Morning all, hope everyone is well.

I've recently decided to get a new GPU and went for the RTX 3060. The TI version looked great, but for what i need i couldn't justify the extra ££.

Anyway, it's since arrived and i've fitted the new card into my machine, but i've noticed now that my CPU is bottlenecking. I spent most of the day yesterday fettling and in a test cruise, the FPS counter in X Plane was showing the CPU @ 0.0220 and the GPU @ 0.0090. I've been looking at new CPUs, but if i'm honest i don't know which way to turn. I keep seeing the Ryzen 5 5600x popping up everywhere with some decent reviews, but not sure whether an upgrade from my current 3600x would be worth it? I only play in 1080p and aside from simming, the only other thing i use this machine for is browsing the net and editing drone footage.

So, 3600x to 5600x... worth it?

Ta
Dean

I have the 5600x + RTX 3060 Ti combination, 32 GB RAM, and I've never been so good in terms of rig...

All sims run beautifully ! Problem is, I don't like any of it, well, less IL-2 😕

1 hour ago, baild01 said:

Morning all, hope everyone is well.

I've recently decided to get a new GPU and went for the RTX 3060. The TI version looked great, but for what i need i couldn't justify the extra ££.

Anyway, it's since arrived and i've fitted the new card into my machine, but i've noticed now that my CPU is bottlenecking. I spent most of the day yesterday fettling and in a test cruise, the FPS counter in X Plane was showing the CPU @ 0.0220 and the GPU @ 0.0090. I've been looking at new CPUs, but if i'm honest i don't know which way to turn. I keep seeing the Ryzen 5 5600x popping up everywhere with some decent reviews, but not sure whether an upgrade from my current 3600x would be worth it? I only play in 1080p and aside from simming, the only other thing i use this machine for is browsing the net and editing drone footage.

So, 3600x to 5600x... worth it?

Ta
Dean

In single-threaded apps like XP11 you can expect I'd say max 15% more FPS when going 5600x, best case. Might make sense to wait and see how XP12 behaves CPU-wise. In short, I'd say no, not worth it.

41 minutes ago, rka said:

In short, I'd say no, not worth it.

I agree, mostly because:

Quote

Let's talk about CPUs first. There seems to be the myth that clock speed = king cuz single core perf, but that's not really true. Clock speed hardly says anything these days anymore due to the way that CPUs are designed. Imma spare you all the details, but there can be significant perf differences between equally clocked CPUs. So don't go out buying CPUs based on clock speed alone. More cores is probably better, even though the super awesome multi-core rendering tech isn't going to be in 12.0 yet. But it's on the horizon, so if you buy hardware today, buy yourself something that you can be happy with tomorrow as well. The big engine re-architecture is planned as one of the big features to come in one of the first major v12 updates, we got a pretty good idea of what we want to do here and a lot of the tech already exists. That being said, 12.0 itself doesn't make any big major leaps here in terms of CPU core usage, so you are still quite well off with a CPU that can do well in single core benchmarks.

GPU wise, before y'all panic, yes, more things are now done on the GPU, but this is a good thing. X-Plane 11 was terrible at fully utilizing the GPU, leaving a lot of idle time on the table when it could do work. For example in v11 we did water FFT calculation on the CPU, and you can see it easily take 8ms of multi-core CPU time. This is great if all you wanna do is see task manager go a little vroom, but for v12 we are actually doing more FFT calculations on the GPU and it does it in... 700 microseconds. So about an order of magnitude faster. It also does this calculation at the top of the frame, when we don't render anything yet because the flight model is still trying to get its act together. So in this case we moved something from the CPU that was super inefficient to the GPU where it can be calculated much more efficiently than before while absorbing time when the GPU was traditionally idle anyways. GPUs are really good at crunching lots of numbers, so that's where we moved a lot of the graphics number crunching. Plus the advantage is that there is no transfer necessary at rendering time to tell the GPU about the numbers that the CPU crunched.

Note the bold line especially.

The ryzen3000 are still very good for the next few years as well imo.

Edited February 2, 20224 yr by mtaxp

Interesting! Appreciate the replies guys, i think i'll hold off and see what XP12 brings.

5600X sounds good to me. Although you may want the extra cores of a 5800X or 5900X if you're also editing videos.

Also consider that the 5xxx series Ryzens run a bit hotter than the 3xxx ones, so you may invest into a new CPU cooler as well.

 

1 hour ago, rka said:

In single-threaded apps like XP11 you can expect I'd say max 15% more FPS when going 5600x, best case. Might make sense to wait and see how XP12 behaves CPU-wise. In short, I'd say no, not worth it.

That's a bit pessimistic in my eyes. In XP's heaviest benchmark scenario, I've seen an increase of ~30% by going from a 3700X to a 5800X.

Edited February 2, 20224 yr by Bjoern

2 hours ago, baild01 said:

Ryzen 5 5600x

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

IMHO it is worth the £££ difference between the 5600X and the 5900X

If you can sell one and buy the other you should see a fair difference (the L3 cache on the higher end new AMDs is great)

Not worth it if if aren't getting cash back from the 5600X.

But also, the X series has a lot of bios toys for improving performance, I suspect a lot of systems are shipping massively under clocked (mine was). It's probably worth making sure your bios is up to date and run the bios performance optimiser - also make sure windows is in performance mode (some game setting needs switching on I believe. But I can't help much with windows stuff).

0.022 is fairly high. But it depends a lot on the situation.

If it's aircraft plugin responsible, nothing will change until the aircraft developer fixes their plugin.

XP clouds and world objects have a big impact, for a 3600X with max world objects and overcast weather 0.022 is reasonable.

3 hours ago, baild01 said:

CPU @ 0.0220

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

5600X sounds good to me. Although you may want the extra cores of a 5800X or 5900X if you're also editing videos.

Also consider that the 5xxx series Ryzens run a bit hotter than the 3xxx ones, so you may invest into a new CPU cooler as well.

 

That's a bit pessimistic in my eyes. In XP's heaviest benchmark scenario, I've seen an increase of ~30% by going from a 3700X to a 5800X.

Yeah that may have been a bit too careful. The benchmark I usually check has the 3700x at 72/100 points and the 5600x at 90/100 for mixed gaming at 1080p.

Edit: I agree with @mtaxp, the Ryzen 3000 series are still very good cpus and will be for a few years to come IMO as well.

Edited February 2, 20224 yr by rka

Thanks everyone.

I've been playing around again this afternoon and i'm not entirely sure what has made the difference, but between updating the BIOS (and putting it into GeekBench mode), putting Windows into 'Ultimate Performance' mode, stopping a few services running in the background that i didn't need and playing around with some other stuff, i'm now parked at Stanstead with everything maxed out (apart from number of world objects that i've got set to high) and i'm getting around 0.0220 on the CPU, 0.190 on the GPU and it's dancing about between 45 and 50fps!

That's in the Zibo mod, with Active Sky and Traffic Global running, so i'm pretty happy! Think i'll hold off upgrading from the 3600x until XP12 comes along. Thanks for all the advice!

Dean