Suddenly Limited by Main Thread

[bobcat999 7,644]

32 minutes ago, NicXGG said:

@Noel Thanks for this. I will retest with the FBW a320 as that is considered performance heavy in comparison to the Fenix. While I am looking at the fps I am also conscious I am just chasing that smoothness over the number. For me, sitting at 25fps is manageable with little in the way of stutters. I will also lower the T/LOD and report back with the findings.

Good.  It doesn't hurt to try and tweak a few settings unless you start to do more tweaking than flying like back in the old FSX / P3D days! 
I was surprised when I jumped to 4k initially from 2k, as it didn't really lower my frame rate, but I had much sharper graphics and could pick out distant runways easier. 
That kind of proves heavy CPU involvement rather than GPU. 

@Noel is very knowledgeable on these things and has done a lot of work / investigation on it since owning MSFS, especially to do with smoothness and frame times etc.

You may improve it a little with a few tweaks and some advice, but MSFS is just a CPU hog currently, no matter how many cores or threads you have, and no matter what speed (my 13900 is at 5.8 GHz). 

As Noel says, smoothness is the key rather than ultimate frame rate, but you can still expect those slight stutters and loss of smoothness when you pan around at a busy airport unfortunately. 

Without a 40 series card with frame generation, that is almost impossible to achieve, and even with my 4080 using FG I still get 'frame skips' when the CPU is topped out on the main threads when the sim is busy.

Another thing I have done is clouds from ultra to just high.  They still look good, but it gave me back a few frames, especially when there were a few layers. 
If it doesn't improve things you can put them back to ultra in a few seconds.

Edited August 14 by bobcat999

[David_CSA 36]

To OP:

Just an idea, but how about that you would fly the Sydney landing challenge (from cockpit only) and tell us what fps you get? You could use your normal settings, LODs, etc. and no frame limiter, if needed.

It is the dafault A320, there's some complexity to the city and there is some serious cloud cover. The challenge has been used for benchmarking in the past.

Someone with similar hardware and resolution could then compare to his/her results. Just to get a rough idea, where you are.

I have almost the same pc (10700K, RTX 3070, 1440p, ultrai) and to be honest, considered your latest performance a bit too slow. Unfortunately, I am on holidays and can't do the test now.

I am also almost always main thread limited (10700k is actually very close to 9900k), unless inside dense semi-transparent ultra clouds (only then GPU limited), but once again, your latest fps feel low.

Your previous performance was good, the 9900k was coping, albeit  sweating. It is difficult to believe for me that the SU/WU degradation could be so severe.

[daztheman70 9]

I have had a similar issue with performance especially in the Fenix I got better performance in Fenix V1 than I did with V2 for some reason and my system is not as powerful as yours but this video on YouTube did help allot with getting my system back to be useable with the Fenix so it might help you fingers crossed just trying to help 🙂 

 

 

 

[Noel 4,180]

Also as I missed it in your OP:  FSLTL is arguably running a whole other simulation inside MSFS and is quite CPU intensive until you dial back both static and dynamic traffic a great deal.  I'm at about 6 AI planes in the air and see maybe 6 on the ground near the gate I'm at.  Sometimes when performance goes to hell at arrival I've shut down FSLTL completely during final approach but that is rare overall.  

[turbomax 2,879]

10 hours ago, Noel said:

Folks here are suggesting your CPU is old

which is true.

[Virtual-Chris 682]

I highly doubt it was sudden, unless you just upgraded your GPU. That hardware combo has been main thread limited since… for ever 😝

[bobcat999 7,644]

1 hour ago, turbomax said:

which is true.

Yes, I must admit I was a bit thrown by the 'not old' comment, with the 14000 series now being talked about. 

I never had the 9000 series but it seems absolutely ages since I had my 8800.  Either way, main thread limited is still the way for me even with the 13900.

Not sure if the AMDX3D chips are any better, but main thread limited seems to be the standard and maybe preffered message anyway in the sim rather than GPU limited or some of the other oddball messages like 'manipulators' (which we saw when we had the FPS sapping scenery bugs a good while ago).

Edited August 15 by bobcat999

[turbomax 2,879]

17 minutes ago, bobcat999 said:

Not sure if the AMDX3D chips are any better,

similar, but uses 1/2 the power (5 nm structure) of the Intel outdated 10 nm silicon structure, hence less hot.

Edited August 15 by turbomax

[bobcat999 7,644]

3 hours ago, turbomax said:

similar, but uses 1/2 the power (5 nm structure) of the Intel outdated 10 nm silicon structure, hence less hot.

Excellent.  I am going in that direction next time I plan a motherboard swap.  According to benchmark testing, the sim responds really well to the extra cache of the X3D chips.

[turbomax 2,879]

1 hour ago, bobcat999 said:

I am going in that direction next time I plan a motherboard swap. 

Intel's next generation Arrow Lake may change that though, when they finally move to smaller structures (TSMC 3 nm). Their Meteor lake CPU was supposed to compete with AMD's x3D generation, but early internal tests showed it just didn't cut it, so they cancelled it (desktop version) before they even launched it. at least "they are updating the naming scheme for future products, starting with removing the iconic “i” from its processor branding." 😊

"which could achieve the same 6.0GHz frequency. While the TDP is mentioned at 125W here, the actual power consumption of the CPU is probably going to be near ~300W when boosting to these frequencies. " 😊

you can tell they are desperately trying to squeeze their current outdated 10 nm tech as long as possible, but without enormous water cooling it will have to throttle down again.

https://beebom.com/intel-14th-gen-meteor-lake-cpu/

[Ixoye 1,614]

6 hours ago, bobcat999 said:

Not sure if the AMDX3D chips are any better

If I let my 4070TI run freely I get main thread limit even with my Ryzen 7800X3D, so I have to increase render scaling 20% to make them more evenly, but that's not a bad thing, MSFS are a CPU beast.

[NicXGG 2]

Thank-you for all the advise. I shall be following all the suggestions and seeing if anything works.

Given some of the comments I won't be updating on here but thank you for those who have tried to help.

As for the likes of @MrFuzzy, @turbomax and @Virtual-Chris. Please try and make the community a little less toxic. Your comments are neither beneficial or constructive. 

[turbomax 2,879]

29 minutes ago, NicXGG said:

Your comments are neither beneficial or constructive. 

Intel vs. AMD tech info not constructive? Intel future CPU road map not beneficial?

if you say so.

Edited August 15 by turbomax

[bobcat999 7,644]

54 minutes ago, NicXGG said:

Thank-you for all the advise. I shall be following all the suggestions and seeing if anything works.

Given some of the comments I won't be updating on here but thank you for those who have tried to help.

As for the likes of @MrFuzzy, @turbomax and @Virtual-Chris. Please try and make the community a little less toxic. Your comments are neither beneficial or constructive. 

Don't take it to heart Nic.  I tend to just laugh at stuff now and try no to take it too seriously.  It just talk about  pixels on a screen at the end of the day.

Because it is just text it can be difficult to interpret the intent behind the words sometimes, some are just having an attempt at humour.
I have gotten to know a lot of the people here over the years, and I don't think they meant any toxicity towards you, just a bit of humour gone wrong maybe.

Anyway, I think the general outcome is that whatever processor you have, main thread limited is the normal thing.
But as you suspect, thread limited or not, my processor seems to be working a little harder and getting a little hotter as well over the previous months.
As long as you can get a decent flight out of it, you are alright!  

 

Edited August 15 by bobcat999

[bobcat999 7,644]

1 hour ago, turbomax said:

Intel's next generation Arrow Lake may change that though, when they finally move to smaller structures (TSMC 3 nm). Their Meteor lake CPU was supposed to compete with AMD's x3D generation, but early internal tests showed it just didn't cut it, so they cancelled it (desktop version) before they even launched it. at least "they are updating the naming scheme for future products, starting with removing the iconic “i” from its processor branding." 😊

"which could achieve the same 6.0GHz frequency. While the TDP is mentioned at 125W here, the actual power consumption of the CPU is probably going to be near ~300W when boosting to these frequencies. " 😊

you can tell they are desperately trying to squeeze their current outdated 10 nm tech as long as possible, but without enormous water cooling it will have to throttle down again.

https://beebom.com/intel-14th-gen-meteor-lake-cpu/

Thanks for the link. Very interesting.
If it goes in my current 1700 socket (as the article suggests) then I will have to take a look, but the anticipated cache size on the 14000 series / Meteor Lake is still way lower than the AMDX3D chips, and we know that has a significant impact.  So I will have to weigh it up at the time of release.  

I don't expect the anticipated October chips to be enough of a performance increase, so it will be the later Meteor chips against next gen AMD I suppose.
It's cat and mouse and better than it has been for many years since the introduction of X3D - great for competition at least. 

Edited August 15 by bobcat999