FSL Concorde - Core usage confusion

[lownslo 592]

On 2/7/2024 at 2:29 PM, Ray Proudfoot said:

If you plan on buying Concorde I’d be interested in hearing how you get on with it. The most resource hungry aircraft I’ve ever bought.

No thanks, after seeing your screens and noticing how FSL messes with your computer.  I'm not keen on a vendor "adjusting" my affinity mask (or anything else on my computer).  I'll just stay with the "slow" Lear 25 as my "go-to rocket".😃

[kmax59 213]

18 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

@kmax59, I’ve just read your post on performance over there. It must be bitterly disappointing not to be able to get decent performance from your system. I have never used AMD hardware so have no idea how it compares to Intel / Nvidia.

As you say, what’s the point of making such a complicated Aircraft with all its systems if it’s basically unflyable around major airports unless you spend thousands on a system.

Even with my really expensive system I have to lower Ai to get 30 at Heathrow. And scenery complexity is set to Dense, nothing higher.

They are so secretive about their processes I doubt they’ll make any meaningful changes.

I’m sure many of us would have been happy with a slightly modified version of the 32-bit we enjoyed for years. And with no option to take over control of many systems we’re reduced to being a spectator on our flights.

Their reply will be interesting.

Yes this is indeed extremly disappointing, I don't have much time to fly in the sim for my own pleasure and it's frustrating to spend this time trying to solve performance issues while my P3D install is extremely well organized already and kept very clean to prevent this kind of problems that could be cause by other add-ons or mistakes from myself. I did some test again the last few days, and today I've removed everything apart from Orbx Global, Concorde and Chaseplane, and I don't get any improvements, a default KJFK does not give more than an average of 14/15fps with low/medium settings, no scenery, no ai traffic, nothing eye candy, this is nowhere close to a satisfying simulation experience with PC specs that are supposed to be very very much higher than the recommended ones.

I remember that we had to send a confirmation mail to send to confirm we would buy the add-on once released, this is pretty unfair to leave us with an uncompleted project, not all liveries released, no paintkit, no performance improvements. If it's understandable that MSFS became a priority, they should still have focused on their initial promises first. I don't want to criticize too much, I know it's harder for devs than it may appear to take decisions in such a situation, but I feel they took the easy way on this one.

About CPUs, I was an intel user as well in the past but I've switched to AMD a few years ago, and I've been very satisfied with the results honestly, I had much less work to do to get all of my cpu and do complex overclocking, temperatures are also much better under load and I've been able to run everything fine until now, I don't think I'll come back to intel unless they bring something which is really above AMD in the future.

 

Edited February 14 by kmax59

[SimeonWilbury 220]

Yeah - the performance isn't great in P3D. Bit disappointing development seems to have quietened down while MSFS gets the preferential treatment.

To offset the doom and gloom though - going to pipe up and say I'm still enjoying myself - I did give in and turn my settings down a fair amount, and I only run at 1080p ( without any traffic), but I'm getting enough frames for me; just made a flight down to BGI and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The only things I really dislike is flying into Heathrow at night, that is a bit of a slide-show, and the autopilot being pretty inconsistent in capturing the localiser on approaches.

So I'm not one of the people regretting their purchase at all.

The Cpu stuff is all a bit beyond me, all I know is I'm running a Ryzen 5 5600x, and my limitations are very much more on the GPU-end than the CPU end.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

Maxime,

I can feel your frustration. Having looked at the min and recommended specs here they are about as clear as mud. Does anyone have a clue what they mean? How about recommended i9-900 and Nvidia 3080 or AMD equivalents. That’s a more realistic target as people will have third party airports and Ai aircraft too.

Yes, I remember the email and we were asked how much we would be prepared to pay. I seem to remember 100GBP as being realistic so 75GBP was helpful.

I see you’ve had no reply to your posts yesterday and today. Maybe a ticket to formalise it is best but I still don’t think they’ll switch to P3D and fix the many issues.

I would suggest you keep away from airports like EGLL, LFPG and KJFK. I create my own plans between airports with flight times up to 2 hours. I don’t have the time or patience for an Atlantic hop.

Today I flew Durban, RSA to Mauritius. 1h 40m with a small deviation to avoid laying my boom over Madagascar. Daytime flights might be easier on frame rates too.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

I may have spotted another bug on today’s flights. In the extensive plan document it states 4000Kg would be required in tank 9 for the landing. It should come from tank 11.

But as I was descending below Mach 1 this was definitely not happening. It might explain why the CG bug was very close to the rear stop. I’ve been pumping fuel from 2 and 3 into 1 and 4 to try and get the CG further forward.

But if the automated systems are meant to do all this for you it’s worth monitoring tank 9 and whether the correct amount of fuel is being moved forward.

[kmax59 213]

5 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Maxime,

I can feel your frustration. Having looked at the min and recommended specs here they are about as clear as mud. Does anyone have a clue what they mean? How about recommended i9-900 and Nvidia 3080 or AMD equivalents. That’s a more realistic target as people will have third party airports and Ai aircraft too.

Yes, I remember the email and we were asked how much we would be prepared to pay. I seem to remember 100GBP as being realistic so 75GBP was helpful.

I see you’ve had no reply to your posts yesterday and today. Maybe a ticket to formalise it is best but I still don’t think they’ll switch to P3D and fix the many issues.

I would suggest you keep away from airports like EGLL, LFPG and KJFK. I create my own plans between airports with flight times up to 2 hours. I don’t have the time or patience for an Atlantic hop.

Today I flew Durban, RSA to Mauritius. 1h 40m with a small deviation to avoid laying my boom over Madagascar. Daytime flights might be easier on frame rates too.

Indeed the recommended specs are not very clear. From what I've seen, my specs are four times the recommended passmark score but I still can't run it properly. I agree that specific hardware should be given as a reference. Though an AMD 3800X should be enough as a recommended spec I guess.

I'm still convinced the perf issues is due to how they manage the CPU, the issue was the same with their airbus in the past. They should definitely allow more flexibility about how cores are being used and let users adjust this depending on their hardware.

I have made a video today with the absolute lowest P3D settings, no autogen, no scenery, no weather, no anything. Norman answered to my mail and said it looked like I had too high settings in my previous video and too bad weather, I'm quite upset reading this after saying many times that settings almost does not affect perf. Common, there is definitely something wrong here, I almost don't have any fps gain by turning all P3D settings to the lowest possible, my GPU and CPU have very low usage and the aircraft is still struggling.

They definitely should switch to P3d again at some point, if I have such an issue, I'm probably not the only one.

I must admit my favourite flights are to from NY, London and Paris, especially flying the supersonic loop over the atlantic from/to Paris. I've made it so many times in the FS9 SST and the Concorde-X ! I could live some time without visiting these towns, but not forever, and I'd still have fps issues anyways as shown on my video... 🥴 how depressing

Obviously don't pay attention to the weird maneuvering here 😅

 

Edited February 14 by kmax59

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

Maxime,

Take a look at this comparison I created.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3279vs3499vs5022/Intel-i7-8086K-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-3800X-vs-Intel-i9-13900K

 The i7-8086K was my CPU for 5 years before I bought my new computer in October. I did run Concorde on it but never at busy airports like Heathrow, Paris or New York. Instead Manchester and Lisbon gave acceptable results.

It suggests your AMD is 50% more powerful than my old i7. So the fact you’re not getting decent performance is odd. I wonder if an Nvidia GPU might help. My old 1080Ti was okay but I was running it at 4K so that would have meant a penalty.

Could you post a screenshot of Task Manager performance so we can see the load across VPs? Do you have Hyperthreading or the AMD equivalent enabled?

I suspect the reason the forum is so quiet is because many have stopped flying her as performance is so poor unless you have a very expensive PC.

[kmax59 213]

It's definitely odd indeed, I could not get the perf you get with your current 13900K obviously but I should get decent frames. There must be something, but I'm 99,9% conviced it's coming from the product itself. I have no issues with all the rest of my fleet or the few games I am playing from time to time.

I am indeed using SMT which is the hyperthreading equivalent, but I've made some tests and disabling it does not have bring any improvement and by the way I already use a Nvidia GPU, I'm using a RTX 4070 OC with a 1440p True Gsync monitor. My experience is usually if not always perfect with these, Gsync allows a pretty good smoothness down to 23/25fps but lower than this it's getting painful again.

I actually have a screenshot that I forgot to include in my mail, I'll add it to the fslabs topic, as you can see the cpu usage is ridiculously low on average, there are some peaks but nothing extreme in the end.
It also shows how FSL is dealing with affinity mask, because here I'm using an affinitymask of 21845 (so it behaves like SMT/Hyperthreading was disabled, it helps with textures loading) with cores 0, 1 and 2 assigned to main P3D tasks, as you can see, this is not respected at all. (By the way, changing the affinitymask did not help either)
Same here in this video I'm showing the tasks manager, but it was with the release version, results are similar but usage is a bit higher as I'm using higher settings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrH2YA72ATw

 

 

39 minutes ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I suspect the reason the forum is so quiet is because many have stopped flying her as performance is so poor unless you have a very expensive PC.

Sadly this is probably the case 😥 it's such a pity because, while it's probably not perfect, this bird is still a piece of art

Edited February 14 by kmax59

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

Maxime,

Is that screenshot when you’re flying and unable to achieve 30fps? If so, that’s astonishing. What is eating performance? I really think FS Labs need to explain what they’re doing.

Are they manipulating the Affinity Mask settings overriding the user’s settings? Given what you said about the Airbus series it suggests something out of the ordinary is going on.

As you’ve raised a ticket for your problem they have to respond. It should be interesting.

LATER. I see you’ve had a reply with screenshots of settings. They didn’t include traffic. Ask what that was. I suspect zero Ai.

Edited February 15 by Ray Proudfoot
Additional info

[kmax59 213]

Hi Ray,

Yes this was taken during the latest video I've posted. That's indeed astonishing.
The Airbus series is dealing with the affinity and it looks like Concorde is doing the same but without any chance for us to change that behaviour.

I guess this is with zero AI as well, I'm about to give it another try with the same jobscheduler

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

Maxime, I see from a reply by a beta tester he doesn’t think FSL are changing the AM settings. It would be helpful if an expert in this could comment.
I doubt a beta tester would be able to give away any secrets even if they were aware of them.

[SimeonWilbury 220]

I just did another night arrival into EGLL

My FPS noticably went down before I was even near London, the flightdeck night-lighting I reckon is a big culprit in eating performance, though that could be my own hardware skewing things.

I run fine until I turn the lights on. Flying into more sparse scenery like OBBI I can seem to get away with it FPS-wise but EGLL really is a bit of a challenge.

For the record, I did a daytime arrival the other day and my frames at EGLL were much smoother.

Edited February 15 by SimeonWilbury

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

1 hour ago, SimeonWilbury said:

the flightdeck night-lighting I reckon is a big culprit in eating performance, though that could be my own hardware skewing things.

I found the same with my old 1080Ti. I prefer daytime flying anyway which helped on my old machine. With my new one nighttime is fine performance wise but I still don’t like it.

There’s definitely a bug with tank 9 fuel being loaded during the descent. A nominal 1300Kg is pumped into it from 11 at the start of the descent. Further along when the CG needs to move forward from 55 the remainder (2700Kg) should be pumped to it until it matches that in the docs.

But it’s going elsewhere. On landing the correct amount is in 9 but where has it come from? Not 11 that’s for sure. I suspect it’s just ‘inserted’ by a process.

Watch your CG during approach. It should be forward of 53. If you leave the systems to their own devices it isn’t. The reason being there needs to be more ballast fuel in 9.

Ticket raised and acknowledged.

[SimeonWilbury 220]

5 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

I found the same with my old 1080Ti. I prefer daytime flying anyway which helped on my old machine. With my new one nighttime is fine performance wise but I still don’t like it.

Ah, so indeed that's on my GPU end then.

My standards are probably a bit lower on the performance front on the whole, it only really gets to me when it starts to affect flight performance.

 

I'll keep an eye on the CG on future flights, I've not noticed much on that end so far, but I've yet to learn the F/E panel and so haven't been paying it much attention.

[Ray Proudfoot 8,980]

8 minutes ago, SimeonWilbury said:

I'll keep an eye on the CG on future flights, I've not noticed much on that end so far, but I've yet to learn the F/E panel and so haven't been paying it much attention.

In the generated plan it includes lots of data. Just before the section showing the waypoints there’s a section on loaded fuel and how much should be in tanks 9-11 on approach.

By the time tank 11 is empty - generally around 10,000ft - tank 9 should contain the stated amount. Tank 9 is at the front, 11 at the back.

It probably won’t show the correct amount but check again after you’ve parked and it will. How? I suspect it’s just placed there by an unknown process.

From now on I’m going to adjust the tank 9 limiter so the correct amount is in 9.