4 hours ago, SteveW said:

You're welcome Ian. Yes I don't see how you can extract more from that CPU than what you have already. I'm glad your system is working well. There may be a way to improve frame rate smoothness a little more since there's other techniques and combinations that are possible depending on the system specs.

If your monitor is 60Hz, to stay capped at 30fps you can alternatively try this: In Nvidia Control Panel, 3D Settings, Programs tab, choose Prepar3D.exe profile Restore/Apply, that removes the 30fps cap you put in the profile, then set the item "Vertical sync" to "Adaptive (half refresh rate) this sets a 30Hz vsync while leaving the monitor at 60Hz, Apply and close, and in P3D Display settings leave the fps slider at Unlocked and set VSYNC=ON. That may or may not work but is worth testing and might give you a slightly smoother 30fps if it works.

Interim report:

Full flight maybe tomorrow but did a quick load of those settings. Strange thing, the FPS varies wildly between 28-40 fps, doesn't stay at 30 or below as with NCP frame limiter. Just taxied and took off. Seemed smooth.

As I said full test flight later.

6 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Strange thing, the FPS varies wildly between 28-40 fps

That would indicate the VSync isn't happening as it should sit at 30 on a 60Hz monitor with NCP set to half refresh. Maybe your monitor is varying the vsync. if so try a fixed refresh rate. Also perhaps try a more recent Nidia driver. You may just have to stick to capping with the fps limit in NCP as you were.

3 hours ago, SteveW said:

That would indicate the VSync isn't happening as it should sit at 30 on a 60Hz monitor with NCP set to half refresh. Maybe your monitor is varying the vsync. if so try a fixed refresh rate. Also perhaps try a more recent Nidia driver. You may just have to stick to capping with the fps limit in NCP as you were.

I updated the driver only yesterday before I did the test. The Monitor is on 60 Hz. So I will have to go back to NCP cap of 30 fps.

On the subject of four core CPU's with HyperThreading: I have been testing this difficult situation recently and found that HT enabled is better than HT disabled so long as the correct Affinity settings are applied. This I also did back in the early FSX days and HT enabled AM=213 was always better than HT disabled. Whether HT enabled or disabled, it is better with exe apps running alongside the sim to corral those into the two last cores leaving cores zero and one free from addon activity.

Usually for more recent systems and P3D v5 I would suggest to use AM=253=11,11,11,01 (with P3D v5.3: 253.253,0,1,2). This uses the second core for both Render and FrameWorker threads and applies two cores (four Logical Processors) to file loading.

Alternatively one can try 213=11,01,01,01 (with P3D v5.3: 213.213,0,1,2). This uses three cores for the Main, Render and FrameWorker threads but uses two Logical Processors for file loading. This might be better for slower systems,

Using HT off gives AM=15=1111 (default P3D v5.3 gives 15,15,0,2,3). Using HT off AM 15,15,0,2,3 as a benchmark - enabling HT the equivalent will be AM=85=01,01,01,01 and using 85,85,0,2,3 in P3D v5.3 gives an identical result in performance to HT off, any difference is  undetectable. Even so, the system will benefit from HT enabled having 8 Logical Processors rather than four non-HT processors.

Enabling HT and using 213 increases file loading performance or 253 increases file loading performance further still, and maintains the same fps performance as HT off AM=15.

Like this? @SteveW

[JobScheduler]
AffinityMask=253
P3DCoreAffinityMask=253
MainThreadScheduler=0
RenderThreadScheduler=1
FrameWorkerThreadScheduler=2

Yes exactly! 

5 hours ago, SteveW said:

Yes exactly! 

253,253,0,1,2. is working well for me.