On 9/21/2020 at 9:21 AM, wthomas33065 said:

Although I would agree that a rush out to buy a new CPU is not normally advised, I will state that if you have a 4 core non-hyperthreaded CPU like an 7th generation or earlier, i5, then you need a new CPU.  Period.

The sim will use all 4 cores quite fully and as such you will almost always be CPU choked.  If you have an i7 that supports multithreading, or an i5 or other CPU with more than 4 physical cores, then things will look better.  

I didn't want to have to go full boat with a MB upgrade and went from an i5 Kaby Lake to an i7 Kaby Lake and the difference in CPU utilization was astonishing when I turned on hyperthreading.  I immediately went from being CPU locked to GPU locked.

I am not saying that hyperthreading is a silver bullet.  It's not.  If you have a CPU with more than 4 physical cores, there seems to be no appreciable performance increase with hyperthreading turn on.

However, if you are stuck with a 4 core i7, then hyperthreading is not just recommended, but I would say a necessity.

 

 

I was on 3770K Intel I7 (4 core 8 thread) OC to 4.5ghz, 16gb ram, 1080TI and my 4 cores were mostly 95%+ usage. I was still getting decent FPS at high end setting (High 40s) and I DID NOT have any stutter related issues. I have a 1440P monitor and 1080P monitors. The 1440P was my primary for gaming and flight sim (borderless fullscreen) and the 1080P 2nd monitor I would use for other things like Youtube, web browsing, reference material, software like Lilttlenav map, the usual. Although FS2020 was running to my acceptable levels, the problem was I couldn't do word not allowed on the 2nd monitor due to all cores being tied up max usage. The desktop experience was not good. 

I came across a really good deal on 3600XT/motherboard combo and after 8 years, decided to just go with it.

I'm pretty sure for the OP of this thread, the CPU was never the issue to begin with because my 3770K/1080TI never had stutters and gave me 45+ FPS, Maybe less at places but never stutters. I upgraded before the patches started coming out but I hear the updates helped older systems and memory optimization (less usage). 

On 9/24/2020 at 5:04 AM, roi1862 said:

I think the reason i cannot go above 100 LOD is my internet connection. I got only 5mb/s

Well you should have probably led with that, that likely was your stutter problem to begin with. 

 

Have you tried custom caching all 3 levels of an area and flying in that to see if you still get stutters? 5mb/s is quite low for on the fly downloads and slow internet speed has been contributed to stutters and freezing frames while data loads. 

Edited October 6, 20205 yr by n19htmare

7 hours ago, RobJC said:

Awesome it works well for you. Resolution makes all the difference.  At 1600 x 900 your system is pushing 1.4M pixels. At 2560 x 1440 mine is pushing 3.7M. It is much worse for the guys with 4K displays. 

yeah, fully aware that I am far away from 4k but this is what I am used since >12 yrs and what I'm still happy with, especially taking into account that I am running on my equally old CPU. Just wanted to share that indeed old CPUs are capable to run MSFS unless you want 4k and all sliders to ultra; once I have seen that I may be spoiled but so far I can only compare with XP11 and FSX and will not look back

11 minutes ago, DAD said:

yeah, fully aware that I am far away from 4k but this is what I am used since >12 yrs and what I'm still happy with, especially taking into account that I am running on my equally old CPU. Just wanted to share that indeed old CPUs are capable to run MSFS unless you want 4k and all sliders to ultra; once I have seen that I may be spoiled but so far I can only compare with XP11 and FSX and will not look back

Same here - good-old i5 2500 and GTX 960 ( 4 GB ) gpu running MFS just ok for my type of use ( mostly testing flight dynamics and takeoffs / landings in weather...

OFC I have disabled all AI traffic, as well as network traffic, streaming caching and photogrammetry, and other sliders are mid or bellow md settings... 

It still looks amazing, better than any other sim I have used before !

jcomm, I previously had a 560TI with 2 GB only, the 1660S was my only upgrade for the sake of MSFS and I can highly recommend that as it easily handles high settings while I applied the settings mentioned in this guide https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/how-to-graphics-settings-and-performance-guide-8-18-2020/132407. FWIW I fly with live weather but any traffic off, bing and photogrammetry are on, though

On 9/21/2020 at 10:45 AM, w6kd said:

If you're running a 10th Gen CPU (e.g. 10700K or 10900K) you might try using the per-core HT capability and turn off HT at least on that last core to give the thread(s) running on that last LP a dedicated core.

Bob, this begs a question:  if I have HT enabled, so have on my 8-core 9900K, LP14/LP15 are handling the main thread in MSFS, yes?  If that is true, what is the downside of splitting that core into two LP versus keeping it as a single LP/core as it were?  I'm guessing it can't be restricting to half of the useful processing power of a whole core else I'd be showing much higher utilization.  Here is the typical utilization I'm seeing:

Do 9th gen CPUs enjoy this capability, per-core HT?  I'm guessing not the way you worded the comment above.

The individually selectable, or "per-core" HT is a new feature starting with the 10th Gen CPUs.  You can selectively turn HT on or off for each core independent of the others in the BIOS.  It's not an option on your 9th-gen 9900K.

The main thread in MSFS2020 appears to run on the last available LP.  So on an 8-core 10700K with HT on for all cores, LP14 and LP 15 share the last physical core.  The main thread is still only on LP15...but now LP 15 is sharing that core with the threads running on LP 14.  If you turn off HT on only that last core, you'll have 15 LPs (0-14) instead of the 16 (0-15) you have with HT on for all cores.  In that config, LP 14 now occupies an unshared physical core, so it has all the cache and all the processing time on that core to itself.  In that configuration LPs 0-13 are paired up across physical cores 0-6 (LPs 0-1 on core 0, LPs 2-3 on core 1,...,LPs 12-13 on core 6, and LP 14 has physical core 7 all to itself.

 

3 hours ago, w6kd said:

The main thread is still only on LP15...but now LP 15 is sharing that core with the threads running on LP 14....

 

But do we know what is the actual downside?  x% less efficiency lost thru sharing?  I don't seem to be making this CPU do much in MSFS as you saw in the utilization graph, so it sure doesn't seem to be hampering much of anything here having the main thread running on LP15 apparently accessing the other half of the core.   For some reason, when I had disabled HT, I was getting those awful 'long frames' on occasion and they disappeared 100% since enabling HT.

4 hours ago, Noel said:

But do we know what is the actual downside?

The answer is "it depends."  As long as the combined load on LP14 and 15 doesn't spike core 7 to its limit, then you're potentially gaining something by running with HT for a given clock frequency.  If enabling HT also means lowering your overclock frequency because of the added load and heat, then there's a tradeoff...you may gain some throughput with HT, but you also lose some due to running the cores slower.  How much effect this produces will vary with the circumstances. 

When I push settings up to the point where the core running the main thread starts flirting with the 100% wall, the stuttering begins.  Same thing when GPU utliization is driven up near 100%.  Headroom, headroom, headroom--that's the key, however you preserve it, whether it be by limiting workload--by pulling back sliders or limiting frame rate as I do with VSync to a 30Hz hardware refresh rate, or by increasing capacity--by overclocking and/or use of a more powerful CPU with more cores, use of HT (in MSFS), etc.

 

42 minutes ago, w6kd said:

The answer is "it depends."  As long as the combined load on LP14 and 15 doesn't spike core 7 to its limit, then you're potentially gaining something by running with HT for a given clock frequency.  If enabling HT also means lowering your overclock frequency because of the added load and heat, then there's a tradeoff...you may gain some throughput with HT, but you also lose some due to running the cores slower.  How much effect this produces will vary with the circumstances. 

When I push settings up to the point where the core running the main thread starts flirting with the 100% wall, the stuttering begins.  Same thing when GPU utliization is driven up near 100%.  Headroom, headroom, headroom--that's the key, however you preserve it, whether it be by limiting workload--by pulling back sliders or limiting frame rate as I do with VSync to a 30Hz hardware refresh rate, or by increasing capacity--by overclocking and/or use of a more powerful CPU with more cores, use of HT (in MSFS), etc.

 

So does this mean a higher (120hz-144hz) monitor is relatively useless?

12 minutes ago, Flyfaster said:

So does this mean a higher (120hz-144hz) monitor is relatively useless?

With a decent system you can get 120-144 fps by pulling all the sliders to the left and turning AI traffic off, but what's the point?

Only fast paced games like competitive FPS need such framerates; a flight simulator is a slow game, nothing moves fast on the screen for 99.9% of the time and what's most important, your life does not depend on your monitor's reaction time. 60 fps (possibly with GSync/Freesync) are ideal.

On 10/6/2020 at 4:17 AM, n19htmare said:

Well you should have probably led with that, that likely was your stutter problem to begin with. 

Well it certainly isn't as no much difference with 4 times the bandwidth now...

7 hours ago, w6kd said:

 As long as the combined load on LP14 and 15 doesn't spike core 7 to its limit, then you're potentially gaining something by running with HT for a given clock frequency.

Interesting.  This suggests to me there is no downside w/ respect to the idea of splitting the one into two, and that is nice to know since enabling HT has solved the long frames problem, interestingly in both P3D and MSFS, though in P3D it is far easier to get the two LP to hit > 100% combined, whereas in MSFS it's been nowhere near 100% combined.  Fortunately MSFS is so low demand the CPU core temps are really low even when HT is enabled--about 8C cooler than when running P3D 4.5.  I dialed back freq from 5.0 to 4.9gHz, but that is still overkill for MSFS it never seems to come near maxing out (50%) each LP.

There appear to be a couple schools on this:  those who constantly chase frame rate as the holy grail, and those who run a scheme which demands far lower from both CPU & GPU by limiting frames to 30 using vsync to a 30Hz screen, or use a software scheme to do something similar, for example MSI Afterburner w/ RTSS scanline 60Hz/2 w/ a 60Hz screen, in exchange for better image quality and complexity and stable operation.  To each his/her own, but I think it's worth noting a couple of the folks here w/ the highest end hardware follow th latter approach, myself included.  The only change I will make is at some point in MSFS it may well be quite feasible to have it all, at a frame rate of 60, that is, can vsync to 60hz instead of 30Hz.  Perhaps when a new GPU arrives it may be possible, but then again bring on payware complex planeware and likely will need to stay w/ 30, but quite frankly, it's totally fine even at 30 w/ all sliders maxed which there are most of the time in MSFS.

Edited October 7, 20205 yr by Noel