October 30, 200619 yr Hi Gang,This may or may not open a can of worms but, I'm confident in my findings.It's been a long, exhausting 15 hours. I was ..this.. close to packing up FSX and all my gear to sell on e-bay when I thought I would take one more stab at getting the sim running smoothly in and around the Calgary area. CALGARY of all places. The most barren place (next to Denver) on earth is seems!! Seattle and any other "big" city would cause my FPS counter to hit maybe as high as 8.2 thus creating a great slide show. Anyhoo...enough babble for now.I followed every tweak found on the forums (Greggerm's fantastic compilation pdf in particular) and nothing helped so those of you in "this" boat running a dual core, please read on.I simply hit ctl-alt-del, right clicked on the fsx.exe process and set the Priority to Below Normal then set the Affinity to CPU1. I went back into FSX and what I experienced made me unpack all my gear. Parked at Boeing Field with pretty much everything turned up (way over to the right) I was getting FPS in the mid teens but things were smooth! This was at 1:30AM. By 4:15AM and MANY tests in MANY different area's, I consistently was getting FSP in the mid teens and in many places was pegging out at my max FPS of 25. This is with the scenery sliders pretty much maxed out .I tried different aircraft; different weather settings, full screen mode versus windowed mode and about 8 or 9 BIG airports and nothing really caused the sim to "burp". Yes, in some places my frames fell to the lower end of what I would consider smooth but, with the amount of eye candy I had turned up, that was/is my personal sacrifice and I will either live with the slight stuttering (I'm used to it with MS by now) or will lower settings to get that balance of smoothness and eye candy. You on the other hand can reduce settings to match your taste :-) One thing I noticed, the sim ran better if I chose CPU1 versus CPU0. I can't explain that one
October 30, 200619 yr Below normal priority? That doesn't make sense. Affinity also did not work on a HT processor for me. I tried it a few weeks ago and it made my sound skip.
October 30, 200619 yr Hi MikeI can see how to set the priority to below normal, but can't find anything to do with 'Affinity'.....Where's that option/setting?ThanksToni.
October 30, 200619 yr I'll have to try this later.I have a question on the AMD Dual Core. When I bring up Task Manager, shouldn't I see 2 screens for the CPU Usage (core 1 & core 2)& 1 for Page file? I just see 1 screen for CPU Usage, is that normal?ThnaksJim
October 30, 200619 yr Looking at all my process running, the affinity for every one is set to both CPU 0 & CPU 1. Should they all be set to say CPU 1 & FSX to CPU 0? Or is having the affinity set to both CPU's normal?ThanksJim
October 30, 200619 yr Hi Toni,Affinity has to do with dual core processors. It allows you to force which processor you want an application to run on. If on your screen it's not present, then you don't have a dual core processor.Mike
October 30, 200619 yr Hi James,I'm not 100% sure if there's an affinity option with hyperthreading CPU's.Sorry!M
October 30, 200619 yr Hi Dave,Yeah, I know it goes against normal convention to set a process priority to below normal priority but it works on this end.Setting the affinity alone could have given you the sound skips, I would be interested to hear if you tried the affinity and the priority settings if your sound would still skip.M
October 30, 200619 yr Hi Jim,I'm running an Intel CPU so I'm not 100% sure why your dual core isn't showing up in task manager. Here's a link to a thread talking about someone with an AMD dual core not showing up on their system as a dual core:http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/forums/index.cf...53708&forumid=1Here's a link to the AMD site for their AMD Athlon
October 30, 200619 yr >Looking at all my process running, the affinity for every one>is set to both CPU 0 & CPU 1. Should they all be set to say>CPU 1 & FSX to CPU 0? Or is having the affinity set to both>CPU's normal?>>Thanks>>JimFirst, setting the priority to below normal should not have any impact- certainly not increasing your framerates!As for the affinity, yes that does sound like a viable option- but only on a true multiprocessor machine. On a hyperthreaded machine it wouldn't do anything (maybe a TINY bit) as in that case it is basically the same as setting the priority above normal.I'm going to try playing with the affinity on my machine, and I'll let you know how it works.
October 30, 200619 yr Hi Cristian,>First, setting the priority to below normal should not have>any impact- certainly not increasing your framerates!Just curious, why not? I know everything one reads online relating to processor priority says to increase the priority to help.Thanks,Mike
October 30, 200619 yr Mike,Thanks for those links. I just updated my AMD processor drivers & will check FSX shortly (the rest of my system is a lot faster now). Also, Task Manager has an option I just discovered to show a graph for both CPU's and I had it checked to just show one. I'm off to explore the affinity settings & will let you guys know.ThanksJim
October 30, 200619 yr I tried this Mike but it made no difference for me. I'll experiment more yet. Also, does your CPU usage only show 50% or so because of the dual core? That's what I'm showing through all these tests. One CPU seems maxed while the other shows very little useage.Jim
October 30, 200619 yr Hi Jim,Sorry to hear it hasn't help out. Yes, my CPU usage shows CPU1 at nearly 100% and combined usage between the two is showing +-50%.When I get home I can post up my cfg settings and screen shots of my settings if that would help? What video card do you have?M
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