1 hour ago, Uteman said:

Very surprised at the last phrase in the above statement - my i9-7900X is running at 4.9GHZ on all cores and is loafing at about 40% and the 1080Ti is at 100% usage 99% of the time (but no DXGI or CTD errors) runs smooth as silk live and I only get some slight hesitations when recording (with geforce). The only other issue I have had is scenery updating online and would really like to find out how rolling and manual cache screw up the experience ie when does it work correctly and how does one know? This imo is the biggest can of worms with the sim at the moment after 3 weeks of testing different profiles on my machine I have tried up to 500GB for each cache (2TB nvme) with awful results loading and flying online (going off topic sorry). The other 3 flight sims on my machine are better balanced for core - GPU loads imo but that is irrelevant if they all work and give you the results.

spot on imo but also a fairly obvious conclusion for any graphics intensive software.

Not at all obvious for long time simmers. FS9, FSX and P3D are all notoriously CPU limited.

In P3D, with my (now modest) i7 7700k at 4.5, I am constantly maxed out CPU wise but my GTX 1080 is barely used. 50 percent and half the VRAM.

But MSFS has shifted a whole lot more into the GPU... like X plane did. So the secret is to adjust settings so that CPU and GPU are balanced.

But this is the first flightsim where a GPU upgrade will be worth ii if you have a decent CPU.

(Of course you still need a decent CPU etc or you would be wasting it.

A dual core CPU simply won't produce enough data for a GPU to even get out of bed.)

 

There is an article somewhere that lists those settings that are purely GPU limited and those that are CPU limited. I forget where it is though.

But that 'guru' article is pretty conclusive.

Read it from start to finish. It's worth a look.

Edited September 11, 20205 yr by Gabe777

Gabe777

I accept all that you say in your second comment, however in my own pedantic way I have to point out your comment too which I specifically replied named  MSFS not the other 3 sim versions you later included.

Cheers.

47 minutes ago, Gabe777 said:

In P3D, with my (now modest) i7 7700k at 4.5, I am constantly maxed out CPU wise but my GTX 1080 is barely used. 50 percent and half the VRAM.

 

Same for me. The difference is that the GPU does a lot more. Main thing is shadows, which in X-Plane is done by the CPU, hence the much better scenery visuals in MSFS. But in the end, the GPU is still bored as long as you stay with a reasonable resolution.

22 hours ago, Colonel X said:

Same for me. The difference is that the GPU does a lot more. Main thing is shadows, which in X-Plane is done by the CPU, hence the much better scenery visuals in MSFS. But in the end, the GPU is still bored as long as you stay with a reasonable resolution.

Yup the shadows are aweful in X plane.

Interestingly, in ETS2 ... when it used DirectX 9 the shadows were bad as well. Truck SIM only uses 1 CPU core too ! But...they recently upgraded the engine (no pun intended !) to DirectX 11 and oh my goodness: what an improvement...everywhere.

Clearly switching stuff from CPU to GPU helps out a lot in the graphics department.

As an FYi.... Eurogamer just did an analysis of MSFS, and concluded that the best CPU for MSFS is one with 6 physical cores. It uses 6 cores for different stuff. So presumably the best CPU would be on with at least 8 physical cores (freeing up 1 or 2 for the system etc.) and the best GPU can afford...the latter being more important the higher the resolution you are using.

They also say that the best scaling is to use your monitor or TVs native resolution, set the Prest to HIGH and use the Scaling slider to achieve your target FPS.

That too is a good article. Here it is.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2020-flight-simulator-optimised-settings-for-next-gen-experience

Good chat guys !

😁

Edited September 12, 20205 yr by Gabe777

Yeah it's quite obvious that MSFS calls for a 10600 or 10700K. But along with the motherboard and RAM, that's at least a 700 bucks investment, and the nightmare of reinstalling Windows and all tools (only a madman would swap all the internals and let Windows figure it all out on the next boot).

On 9/11/2020 at 7:45 AM, Gabe777 said:

But MSFS has shifted a whole lot more into the GPU... like X plane did. So the secret is to adjust settings so that CPU and GPU are balanced.

But this is the first flightsim where a GPU upgrade will be worth ii if you have a decent CPU.

(Of course you still need a decent CPU etc or you would be wasting it.

 

I have a 6 core 12 thread CPU, and MSFS only uses 50% of it before become bound by the main thread. I read this has something to do with using DX11 instead of DX12. That said, I'm still GPU bound when running at max resolution (I did DF's trick of dropping resolution to test my CPU), so I'm not that worried about it at the moment, but still, it would be nice of the sim would fully use my processor if given the chance.

1 hour ago, Keto Ketchup said:

I have a 6 core 12 thread CPU, and MSFS only uses 50% of it before become bound by the main thread. I read this has something to do with using DX11 instead of DX12. That said, I'm still GPU bound when running at max resolution (I did DF's trick of dropping resolution to test my CPU), so I'm not that worried about it at the moment, but still, it would be nice of the sim would fully use my processor if given the chance.

This "50% usage" is a misconception. It's the overall load of all cores. Look at your core usage (right click the graph) to see all the cores. You will notice that at least one core is hitting 100%. "MSFS underutilizing the CPU" is a myth, nothing more.

2 hours ago, Colonel X said:

This "50% usage" is a misconception. It's the overall load of all cores. Look at your core usage (right click the graph) to see all the cores. You will notice that at least one core is hitting 100%. "MSFS underutilizing the CPU" is a myth, nothing more.

Oh I get that, but shouldn't the distribution of the workload be better across all six cores? I'd understand if MSFS was optimized for 4 cores, but IIRC 6 cores is the sweat spot. Unless the 50% means that it's not utilizing the hyperthreading...

I'm not being argumentative, I am genuinely curious.

UPDATE

I checked, I've got 12 logical processors, one is pegged at 100%, while a couple are running at 20-30%, the rest averaging between 50-80%. Here is image:

UPDATE #2

When the game is loading (after clicking "Fly Now"), it actually does go to 100% CPU, all 12 logical processors pegged. Then it drops down to about 50% give or take. I've tested this on low resolution so that the GPU is no longer a factor, yet I still see this. Multiple comments on Digital Foundry's video on MSFS claim this is due to limitations in DX11.

Edited September 12, 20205 yr by Keto Ketchup
More info

Thanks for the tip. I like my Sim to look like how my eyes would see, not how a camera would record it. So I like eye adaptation but I dislike film grain, lens flares, etc. Also turning off artificial sharpening really helped reduce a lot of the visual artifacts, thanks! I wonder why these options aren't in the game menu.

1 hour ago, Keto Ketchup said:

I checked, I've got 12 logical processors, one is pegged at 100%, while a couple are running at 20-30%, the rest averaging between 50-80%.

Yep, that's perfectly normal. In an ideal world, load distribution would be better, however in some cases it's just impossible to divide a calculation between multiple cores. MSFS already does ist better than any sim before it.

According to Eurogamer or Guru, whichever did the CPU detailed analysis, the best performance was with 6 physical cores.

It appears that different stuff goes into different cores. So as an example, maybe Ai traffic is controlled with one core...terrain loading another...and so on.

.....If there are less than 6 spare physical cores they queue up for access to an alternative one. Total usage is not the "be all and end all." What is the effect on FPS and more importantly...smoothness.

Additionaly, the overall percentage usage is misleading. For a start it depends on "polling intervals." If they are set too low it may appear to use all 8 cores.

I saw a video with an i7 8700k a while back that appeared to use 8 cores at 100 percent. But it wasn't. It just appeared to due to the way it was being monitored and reported.

Anyhow, this article implies that a cpu with 8 physical cores (so the sim easily has 6 to itself !) running as high as possible will always be better than anything else. More cores are a waste and will tend to run slower.

Now, whether disabling hyperthreading may benefit also...I don't know.

And, TBH I haven't the time to find out. I'll go with the stuff I've read already. Those guys have been analysing games and Sims for a long time.

 

Edited September 13, 20205 yr by Gabe777

7 minutes ago, Gabe777 said:

According to Eurogamer or Guru, whichever did the CPU detailed analysis, the best performance was with 6 physical cores.

[...]

Anyhow, this article implies that a cpu with 8 physical cores running as high as possible will always be better than anything else. More cores are a waste and will tend to run slower.

[...]

Which is it, six or eight? As a six core owner myself, fingers crossed for the six 😉

15 minutes ago, Keto Ketchup said:

Which is it, six or eight? As a six core owner myself, fingers crossed for the six 😉

Mine uses all 6 cores it seems. So more cores will be better, as if the sim is using six, you might be able to offload the operating system and maybe a few background services to the others.  Windows 10 actually seems quite good at handling this by itself, but some people use the affinity assignment tools.

Edited September 13, 20205 yr by bobcat999
Clarity

On 9/13/2020 at 1:53 PM, Keto Ketchup said:

Which is it, six or eight? As a six core owner myself, fingers crossed for the six 😉

Yes. The article says it can use 6 cores.

So...get an 8 or 10 core CPU, leaving some for Windows and other 3rd party stuff.

On 9/12/2020 at 1:14 PM, Colonel X said:

Yeah it's quite obvious that MSFS calls for a 10600 or 10700K. But along with the motherboard and RAM, that's at least a 700 bucks investment, and the nightmare of reinstalling Windows and all tools (only a madman would swap all the internals and let Windows figure it all out on the next boot).

Then call me "Madman Farlis" from now on. I did a hardware switch from Intel to AMD in March, and did not change a single thing on my software side, no deinstallations, no clean new start.