Stutter test : HT ON and reset OC

[FuriousBird 6]

Hi,

in case it helps anyone, i am on a 7700K, 16Gb Ram and 1080Ti system built 2 or 3 years ago, which i overclocked at the time and disabled HT. I use a dell U3415W 1440P monitor.

My experience with the new sim has been pretty good so far without major issues, besides some heavy stutters and long pauses at moments (i was noticing 95%+ constant CPU usage, with lower GPU usage) .

Today, i decided to re-load the default profile in the bios which removes overclock and puts HT back ON and other complex settings i didn´t know much about that i was still playing with. I am glad i did, because i now get much less stutters and no long pause at all. CPU usage is averaging 40-60% and GPU 60 - 90% depending on scenery complexity. CPU and GPU now work hand in hand to deliver quite a pleasing experience. CPU didn´t get overloaded a single time.

Graphic Settings is a mix of Medium / High-end (clouds and resolution especially at High).

I am a hardcore simmer, used to fslabs and pmdg stuff and ivao but i am truly enjoying the sim even with the default a320 which in my opinion is quite ok and flyable.

So i highly recommend people with older gen tweaked hardware (likely optimized to accomodate older sims) to double check their bios and try to reset any complex settings like OC, voltage and so on (and maybe fix eventually unstable combos that remained un-noticed). I felt people with newer Gen hardware complained much less, probably because they didn´t feel the need to play with bios settings.

 

[DMojo 6]

Yep - HT ON made a big improvement for me.

Additionally, using RivaTuner to set an FPS lock of 30 and Vsync Half Refresh in nVidia CP.

[HeLord 17]

I am also on 7700K and can confirm these results!

[regis9 3,999]

Ditto here, HT has finally become useful for me!

[Der Zeitgeist 1,575]

Why would you turn off hyperthreading in the first place? 🤔

[tommy10101 67]

How exactly do you turn it on/off? 

[honanhal 1,420]

14 minutes ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

Why would you turn off hyperthreading in the first place? 🤔

In a nutshell: FSX and P3D benefited from it being off in two ways.

First, P3D in particular (for whatever godforsaken reason) ran smoother, with fewer microstutters, for a lot of people with it off. Not everyone, but maybe two-thirds of people who tested it found this to be the case.

Second, because FSX and P3D remained overwhelmingly performance-dependent on single-core CPU speed to the exclusion of almost everything else, anything that allowed you to increase your CPU speed was good. Because turning off HT gives you more temperature overhead, you can overclock higher (in my case, we're talking about the difference between 4.4 GHz and 4.7 GHz).

MSFS is a whole new paradigm. At 4.4 GHz my HT-on, 4-year-old 6700k CPU is running at about 50-60% most of the time. I don't think overclocking higher would have any benefit in the sim.

Turns out, incidentally, that all my initial performance problems with MSFS were direct results of the strange stuff a lot of us did to make FSX and then P3D run better. I turned off HT and limited my pagefile, and lo and behold, reversing those two changes fixed my MSFS problems. Funny, that.

James

[regis9 3,999]

1 minute ago, honanhal said:

In a nutshell: FSX and P3D benefited from it being off in two ways.

Yup, this.

1 minute ago, honanhal said:

Turns out, incidentally, that all my initial performance problems with MSFS were direct results of the strange stuff a lot of us did to make FSX and then P3D run better.

It’s time for us old dogs to learn some new tricks (or at least forget our old tricks 🙂 )

[Der Zeitgeist 1,575]

7 minutes ago, honanhal said:

In a nutshell: FSX and P3D benefited from it being off in two ways.

I played around with it years ago in P3D for a while, also with various affinity mask settings, things like that. Never really could tell a difference to just keeping everything on default, BIOS as well as in the sim.

Since then, my personal opinion has been that most of these tweaking tips are more like voodoo. It may work, but you really have to believe in it. 😄

[DMojo 6]

Yep P3D runs better with HT off MSFS better with HT on.

Although in saying that I definitely think the game is poorly optimized for some people. GPU looks to be getting a max utilization of 60% for me.

Plenty of complaints on the official MSFS forum about it too. Testers saying that they were getting fantastic performance during alpha/beta but release version as been abysmal.

So it will just be a matter of waiting until on a fix for this. It's still playable in the meantime

I found that flying at low altitudes and being on the ground really tanks performance. Once you're at 1000 ft it's fairly smooth.

[PapaRomeo 40]

I can confirm this.
Now I just need to find the best settings regarding fps lock internal/external v-sync on/off

[spitzer45 99]

With 6700k same result here. With ht off and oc to 4.6 ghz, cpu usage was nearly %100, stutters badly, after ht on cpu usage come down to %60-70 and very smooth sim experience. Also my oc lowered to 4.4 ghz. All seems good now, thanks for tip! 

[fppilot 4,339]

Would have liked for some of this to come out of Alpha and Beta.

[DylanM 1,069]

5 hours ago, Der Zeitgeist said:

Why would you turn off hyperthreading in the first place? 🤔

Edit - already a great answer above...

 

Edited August 21, 2020 by DylanM

[bonchie 2,305]

I bet my HT is still off for P3D/XP. I wonder how many people have it off that have forgotten?