Thoughts on CPU upgrade, it's depressing.

[RobJC 2,069]

Regardless what you do I will buy your 4790K processor for $100 if you are interested. 

[Nuno Pinto 1,394]

Forget Intel, they're in the backburner now. New AMD Ryzen ZEN3 cores are soon to arrive and THOSE will be the CPUs to go for.

 

[z06z33 763]

4 hours ago, Colonel X said:

So I am running the good ol' 4790K, clocked at 4.6Ghz. The new 10700K seems to be the ideal CPU for MSFS (the 10900K has more cores, but MSFS doesn't utilize them).

I've been looking at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html for single core performance, the single most important factor in flight simulation. 

4790K @ 4.0 = 2.47 Performance points.

10700K @ 3.8 = 3.08 Performance points.

That's a performance increase by 25% (not considering my overclock, or the 10700K's turbo speeds up to 5+Ghz), or in other words, if you get 25FPS at a situation in MSFS, the new CPU would run that with 31FPS. While that represents just the increase you need to kill the dips below 30FPS (I lock at 30FPS), and additionally will tackle the stutters caused by core overload, it's still, by all means NOT MUCH, considering the 6 years between the CPU's, and the roughly 700-900 bucks needed for the CPU, Mobo and RAM.

Seeing that I am basically locked at 30, and I only get dips at, say, LAX in "bad positions" (such as 07L looking at the entire airport with traffic) to maybe 27, I really wonder if it's worth the spending (and work). Am I missing something here? Will the increase be larger because the 10700K will run at turbo speeds (probably). Sure, once we get more complex add-ons, dips will increase, but overall, it's kind of depressing that even the fastest CPU can't lift your performance more than a mere 25%.

I gained about 15 FPS in P3d moving from a 4790k to an 8700k at the same OC... The main reason is moving from DDR3 to DDR4

[Bob Scott 7,705]

4 hours ago, Colonel X said:

So I am running the good ol' 4790K, clocked at 4.6Ghz. The new 10700K seems to be the ideal CPU for MSFS (the 10900K has more cores, but MSFS doesn't utilize them).

I keep seeing people say that MSFS doesn't utilize additional cores beyond four, or some say six, but that's not at all what I see here.  I run a 10900K with HT off, and MSFS/Win10 is most definitely distributing the workload across all 10 cores.  Flying the Caravan around one of the big buffed-up airports (KDEN), I see all of the cores fluctuating around the approximately 35% mark with occasional spikes on some that don't come close to maxxing any one core out.  This is running with frames locked to 30 by VSyncing to a 4K display with a 30 Hz refresh rate.

[G-RFRY 1,705]

1 hour ago, Nuno Pinto said:

Forget Intel, they're in the backburner now. New AMD Ryzen ZEN3 cores are soon to arrive and THOSE will be the CPUs to go for.

 

Yes and Jensen is holding some GPU`s back to release end of year.

In in-depth test of MSFS core clock is still king, i ran a flight today HT on all cores in use just done my BIOS update ready for some tweaking. 

Edited September 16, 2020 by G-RFRY

[martin-w 3,234]

1 hour ago, Nuno Pinto said:

Forget Intel, they're in the backburner now. New AMD Ryzen ZEN3 cores are soon to arrive and THOSE will be the CPUs to go for.

 

 

I may be building a new rig after I've moved location. And guess what I'll be going for? Intel! 😉 

Don't care if on paper Ryzen is superior. There's something about Intel CPU's I like. I understand them, they are familiar. And recently I built a rig for someone and cant say I was impressed with the way AMD CPU's spike. Slightest thing you do, the CPU spikes. Had to set a custom fan curve so that the fans wouldn't ramp up till temp was above 50. No big deal, but I'm just not feeling AMD chips to be honest.

 

Each to his/her own. 🙂 

[RJC68 820]

2 hours ago, Colonel X said:

I am aware of that. But like in most cases, it's the CPU. My 1080ti is just yawning in MSFS.

I paired my 1080 TI with an i5 9600K @ 5Ghz (Full specs below) and I have to say it performs admirably well once the sim loads and settles with pretty decent settings but certainly not Ultra across the board. I can maintain 60FPS a good deal of the time but I am using a 42" 1080P LED TV. Of course the FPS takes a hit at huge airports but I do not generally fly in and out of those. Even the modded A320 performs pretty well now and I am sure with updates the optimizations will improve.

I certainly would not be in a hurry to fall down the hardware upgrade rabbit hole when I get fantastic performance in X-Plane 11 with a ton of Ortho4XP and birds like the FF A320, FF 757 V2 and of course the Zibo 737 with my current rig.

[Nuno Pinto 1,394]

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

 

Each to his/her own. 🙂 

Exactly. I'm glad i did test them, so i know the "on paper" is Intel's "weapon" right now, because in real life use, things have indeed changed.

Besides, next upgrade would require a new motherboard once again whereas AMD will still be AM4.

Each to his own indeed, in full PCIe 4.0 speed.

Edited September 16, 2020 by Nuno Pinto

[ANCRM114 35]

3 hours ago, EmaRacing said:

Why Intel though?
AMD's price\performance in multicore is unbeatable ATM.

Depends on your priorities. If single core performance is is more important than overall price vs multi-core performance then Intel might be the way to go.

 

I have a R5 2600x on a X570 board that I built just before MSFS was announced. I'm sticking with this motherboard, chip-set, and memory setup until. Zen4/Ryzen 5000 and Alder Lake are both out with DDR5 memory.

In the meantime any CPU upgrades I will definitely wait for Zen3/Ryzen 4000 chips to come out.

But if I was buying a whole system today I would go Intel based on the better single thread performance.

Edited September 16, 2020 by ANCRM114

[Boomer 1,619]

IS MSFS 2020 using multiple CPU cores?

[G-RFRY 1,705]

Never go on paper launches the 3080 has proved that in MSFS not much better than a 2800ti you have got use 4K to get some benefit. 

[TheFamilyMan 279]

Guru3D has done a performance oriented review of MSFS 2020.  Great reading for those looking to upgrade.  I hope it gets periodically updated:

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/microsoft-flight-simulator-(2020)-pc-graphics-performance-benchmark-review,1.html

Interestingly it sort of dismisses the 10900k as not necessary.  One of their final comments is telling:

Quote Guru3d wrote: As you have been able to see, something is bottlenecking at Full HD as the cards are just too close towards each other. This might be CPU related, but also can be a throttle based on retrieving satellite imagery from the cloud servers. We'll have to investigate a bit more to see what is going on there.

Reading between the lines here, why the meager performance of the 2080ti at 1920x1080?  Definitely not a gcard issue.  Perhaps the Cloud access...if so, would manual caching alleviate this problem?  My gut tells me this: Is MSFS going to be just like it's always been with M S F S...always chasing rainbows for that elusive "perfect settings with perfect performance"?

BTW, I got my sights set on a 20GB edition of the 3080 when it hit the streets eventually.  Until that time, my 4 years old gtx 1070 will get me through adequately well using "High-End" and externally limited to 30 fps.

Edited September 16, 2020 by TheFamilyMan

[Boomer 1,619]

1 hour ago, TheFamilyMan said:

BTW, I got my sights set on a 20GB edition of the 3080 when it hit the streets eventually.

LOL how many body organs will you sell?

[speedyTC 194]

12 hours ago, Nyxx said:

Well look at my PC spec in sig below.

Hopefully tomorrow 2pm UK I can order new PC 10900K@4.9 ( All cores), 32RAM 3200Hz 14-14-14-31, 3080, SSD M.2

Won the lottery, David?  😁

[fppilot 4,335]

Did anyone read the change log for today's major update.  Did all of this discussion just become obsolete?  Guess the next few days will tell.