4 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Ah right. So why not run it at native 30Hz? Is it because of the mouse movement? I've got used to that.

I'm not sure why we keep misunderstanding each other.  I DO run it native at 30hz (when simming)

hehe, I remember FS9 eating up 100% CPU from the moment it launched until you shut it down.  It did so for the life of the sim as far as I can remember.  I never thought anything of it as long as performance wasn't impacted...  The increased temps would worry me more than the increased usage though.  

41 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

interesting that you have a Ryzen.

Ray, I had this PC built in anticpation of MSFS, as I was hoping that would be a more modern design that would take better advantage of the extra cores and maybe break away from the overclock thing. So far, business as usual with MSFS in terms of CPU threading, but this result in P3D is actually encouraging to me. At least all those cores are doing something now, so maybe MSFS will go the same way when it goes DX12.

32 minutes ago, micstatic said:

I'm not sure why we keep misunderstanding each other.  I DO run it native at 30hz (when simming)

Sorry, me being thick. 😞

An important change to my test...

I disabled AIG Ai traffic and conducted the same test. CPU1 load remained below 100% except for very brief periods. It was mainly in the high 80s / low 90s. But where's the fun with no other aircraft in the skies?

The imbalance between CPU and GPU workload remains an issue.

Clearly many of you have had different experiences to me, and there's no single size that fits all, but in my experience Core 0 (or whichever core the main P3D rendering thread is running on) is always pinned at 100% whenever P3D is rendering the scene. It only ever drops below 100% when I am in the settings dialogs etc (ie when it's not rendering the scene), and my GPU usage has rarely ever gone above 20-30% even at the highest settings. That's been the case since the days of P3Dv3. The usage of other cores has definitely increased over the years but I was seeing relatively high load across all cores back in the P3Dv4 era.

The key difference, I suspect, is that I don't limit frames. I always run Unlimited. With a hard frame limit then yes, main core usage can drop below 100%, but 95%+ would still be your sweet spot because then you're getting the best CPU performance for the FPS limit you've specified. When Unlimited, the sim is trying to render as many frames as it can regardless of settings, so it'll always be at 100% and it's the FPS that varies. For me, that has been a better trade-off because limiting frames has caused worse performance at given settings for me. Also, I have my CPUs overclocked, core parking disabled, and Windows set to not use SpeedStep, so the cores are always running at the overclock frequency. The shifting of frequencies up and down during turbo operations is, I believe, a cause of microstutters. 

Am I worried about cooking my CPU? No. It has thermal and over-voltage protection. You can't kill a CPU like that short of massively over-volting it (and you'd have to turn off the over-voltage protection to do so) or removing the heatsink completely. It if goes overtemp, it'll thermal-throttle. It might have a slightly shorter useful life overall, but the functional life of a CPU will be longer than I generally want to keep it for anyway. 

Quote

The imbalance between CPU and GPU workload remains an issue.

Has anyone from LM said that this balance has been changed with this release? There's always going to be a limit on the GPU workload because GPU cores are optimised for specific tasks, not general purpose computing. There are many aspects of the sim rendering that will never be able to be offloaded to the GPU, but I'd be very surprised if they deliberately pushed tasks that could be on the GPU back onto the CPU. I suspect they are just using DX12 better than they did before and that's where the VRAM improvement is coming from.

I have yet to switch AIG back on to see what impact that has, but I have always found it to be much worse than UTL ever was. 

Edited June 14, 20214 yr by neilhewitt
Adding extra points.

Out of curiosity I set my scenery settings to off as much as P3D allows. See below.

But on a flight from EGLC to EGLL flying over what is now a village, not a major city, CPU1 still remains in the high 80s / low 90s and occasionally hits 100%.

The only processing of any significance is AIG aircraft but these are optimised for 64-bit and whilst I've had to limit them at major airports they've never caused CPU1 to hit 100% at quieter ones such as EGCC and LEAL.

@neilhewitt, my Affinity Mask is set within SimStarterNG. I have 12 virtual cores and only cores 0,2,4,6,8 and 10 are enabled. I tried enabling all of them but it was a stutter-fest. I've had that AM since v4 days.

Neither do I limit frames. My monitor runs at 30Hz with "unlimited" in P3D and Vsync enabled. That's been the case since I had v4.

There's been no official response from LM about any change in CPU/GPU processing but given there were lots of complaints about excessive VRAM usage I suspect they've moved some processing from the GPU to the CPU hence why my performance seems worse with 5.2 than with 5.1. Look at my settings and ask yourself why does CPU1 stay so high with so little to do?

43 minutes ago, neilhewitt said:

Clearly many of you have had different experiences to me, and there's no single size that fits all, but in my experience Core 0 (or whichever core the main P3D rendering thread is running on) is always pinned at 100% whenever P3D is rendering the scene. It only ever drops below 100% when I am in the settings dialogs etc (ie when it's not rendering the scene), and my GPU usage has rarely ever gone above 20-30% even at the highest settings. That's been the case since the days of P3Dv3. The usage of other cores has definitely increased over the years but I was seeing relatively high load across all cores back in the P3Dv4 era.

Exactly my observation. I don't understand Ray's fixation on the derivative numbers, they reflect just what they "see", not what we see and how smooth the performance is.

Cheers,

2 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Ah right. So why not run it at native 30Hz? Is it because of the mouse movement? I've got used to that.

Why to run your monitor at 30Hz Ray? The way I've set it here since P3Dv4 in NCP is: 

1) Prepar3D.exe Max Frame = 30Hz (in NCP!! not P3D UI)

2) Refresh rate = Adaptive 1/2 

3) In Prepar3D  UI = Vertical sync ticked , buffers OFF (always more stutters in heavy environment like EGLL, EGLC, EHAM with ORBX's TE).

Thus I don't need to switch my 60Hz monitor to 30Hz back and forth.

Thanks. 

PS: in Windows Graphics settings Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling is On and in NCP Low Latency Mode @ Ultra just in case..

 

Edited June 14, 20214 yr by Dirk98

I guess the question to ask Dirk98 and neilhewitt.  Are you guys happy with the jump from 5.1 to 5.2?

35 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Out of curiosity I set my scenery settings to off as much as P3D allows. See below.

But on a flight from EGLC to EGLL flying over what is now a village, not a major city, CPU1 still remains in the high 80s / low 90s and occasionally hits 100%.

The only processing of any significance is AIG aircraft but these are optimised for 64-bit and whilst I've had to limit them at major airports they've never caused CPU1 to hit 100% at quieter ones such as EGCC and LEAL.

@neilhewitt, my Affinity Mask is set within SimStarterNG. I have 12 virtual cores and only cores 0,2,4,6,8 and 10 are enabled. I tried enabling all of them but it was a stutter-fest. I've had that AM since v4 days.

Neither do I limit frames. My monitor runs at 30Hz with "unlimited" in P3D and Vsync enabled. That's been the case since I had v4.

There's been no official response from LM about any change in CPU/GPU processing but given there were lots of complaints about excessive VRAM usage I suspect they've moved some processing from the GPU to the CPU hence why my performance seems worse with 5.2 than with 5.1. Look at my settings and ask yourself why does CPU1 stay so high with so little to do?

Without going into too much technicalities of P3D and CPU, GPU usage I am seeing a huge performance increase with the same settings I used in V5.1. I am using no tweaks whatsoever. The only thing that I fiddled with is Nvidia Control Panel and even there the only thing I touched was the FPS limiter which I set to 30 FPS. Within the sim I also set an FPS limit to 35 FPS. I know, I know what some of you might say - what is the point of doing so? Well in some places like KJFK and EGLL my sim couldn't do 30 FPS so it halved it to around 15 but mostly to around 20ish frames. That is when I used to switch to unlimited FPS and then it came back to around 30ish frames and obviously limiting it with Nvidia Control Panel I just set a limit so it doesn't go crazy rendering frames to the max it could do thus wasting computing power to do higher frames then what I need.

Now with 5.2 I can maintain 30 FPS in both aforementioned airports even with frames limited to 35 FPS within the sim. Now whatever they have done to the sim they have found that sweet spot for me. But oh god, badly (very well)!

See my settings bellow:

And also I have uploaded two videos of me just randomly flying around the NGXu in KDEN - though it's not a FPS demonstrator video, I find V5.2's looks and performance very very appealing:

P.S. FPS stayed at 30 fluctuating up and down 1 every now and then. Also I've got saving enabled every 5 minutes...

Edited June 14, 20214 yr by Balint Szarka

6 minutes ago, Dirk98 said:

Why to run your monitor at 30Hz Ray? The way I've set it here since P3Dv4 in NCP is: 

1) Prepar3D.exe Max Frame = 30Hz (in NCP!! not P3D UI)

2) Refresh rate = Adaptive 1/2 

3) In Prepar3D  UI = Vertical sync ticked , buffers OFF (always more stutters in heavy environment like EGLL, EGLC, EHAM with ORBX's TE).

Thus I don't need to switch my 60Hz monitor to 30Hz back and forth.

Thanks. 

PS: in Windows Graphics settings Hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling is On and in NCP Low Latency Mode @ Ultra just in case..

 

thank you.

12 minutes ago, Dirk98 said:

Exactly my observation. I don't understand Ray's fixation on the derivative numbers, they reflect just what they "see", not what we see and how smooth the performance is.

Cheers,

I’m not fixated on the numbers. When I’m at FL290 SE of London enroute to Brussels I wouldn’t expect to see CPU1 hitting 100%. It rarely did in 5.1. I have moderate settings to reflect my 1080Ti. And running AIG Ai also incurs a hit so I’m sensible about settings.

But just a few flights in 5.2 have convinced me more work is being demanded of the CPU and my GPU is definitely under used compared to 5.1. Look at my earlier report where changes in Autogen and Scenery Complexity hardly affected the demand on the GPU.

Its only when the performance isn’t smooth I glance at the RTSS readout and notice CPU1 has hit 100%.

7 minutes ago, micstatic said:

I guess the question to ask Dirk98 and neilhewitt.  Are you guys happy with the jump from 5.1 to 5.2?

I'm still waiting with my current v5.1 for a couple of important updates like FSL and EZCA, so I'd like to ask Ray first if he likes P3D's performance and fluidity in v5.2 beyond all those overlay numbers.

Thanks. 

11 minutes ago, micstatic said:

I guess the question to ask Dirk98 and neilhewitt.  Are you guys happy with the jump from 5.1 to 5.2?

Too early for me to say. I haven't flown it in anger yet, I've been in setup mode. The FPS numbers I am seeing are on the ground not in the air. 

Once I've been able to to a full flight (which is not as simple as it sounds, I have a multi-channel setup so I need to get lots of things working together) I'll be in a better position to judge on performance and load.