2 minutes ago, Noel said:

This must be the same as X3D Game Mode for MSI's AMI BIOS.

I think so, yes.

Mine is much better when flying in 2D but much worse in VR.

It took a while, but I'm now on the latest BIOS with Gigabyte X3D Turbo Mode set to on. What it does is basically turns off SMT and disable the 2nd CCD on my dual chiplet 7950X3D. Sort of like downgrading it to a 7800X3D 🙂 There might be some other wizardry as well that I'm not aware off. 

Compared to my previous optimal BIOS settings (SMT off, PBO +200Mhz, -20 curve on CCD0), the results are significantly worse:

• much worse 1% and 0.1% low average
• much worse FTV

This is without any addons. I expect the situation to be even worse with FSHud/BATC, AI traffic, Active Sky etc running - as those apps might utilize the faster cores on CCD1. 

So I would not recommend X3D Turbo Mode (or Gaming Mode on other motherboards) for the AMD Ryzen 7950X3D. This could apply to any of the AMD dual-chiplet CPUs - it's hard to tell. As for the single-chiplet CPUs e.g. the 7800X3D, results might be different.

Also, I doubt that there's huge performance benefits by changing BIOS settings, so I wouldn't worry too much about it for people not used to mess around with the BIOS. I always try to squeeze as much performance as possible out of my hardware - but not being familiar with the BIOS can quickly get you into trouble. 

Example: after updating the BIOS, I disabled a RAM-related setting called "power down". That resulted in severe instability, with Win11 freezes and BSODS. Heck, the PC even became unresponsive within the BIOS. I was eventually able to troubleshoot the issue (took some sleep and a few hours of troubleshooting). But it just goes to demonstrate that messing with the BIOS settings can cause issues. 

For those familiar with the BIOS though, these are my optimal settings for my hardware:

• XMP on with improved primary and secondary timings (the latter as per buildzoid's recommendations)
• PBO enabled with an added +200MHz boost
• PBO limits set to motherboard
• Curve optimizer enabled with -20 on CCD0
• SMT off

One more thing: For most of the test sessions, I've had a stutterfest on takeoff. I'm wondering whether this could be due to scenery not being loaded. I recall a discussion with @Noel and a suggestion to pan around in external view (or with drone cam) prior to takeoff. When doing the tests, I've done a minimal cockpit preparation and pretty much been ready in a couple of minutes. So I guess when the aircraft starts rolling down the runway, a lot of scenery has to be loaded all of a sudden, which leads to stutters. Not sure if this is the case - but things settle down above 1000ft or so.  

Edited December 31, 20241 yr by Cpt_Piett

3 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Compared to my previous optimal BIOS settings (SMT off, PBO +200Mhz, -20 curve on CCD0), the results are significantly worse:

• much worse 1% and 0.1% low average
• much worse FTV

This is without any addons. I expect the situation to be worse with FSHud/BATC, AI traffic, Active Sky etc running - as those apps might utilize the faster cores on CCD1. 

 

Yeah, mirrors my experience on the 9800X3D. It just trashes performance. It may work in general gaming sense due to other games having much lower CPU usage, thus just having only the physical cores can improve the experience a bit but MSFS will absolutely make use of HT / SMT for terrain loading and other tasks. So you essentially just kneecap the CPU by doing it, giving it a lot more work to chew through. 

3 minutes ago, Cpt_Piett said:

Example: after updating the BIOS, I disabled a RAM-related setting called "power down". That resulted in severe instability, with Win11 freezes and BSODS. Heck, the PC even became unresponsive within the BIOS. I was eventually able to troubleshoot the issue (took some sleep and a few hours of troubleshooting). But it just goes to demonstrate that messing with the BIOS settings can cause issues. 

A note for Power Down mode, it's a known issue I also remember having on my 7800X3D. Believe you need to disable MCR / Memory Context Restore for it to work (which will increase boot times). 

 

 

 

 

26 minutes ago, Sethos said:

A note for Power Down mode, it's a known issue I also remember having on my 7800X3D. Believe you need to disable MCR / Memory Context Restore for it to work (which will increase boot times). 

That's it. I decided to just leave both on for now for a bit faster boot times. I might try both off at a later stage to see if latency improves a little. 

In terms of SMT, I've had better results with it disabled. Could be different on other CPUs though, I have 16 cores. 

17 hours ago, Sethos said:

Just tried that on my MSI board (which just disables SMT, if anyone's curious) and tried it at EGLL 09R, just to test if what Bunchy was saying was present on my machine. Toggling game mode on dropped FPS by about 10-15FPS and significantly increased stutters, like to a point where I'd call it unusuable. Toggling it back off, it's smooth but still not maintaining a perfect 90FPS (FG) at EGLL and occasional stutter when looking around quick but taxiing and general usage is very smooth. So at least on a 9800X3D, I wouldn't suggest enabling Game Mode. 

I'll try disabling game mode.

Other info from my side is my RAM is DDR 4 and I'm running 4K

Against my better judgement, I did some more testing last night.

The good news is, after the SIM setteld in, ram usage dropped from the 90s to high 70s low 80s. I had more headroom.

The bad news is, in the Fenix flying in to payware KJAC once I hit ground effect it became a complete stutter-fest. There may be value in making sure I load into the destination airport to cache it, and then reload to my origin but it's getting to be too much of a Rube Goldberg machine at this point. I do have off-screen caching set to high also.

Also, the Sleepy Hollow-esque trees between the taxiways is a major immersion killer.

For me 2024 has been all disappointment in terms of performance. At identical settings I get 33% lower FPS in identical scenarios compared to 2020. It seems that no matter what I do I cannot break out of the mid 40s whereas in 2020 I'm routinely in the high 60s. Extremely frustrating as I built an entirely new computer around the AMD Ryzen 8 9800X3D, aside from the video card (kept my 4090), that I hoped would lead to even better performance in 2024 compared to what I had been getting in 2020. In 2020 it did boost my FPS quite a bit but in 2024 it's now much lower.

This performance is one of several reasons why I anticipate the bulk of my flying time to remain in 2020 for the next several months.

fantastic performance. 14700K and 4070TI.

5 hours ago, Cpt_Piett said:

I recall a discussion with @Noel and a suggestion to pan around in external view (or with drone cam) prior to takeoff.

I do this regularly but TBH not quite sure it helps but believe it does, a bit.  I haven't seen a stuttery TO for a very long time now

Quite variable for me at the moment. Some flights have been a stutter-fest, however today and yesterday have done several relatively short flights both GA and in the A320 and performance has been fluid smooth. I can't really work out the correlation between a stuttery flight and a good flight!

2 minutes ago, Tom Wright said:

Quite variable for me at the moment. Some flights have been a stutter-fest, however today and yesterday have done several relatively short flights both GA and in the A320 and performance has been fluid smooth. I can't really work out the correlation between a stuttery flight and a good flight!

Correlation is Cloud Gaming.

I had issues early on, but my performance has been great lately. Using the fenix airbus series and several compatible add on airports. I built a computer using a 9800x3d and a 4080 super. 

Update:

After even more tweaking, I'm back on SMT. Reason is that I got sound issues without it. Basically, when using my speakers (not headphones, strangely), I get audio crackles and brief pauses which correlate with core usage close to 100% and frame time spikes. With SMT, the load is evenly distributed among twice as many threads, which seems to help. 

Not sure if this is specific to my CPU. But it could be worthwhile trying hyperthreading with an Intel system (the equivalent of AMD's SMT)- if there's audio issues and spikes in core usage. 

Hopefully I'll be able to do a bit more flying now, and less tweaking! Currently flying in the Pacific Northwest, and Mount Rainier looks quite spectacular:

Edited January 1, 20251 yr by Cpt_Piett

the last image with the Bonanza is just incredible!!