Alder Lake CPU's for VR

[aidanlegras 7]

Hi all, I am thinking of upgrading my i7700 OC'd to 4.8GHz to something newer. I also use a 2080ti all in one cooler with 32G of ram and a Reverb Gen1 with the following platforms:

DCS (Currently single core usage)

MSFS and P3D 5.2.

With that in mind, could someone with some understanding of the upcoming Alder Lake technology please give me some insight into whether this CPU may be a good performance boost. I am obviously going to need a new MOBO to carry a new CPU, truth be known I am more interested in performance than price.

Here's an article to give some context to someone that can understand what the hell they're talking about, it's all Greek to me:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-core-i9-12900k-geekbenched

Edited August 29, 2021 by aidanlegras

[787flyer 633]

Hi,

 

The jury IMHO is still out on what this will really mean practically to any performance gains for flight sim products given there are only some limited test CPU examples available that have been tested.

Typically, the flight sim products have been tied to CPU performance (although later versions of P3D and X-plane etc are more balanced in terms of the balance between CPU vs GPU usage). Higher CPU clock rates and looking at the single threaded performance gain is an indicator of potential gain, but not the only consideration.

 

As you mentioned, these top range CPUs are power hungry so a pretty powerful power supply is required, however Alder Lake will introduce some new, additional "efficiency" CPU cores as well as the "power" cores we see in the Intel 11th Gen and older, so hopefully the power requirements wont be as high.

The balance between these high power cores and efficiency cores is somewhat an unknown as to its effect on running a flight sim. Potentially, it could help since the sim can use those most powerful cores to perform its main computational tasks together with the terrain loading tasks for all the scenery which are usually run on just a few cores, however other sim add-ons you may have running can potentially be offloaded to those lower power, efficiency cores.

This balance between the two different types of CPU cores available on the 12th Gen Intel CPU chips will depend upon the Windows Thread Scheduler to balance all the workload efficiently across all the available cores and threads.Potentially this is another gain in performance over Intel's 11th Gen chips.

So the signs are promising for Alder Lake however I don't think this is going to be a cheap solution for the following reasons:

To run an Alder Lake chip I think you will also need to consider:

• A new motherboard (Intel 690 chipset - likely not going to be cheap (given its new and there are known component shortages today and likely to run into next year)
• Possibly a new PSU depending upon which 12th Gen chip you select, but also the GPU you have or plan to purchase as an upgrade as its likely to have high power requirements (current PCIe 4.0 GPUs will still be supported)
• Alder Lake does provide PCIe 5.0 support (its possible that future, newer M2 SSDs will be able to utilize this higher bandwidth which could improve load times further in the sim - current SSDs support PCIe 4.0)
• While PCIe 5.0 is available on the motherboard its not yet known when the first GPU cards will be available (currently latest and next series of GPUs will continue to support PCIe 4.0)
• It does look like DDR4 memory will still be supported for RAM although Alder Lake will be able to support the newer DDR5 RAM too (likely to be more expensive than DDR4). You could re-use your existing RAM from your current sim rig
• A good cooling solution needed -probably liquid or hybrid solution
• A possible upgrade to Windows 11
• A flight sim product that supports better multi-threading will likely perform better on this new platform using the new CPU architecture.

 

In summary, I think the potential is there and Alder Lake will bring some benefits to current sim performance overall, but exactly how much is yet to be seen.

On the other hand, investing in Alder Lake at the end of the year only gets you part of the way there, especially with a new motherboard investment that you can not take full advantage straight away as the other PC components have not caught up yet with supporting the latest interconnect standards 

Of course, this does offer you good, future upgrade possibilities when those additional components finally make it to the market place.

 

Personally, I am waiting for some more substantive Alder Lake tests to be run before pulling the trigger on a new rig since my current one is similar to yours ( i7-8700K at 4.5 GHz , 1070Ti GPU).

 

[aidanlegras 7]

@787flyer Hi Mark,

Thank you so much for the very detailed response. I imagine we will get some more info soon enough, I have been toying with the idea of moving over to the 11th Gen but I am reasonably happy with the performance I have so far so that’s why I’m considering waiting for the 12th Gen. 

In terms of the costs of upgrading other components such as the motherboard and power unit, I can appreciate that this will always be a big leap particularly with Intel only covering what seems to two generations of CPU per motherboard. I’m going to upgrade at some point though, I’m banking on there being a material gain in latency, frame time or settings available at some point and it’s hard to imagine that these 7nm chips will not be the way forward but I will wait as you suggest….with baited breath. 

[787flyer 633]

Yes I am waiting patiently too. 🤞Hopefully there will be more test results coming in. Hopefully someone will run a test on MSFS2020 which should give a better indication of sim performance.

 

Yes I agree with you, the way forward is decreasing the die size which is not only occurring on the CPU design front, but also the graphics cards manufacturers are also heading in the same direction.

The benefit is smaller dies means reduced power and less temperature which is a good thing overall and of course the manufacturers see this as beneficial too as they can cram more circuitry on to the same wafer and sell more chips

 

 

I see Alder Lake holds out a lot of promise in this regard. Potentially this is the next platform I will base my new sim off of and I hope to get some reasonable gains from jumping from Intel 8th Gen to Intel 12th Gen as well as an investment in a new GPU since my 1070Ti is a bit long in the tooth.I was also hoping that a new PSU was not going to be needed for Alder Lake, but I would definitely need a new one if I were to jump onto Intel's 12th Gen chip and RTX 3000 series GPU.

As a side note, I also explored whether it made sense to go back to Intels 10th Gen CPUs if Alder Lake's promise is not fulfilled because of the power hungry requirements of the current 11th Gen CPUs, but I see there are some downsides to this approach. So I have sort of given up on that idea and look forward to what Alder Lake can offer.😉

 

[X_Man 8]

I just made that upgrade from an i7-7700K to i9-11900KF (same as the K without the GPU) - one less instruction on the die IMHO and at the time it was less than the 11900K so...

2:38: Testing Games: MSFS

8:35:  Device Lab: MSFS

1:51: NJ Tech

Event though the systems are not the same, with some inference, you can see there is a difference b/w the i7-7700K and the i9-11900K/KF. The degree of performance increase will depend on your hardware.

Note:

• The Asus 3080Ti is better than some 3090s out there.
• RAM with a lower CAS # are better than faster RAM and higher CAS#.
• # of RAM sticks matters
• Motherboard VRM matters.

 

[aidanlegras 7]

3 hours ago, X_Man said:

I just made that upgrade from an i7-7700K to i9-11900KF (same as the K without the GPU) - one less instruction on the die IMHO and at the time it was less than the 11900K so...

2:38: Testing Games: MSFS

8:35:  Device Lab: MSFS

1:51: NJ Tech

Event though the systems are not the same, with some inference, you can see there is a difference b/w the i7-7700K and the i9-11900K/KF. The degree of performance increase will depend on your hardware.

Note:

• The Asus 3080Ti is better than some 3090s out there.
• RAM with a lower CAS # are better than faster RAM and higher CAS#.
• # of RAM sticks matters
• Motherboard VRM matters.

 

Forgive my ignorance but I thought VRM was memory on the GPU itself, are you referring to voltage regulator module when say that motherboard VRM matters?

[X_Man 8]

@aidanlegras Sorry for the late response - getting P3Dv5.2 up and running.

VRM "Voltage Regulator Module" when it comes to motherboards is a term used to describe several components that work together the regulate the boards power phasing function. 

This is a great article from Gamers Nexus: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1229-anatomy-of-a-motherboard-what-is-a-vrm-mosfet?showall=1. I think the idea is just to be aware of how effective the VRM on the motherboard you are considering is before your purchase, especially if you plan to overclock.

[aidanlegras 7]

On 9/8/2021 at 12:32 AM, X_Man said:

@aidanlegras Sorry for the late response - getting P3Dv5.2 up and running.

VRM "Voltage Regulator Module" when it comes to motherboards is a term used to describe several components that work together the regulate the boards power phasing function. 

This is a great article from Gamers Nexus: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1229-anatomy-of-a-motherboard-what-is-a-vrm-mosfet?showall=1. I think the idea is just to be aware of how effective the VRM on the motherboard you are considering is before your purchase, especially if you plan to overclock.

Thanks X_man, that's a great article to read. I do plan to overclock, I tend to do it with the Overclock Genie which, on my current setup allows me to OC to 4.8GHz and switch on XMP 'for free' and seems to work a treat. I can't really be bothered doing all that other type of overclocking tbh but as I approach a new CPU I will be sure to take into account the VRM.

Thanks.

[turbomax 3,285]

On 8/29/2021 at 9:41 AM, 787flyer said:

PCIe 5.0 support (its possible that future, newer M2 SSDs will be able to utilize this higher bandwidth which could improve load times further in the sim - current SSDs support PCIe 4.0)

PCIe 5.0: no noticeable improvement for MSFS: even going from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0 was only 0.5 fps increase at best. I suggest any 8-Core i9 around 4.7 - 5.0 GHz, 32 GB Ram minimum and RTX 3080 or for 4K or VR: RTX 3090. Any PCIe SSD above 3.0 is totally overrated and irrelevant for MSFS.

[turbomax 3,285]

On 8/30/2021 at 11:51 PM, aidanlegras said:

I thought VRM was memory on the GPU itself,

don't confuse VRM with VRAM: vrm = voltage regulator module, vram = video ram memory. has nothing to do with each other except that more is better 😊

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/voltage_regulator_module

Edited October 18, 2021 by turbomax