I decided to start over with my OC settings. I'm running: an Asus TUF Gaming z490, i9-10850K, 16GB Gskill 3600 RAM, RTX 2080Ti 11Gb. Set uefi settings to "optimized defaults". I then enabled the XMP1 profile for my RAM, and saved the settings.

I used the Nvidia control panel to set max frame rate to 30 in the Prepar3D profile.

I ran CPUz used the "Tools" -> "Clocks" option to find that Intel had flagged cores 6 & 7 as the "favored" CPUs (shown in red in CPUz). These were the two cores that tested as the best on my CPU.So, I added an affinity mask to my Prepar3d.cfg file as shown below. This put P3D on core 6, and gave it cores 7, 8, and 9 to run on.

[JOBSCHEDULER]
AffinityMask=1396736

The result is that with every slider set where I want it (some less than ultra just because I don't like the way it looked - not for performance reasons) P3D is running silky smooth with CPU temps in the 50s. I haven't seen a stutter yet.

Right now, I've got the NGXu sitting at Gate F85 at KSFO with EA on at dusk. AIG traffic is set to 100%, and I increased the sim rate to 4x. I've been watching in locked spot view for 15 minutes. All kids of traffic in and out, vehicles running around the airport, highway traffic in the background, SODE jetways auto docking (including some dual jetways) all over the place, and the silly thing hasn't stuttered once. Everything is super smooth and fluid.I have both Orbx California regions installed as well. My FPS counter hasn't budged from 30 yet (it fluctuates between 29.5 and 30.4 all the time). A few test flights have been super smooth as well.

Is it blasphemy to run a CPU stock?

5 hours ago, MDFlier said:

Is it blasphemy to run a CPU stock?

 

😁 Oh yes, there are many that would call it blasphemy. But you are a wise man. Always test conventional wisdom, and sometimes you find its wrong. 

Intel pretty much pushed the 10 series as far as they could, and even reduced the thickness of the die to improve thermals so it would clock further. Not to mention soldered TIM of course. All to compete with AMD of course. The result is that the 10 series CPU's are pretty much already overclocked from the factory. 

Pushing the CPU even further isn't necessarily the right move. And besides, a few hundred megahertz offers very little extra performance, so often isn't worth it. 

Not built my new PC yet as you know, but I doubt I'll be overclocking it. Yes, I'll test it to see what it will do, see how well Ive done in the silicon lottery, but the minor gains from pushing it to the max aren't required for what I do. 

I can easily get it to do 10 cores @ 5.0Ghz with HT on, or 5.1Ghz on all 10 with HT off. Both are super easy to do without messing with voltages. Temps under mid 60s all day long.

But no matter what I do, P3D keeps using 1 core heavily and throwing a bone to 2 others. Doesn't make sense to OC the other 6-7 cores for nothing.

I'm going to try to nuke the turbo power  and duration limits on cores 6 & 7 and see if I can get them to hold at 5.2Ghz while P3D is running. I think that'll do it

10 minutes ago, MDFlier said:

I'm going to try to nuke the turbo power  and duration limits on cores 6 & 7 and see if I can get them to hold at 5.2Ghz while P3D is running. I think that'll do it

I would agree with the previous poster that going from 5.1 to 5.2 is unlikely to give you any real benefits (but possibly real headaches..)

P3DV5 is much more heavily GPU dependent than previous releases, and turning off the performance monitor and doing some flying instead, would be my recommendation.  If you cut back the framerates (maybe to 30 like many of us do) your Core0 usage may well go down, and if not... the performance monitor may well mislead you into believing there is a problem, where there is none. 😉

No matter what you do there will always be a main core that`s how the CPU works one core must load first and schedule the work, if you shut core O down it will pass to another core as the main core Asobo themselves explained this last year in a Q&A.  

14 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

I would agree with the previous poster that going from 5.1 to 5.2 is unlikely to give you any real benefits (but possibly real headaches..)

P3DV5 is much more heavily GPU dependent than previous releases, and turning off the performance monitor and doing some flying instead, would be my recommendation.  If you cut back the framerates (maybe to 30 like many of us do) your Core0 usage may well go down, and if not... the performance monitor may well mislead you into believing there is a problem, where there is none. 😉

I'm just testing, Bert. I've only had this CPU/MB for a couple of weeks and I always grab a copy of the CPU data sheets and then play around with some of the new features. Eventually, all of the tuning monitors will go the way of the dodo on my system. I'm not trying to fix anything, I'm at the stage where pretty much everything I've tried seems to work really well in P3D. 

For me, the Nvidia max frame rate setting has been the silver bullet in getting P3D to run silky smooth. As soon as I tried that when Nvidia came out with it everything just smoothed right out for me (and this was also true on my old 8600K / Gigabyte Z370 system as well, except that I had it set it to 25 instead of 30 like it is now). My 2080Ti is running at about 35-55% load most of the time on the ground, and about the same in the flight levels. During departure and approach, it can get up to the 90-95% range for brief periods.   

At stock settings, the cores running P3D run at 4.9Ghz more than 90% of the time. I get fantastic P3D performance. When I turned of HT and locked all 10 cores at 5.1Ghz, there was a noticeable increase in FPS. It was already running butter smooth, so the increased FPS didn't really add to the experience. Running P3D at 5.1Ghz is a pleasure when P3D really starts to work. I did a night flight to KBOS in heavy fog and rain with a Cat III autoland on 4R. Even at 5.1, the FPS dropped to about 27 during the rollout, but there were no stutters at all.

Which brings me to where I am now. I'm happy that the affinity mask is consistently putting P3D on the Intel flagged 'favorite' cores (6 & 7). Everything is running just the way that I want it. My current goal is to start dropping the load on the unused cores to further reduce the overall package power draw, and see if I can get cores 6 & 7 do do 5.2 or 5.3 over a sustained period. I think I can find a good balance in there and get 6 cores to idle down while forcing 2 of the remaining 4 to turbo up. I'll save these settings to a P3D profile in BIOS and activate them when I want to fly. Rebooting is so fast now, the biggest problem is trying to hit <Del> at the proper time before the OS loads. 

I've OC'd every CPU that I've ever owned. My 8600K was locked to 4.9Ghz for most of it's life. It's never caused me any problems. As long as you don't over-voltage them, it's pretty hard to damage them (at least by doing things that normal people do on their computer). I 

 

Edited February 6, 20215 yr by MDFlier

1 hour ago, G-RFRY said:

No matter what you do there will always be a main core that`s how the CPU works one core must load first and schedule the work, if you shut core O down it will pass to another core as the main core Asobo themselves explained this last year in a Q&A.  

Exactly. The key is to steer the workload to the most efficient CPUs. Intel flags the 2 most efficient cores when they test the chips for binning, so that's why I'm taking the approach that I am.

As to Asobo... When I finally get around to getting MSFS. I'll repeat this entire process. If there's any performance to be gained in the BIOS settings, I'll find them and save a BIOS profile for MSFS as well. I was in the beta and it was running really well on the 8600K. My thoughts are that MSFS probably won't require as much work as P3D has. MSFS was written on modern hardware and compiled using modern compilers. Everything from top to bottom is more thread aware than previous versions of sims have ever been. I'm pretty sure that it will be a case of simply getting the fastest CPU speed possible within my desired heat constraints. Kinda boring, actually.      

Don't sweat the frame rates.  If the sim is running smoothly, no stutters or pauses, then leave it as-is. 

7 minutes ago, stans said:

Don't sweat the frame rates.  If the sim is running smoothly, no stutters or pauses, then leave it as-is. 

You are a wise man, my friend.

But CPUs are like sports cars. I gotta make sure that the speedo really does work at the highest reading once in a while. "Yes officer, I was just testing my speedometer to make sure it was accurate. 165MPH? Yep. That's what I saw. Thanks for verifying that with your radar unit. Can I go now?"

I agree firmly with Stans don't get caught up with frames, all u want is a smooth and stutter free flight.  Stay locked at 30, possibly 60, and u will be a happy camper

9 hours ago, Sunshine13 said:

I agree firmly with Stans don't get caught up with frames, all u want is a smooth and stutter free flight.  Stay locked at 30, possibly 60, and u will be a happy camper

 

The OP agrees with you. He was just testing his system.

I'm still playing around with things. Some observations. 

At stock settings (only change is enabling XMP1 memory profile) P3D runs great. Nice and smooth. CPU runs mostly at 4.8Ghz without any changes on my part. Some FPS dips do happen in heavy weather conditions at the usual locations where that occurs.

At a 5.0Ghz all core OC (not really an OC, but an increase over base), I don't see an FPS increase in P3D (remember, I have the Nvidia driver locked to 30 FPS), but my entire system runs "snappier". Switching to other apps, interacting with menus, etc. are all most definitely faster. I did see a few dips below 30FPS ar KBOS and again at KMIA, both with bad weather (non EA), They weren't  bad enough to mess up the experience. 

At a 5.1Ghz no HT OC, P3D does feel smoother. I never thought that it wasn't smooth at stock settings but it definitely feels "crisper". Everything else also runs faster. As soon as I enabled HT, 5.1Ghz was unstable. I never bothered to try getting that working.

I bought MSFS last night just to test. In all 3 cases, it runs smooth and stutter free. I haven't found the FPS counter yet, so I'm going to just avoid it for a while. No need for it at the moment. Smooth is smooth. Of course, it blew up tonight, so...

I still need to attempt getting cores 6 & 7 to lock at 5.2 Ghz and let the other 8 cores float at the default 4.8. P3D has been running on core 6 consistently, and I want to see if I can get rid of the below 30 dips. I might even try getting core 6 to 5.3 and letting the other 9 sit at 4.8. It'll be interesting to see how that feels. 

For daily, "normal" use, I'm currently using the all core 5.0 setup. Temps are in the 40s while doing everything except flying and then they are well below 80°. There's no down side to the extra 200MHz aside from the extra electric bill.

 

Edited February 12, 20215 yr by MDFlier

5 hours ago, MDFlier said:

 

At a 5.0Ghz all core OC (not really an OC, but an increase over base),

 

 

It is an overclock though, as its on all cores. 5 GHz is only on two cores I recall. Your boards MCE (if enabled)  may be modifying that though, in terms of number of cores, duration etc. For example "tau" for PL2 is only 57 seconds following Intel's settings.

Re smoothness, you do have to be careful with  what you "perceive" without an way to measure it, the brain is easily fooled. 🙂

Edited February 12, 20215 yr by martin-w

3 hours ago, martin-w said:

the brain is easily fooled.

I, for one, am grateful that my brain is easily fooled. 😉

lol

Edited February 13, 20215 yr by MDFlier