It's on a humanscale arm so it's not too high. Icons and fonts are the same as with the 24" setup. Coding is even better with lots of desktop to move stuff out to. Using the sims in multiple windows is also good. When going to 4k and regular size monitors pixel density rises sharply which may not be what some people want.