FS2020 Reference PC?

[rheitzman 0]

I guess it is too early, but has the team made any public statements regarding the optimum platform for FS2020? Minimum platform? Any statements? I did hear them say no ray tracing. BTW the FSInsider MFS Forum is alive, empty, but alive.

I'm looking at buying a new PC and I have $300 more in the budget and I'm wondering if it should go to a move from i5 to i7 or to bump up a model or two on the nVidia card? I don't play any games more intense than FSX.

Any thoughts on mid range parts for the game PC to run FS2020? I'd like to stay under $2k.

Is there a better forum for this question? I don't see much hardware talk here.

Edited December 13, 2019 by rheitzman
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[188AHC 2,138]

None at this time but I suspect soon we will have an idea as to what their recommendations will be. 

[HiFlyer 9,359]

At this early stage, they're probably still optimizing. With that being the case it'll likely be hard to settle on spec recommendations until they figure out exactly what they're going to be able to shoehorn into the final product.

[G-RFRY 1,712]

The XBOX SERIES X (Project Scarlett) was finally announced at the game awards and the specs look like a mini power PC.

 

 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

Thanks for posting that. This is IMO why it's premature to scope out hardware for MSFS 2020. The specs of the XBox X have been leaked out for almost a year now, but this is the first official statement from MS that confirms the design and capabilities. The PS5 will have similar specs and capabilities, so what will drive the market will be which platform has the best blockbuster titles.

 

[G-RFRY 1,712]

More info on specs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_QhpE0Hx4s

 

[Poppapete 13]

I recently built a new rig for my Prepar3d 4.5. GPU is RTX2070 Super and CPU is AMD Ryzen 3900X which is 12 core.  This was my first ever AMD CPU and I have had a computer since before AMD existed.(That's not strictly true since they started in 1969 and I got my TRS-80 in 1977). What I notice is the CPU runs at 16-20% capacity but core 1 runs at 98-100%.  Seems Prepar$d and FSX cannot use multi-threaded CPU's efficiently and maybe it is a waste of money buying these expensive CPU's unless some of the addons that are running in conjunction are making use of other threads which I doubt. From my experience it is best to put all your $$$$$'s into the GPU.  Love to hear others opinions and can't wait to find out if FS2020 can make use of multithreads. 

[stans 703]

Th

15 hours ago, Poppapete said:

I recently built a new rig for my Prepar3d 4.5. GPU is RTX2070 Super and CPU is AMD Ryzen 3900X which is 12 core.  This was my first ever AMD CPU and I have had a computer since before AMD existed.(That's not strictly true since they started in 1969 and I got my TRS-80 in 1977). What I notice is the CPU runs at 16-20% capacity but core 1 runs at 98-100%.  Seems Prepar$d and FSX cannot use multi-threaded CPU's efficiently and maybe it is a waste of money buying these expensive CPU's unless some of the addons that are running in conjunction are making use of other threads which I doubt. From my experience it is best to put all your $$$$$'s into the GPU.  Love to hear others opinions and can't wait to find out if FS2020 can make use of multithreads. 

That is normal behavior for FSX and, to a great degree, P3D.  Unless assigned by the user, FSX will, by default, run its primary thread on Core 0.  Additional cores are used to process textures and autogen, that's pretty much the extent of its multi-core usage by design.  Remember, when FSX was designed and first released in 2006, it was intended for very fast, single core CPU's.  MS added mult-core support with the release of Service Pack 1 (SP1).  This is 2020 and I expect MSFS will be a true multi-threaded program, so it will make use of as many cores as it needs, which, at this point in time, gives AMD the advantage.

Edited January 5, 2020 by stans

[Poppapete 13]

If so,then I may have to get a Threadripper for MSFS2020!

Edited January 5, 2020 by Poppapete
Spellingf

[Luke 782]

On 1/4/2020 at 4:17 PM, Poppapete said:

Love to hear others opinions and can't wait to find out if FS2020 can make use of multithreads. 

If you wonder how well P3D handles multi-threading, set your affinty mask to 1 and report back. 🙂

Cheers!

[Poppapete 13]

Where do I make the change. In the config file?

[martin-w 3,235]

22 hours ago, stans said:

This is 2020 and I expect MSFS will be a true multi-threaded program, so it will make use of as many cores as it needs, which, at this point in time, gives AMD the advantage.

 

100% agree. 

[Luke 782]

I don't agree. Read up on Amdahl's Law for the reason why - it gets very, very difficult to make things scale linearly with CPU count, unless you're dealing with embarassingly parallelizable problems that have no data dependencies like GPU work or web serving. Flight simulation isn't in that category.

I definitely think things will get somewhat better in FS2020, but I don't see any sort of magic happening. P3D and FSX are already "truly multi-threaded" and people who suggest that they aren't simply because there's a critical path in execution don't understand that almost all multi-threaded programs are like this.

The problem is that P3D runs into that limitation too soon, not that it exists at all.

Cheers!

[Poppapete 13]

I have watched YouTube videos with simmers using Process Lasso to spread programs CPU usage over multi cores.  Not used it myself.

[G-RFRY 1,712]

On 1/6/2020 at 11:30 AM, martin-w said:

 

100% agree. 

Bad news for MS then as most games/flight sim PCs run on Intel/Nvidia who going to tell them they are using the wrong hardware.

And there own test were done on Intel Nvidia at XO19.

Edited January 7, 2020 by rjfry