SAAB340

100% usage on so many cores, Paul. Can anyone comment if that is normal behavior, because I usually see 100% usage on just the one rendering core.

Another way you might get a high load on all the assigned cores is if you set the FFTF too low. Then the texture loaders sometimes stall at 100% load as they don't get enough time to sync with the main thread.

Yes, about more ram.

There is NO performance improvement to be had with more than 8GB RAM. FSX is a 32bit program and is therefore not able to ever use more than 4GB of RAM. That's why we get Out Of Memory crashes when we turn up the settings too much even thou many people have 16GB or more RAM in their computers. As you have 8GB RAM and FSX can use 4GB, that leaves you with 4GB of RAM for the OS and all other background applications that you might have running. That is way more than enough for background processes.

Depending on the speed and timings of your current RAM you might be able to get about 10% more FPS with faster lower latency RAM. But that depends on what you use at the moment. Kind of a bit of a waste though to buy new DDR3 now though. You are better off saving that money towards a Skylake build with DDR4. If you are on the standard Intel cooler you can spend less than what new faster RAM would cost on a new Cooler and then overclock the CPU. Overclocking will yield a lot more performance. Its overclocking your system that will give you most bang for the buck at the moment. If you're already on a 3rd party cooler it might even be for free.

850 Evo here... I take it that as it uses a different NAND and controller it's clear of the issue? From what I can see on the internet, they don't seem to be exhibiting the dodgy behaviour.

 

I understand that the V-Nand cells are bigger in the 850 and less likely to suffer the degradation.

Yes, it seems like the bigger V-Nand cells are working better with TLC. Haven't seen any reports of them failing

(yet..).  I've recently trusted Samsung with my money once again for the 850EVO. There is not much choice if you want a 2TB drive. Think the smaller drives have been out for about 11 months now. I assume a lot of people will be more vigilant for this kind of behavior this time and the 840EVO was already showing symptoms after 11 months.

6700k has a built in gfx. The outputs for it are on the motherboard. But you should/will be using a regular gfx card. So make sure the gfx card you're getting has the outputs you need.

Today I've done a further look in to load times and texture loading. I have terabytes of photo scenery myself. Personally I don't use much demanding 3rd party aircrafts or airports. I know that's certainly highly unusual here. So the texture loading improvements that can be gained by using the increased core count in the Intel Extreme line of CPUs is basically irrelevant to 99.99% of people who reads this. But I personally find it an important measurement.

Load times however, the time it takes to load a flight, is still a relevant metric for all of us. Texture loading and load times are very much CPU limited as long as you use an SSD. So they scale linearly with CPU clock speed.

When I got my SandyBridgeE system I had a quick look at how much effect RAM had on texture loading and load times. The finding then was that it didn't really matter. Today I had a look with the Skylake system @ 4.5GHz and used 2133 15-15-15-36 2T and 4133 18-20-20-40 1T RAM for the comparison.

Basically, RAM still doesn't matter for texture loading or load times.

(You can't see it without looking in to the decimal points, but by taking the average from 10+ measurements in each test that I've done here, there is a tiny trend that emerges of about half a % improvement by using the much faster RAM. The variance between each of the measurements is still a lot greater than that and half a % is in reality nothing.) 

I also tested at 4.3GHz at 4 relevant AffinityMasks so I could compare against the SandyBridgeE measurements I've made in the past. My Skylake build uses the same Intel X-25M G2 SSD for OS/FSX that I used to have as my OS/FSX disk in my SandyBridgeE system before I upgraded a while back. So today I simply moved across my 1TB Samsung 840EVO SSD that has all the scenery needed for the test and got to work.

This is how Skylake compares to SandyBridgeE (and very likely to regular SandyBridge as well).

When it comes to load times and texture loading I guess I should mention that AffinityMask=84 on a Hyperthreaded system performs the same as AffinityMask=14 without Hyperthreading. And AffinityMask=85 with Hyperthreading performs the same as AffinityMask=15 without Hyperthreading.

From these results we can see that the texture loading improvements are fully in line with the FSXmarkCPU improvements while using the same RAM settings for Skylake and SandyBridgeE. In texture loading the 4 core 8 thread Skylake still can't beat the 6 core 12 tread SandyBridgeE, but it's getting close. Especially if we factor in the higher possible overclock for Skylake. But as I said before, this is irrelevant to 99.99% of all of you. I know of photo scenery lovers that have left the 8 core 16 tread HaswellE for Skylake and they are very happy with the result. Pretty much all the Intel-E CPUs are poor Overclockers. It's a lot harder to get 6 or 8 cores that all can achieve high clockspeeds on the same chip. So the overclock and the all important single threaded performance that is what matters most in FSX does suffer.

What this also shows though is that Skylake offers significantly improved load times over SandyBridgeE. I thought load times were speedy on the bare install we use with FSXmark11 but I thought I'd just forgotten how fast things load without all the add-ons I usually have. But this test confirms a very significant speedup over SandyBridgeE. I've double checked and I have the same add-ons installed on the same disks as I had with the SandyBridgeE when I tested it previously. I used native SATAIII of the chipset with SandyBridgeE as well. The speedup with Skylake is 60-70%, getting larger the more threads that are used. Is this all due to Skylake or is it the sum of a few large, but gradual speedups through the generations of IvyBridge and Haswell? I can't say. Anyone that has upgraded from those platforms that wants to chime in?

What I do know is that I'm really enjoying it. I've shown before how much using SSDs instead of HDDs for scenery speed things up. The upgrade from Lynnfield to SandyBridgeE didn't offer anywhere near this load time speedup. Even compared to using all the 6 hyperthreaded cores on SandyBridgeE, Skylake still cuts out 1/3rd of the load time using its 4 hyperthreaded cores. That is very much noticeable. On a HDD I'd not expect as much of a speedup as the HDD will be the botleneck, but I'd still expect to see a noticeable improvement.

Now its time to do more flying and less testing on this Skylake build. I've got a brand new SSD waiting to filled with scenery =). My wife just asked how long I'm planning to spend all my free time in front of my new toy as she claims I've only said about 10 words to her the over the last two days. Don't think that is totally accurate but she has a point. Happy flying!

Nice work Saab340!!!

G.Skill have mems based on the same samsung chip , later batches of this F4-3200C16D-8GTZ no problem with +3866 mhz confirmed, the price is good.

Not all Mobos do +4000mhz keep in mind that the best MoBo for mem OC is Asrock.

I have a Asus Hero VIII Its ok up to 4000mhz not much more the Asrock OC formula do 4266 with same mems.

Most mobos do 3600mhz a good goal is 3600mhz 16-18-18-38 for not experianced overclockers.

That would be as the Haswell 2400 cl9 recomendations.

Got a set of the same Team 3866 and the tridentZ 3200 , have hyper X fury 2666 G.Skill Ripjaws4 3000 these ar based on Hynix MFR they stop at 3200mhz , have also a micron based kit Crucial ballistix not like them.

Almost forget the G.Skill 3400 Ripjaws4 based on the Old Samsung chip ( not as good as the E-chip)

It didn't actually cross my mind that the MoBos might limit the RAM 'already' at 3600. Very good thing to be pointed out. I guess we will start to see reasonably priced kits up to that sort of speed. DDR4 certainly have come a long way already even though its still very young and is away to become mainstream.

I use the AsRock Fatal1ty Z170 mITX. It looks like AsRock have done a good job with their board designs when it comes to RAM. 4133 is the highest strap I have on offer in the BIOS. Been thinking of making use of the unlocked BCLK to see how far my RAM sticks can go. It won't even POST at any timings tighter than 18-20-20-40 @1.4V. Seen the great results at higher mem voltage though. It's always tempting to bump that Voltage higher when overclocking...

Excellent work there, thanks for the comparisons.

Did you underclock the TeamGroup Xtreem RAM for the lower speeds?

gb.

Fantastic work! Thanks so much for your efforts SAAB340! Endeavours like this benefit all of us.

 

23% improvement from Ivy Bridge to Skylake sounds great to me. I have components for my Skylake system arriving this morning.

 

I went for Ripjaw V's for ram.

 

3200 MHz. F4-3200C16D-16GVR to be precise.

Happy building!

I've been busy running FSXmark11 on my 6700K today.

Posted a separate thread about it here

that indeed looks gorgeous! Thanks for sharing

 

could also be promotional photos of an upcoming add-on

 

My eyes however now have caught the attention of a computer that is on sale at my local PC store;

 

it's a custom-built PC for rougly the same price....

however i realised that the processor is not an intel!

It has an AMD FX6300 6x Core processor. it makes me wonder that the seller nowhere mentions what GhZ it has...Should I be worried ?

 

The graphics card is an AMD R7-260x 2GB

You can get away with an i5 CPU.

FSX is one of very few programs where RAM speed also matters. Not as much as the CPU, but its still a vital component.

SSD gives you faster load times and prevents a few stutters when sound files are loaded. It doesn't give higher FPS though. Invest in a larger SSD is still my recommendation. I'm personally allergic to any computer that doesn't have an SSD as OS drive.

Is it worth upgrading how many fps and smoothness will i get at say uk 2000 heathrow i am getting between 20 and 30 fps now and it is a bit jumpy at times.

What DDR3 RAM speed and timings are you running at the moment? 

Interesting text

Very interesting testing you've done there Daniel.

It's also interesting to see how very similar P3D is to FSX when it comes to certain things. Yes the engine seems to have been tweaked a lot so there are differences, but also similarities. I don't have P3D myself but really enjoyed seeing your more detailed analysis of its performance at different config settings being posted. I looked in to FSX performance in a similar way in the beginning of 2012. http://www.avsim.com/topic/377105-texture-loading-ssd-vs-hdd/ (The important images in that post are available on page two of the thread as the images in the original post got deleted).

The long spikes in frame times you are seeing appears to be of the same origin as in FSX. This is what I found out about them. "Adam gives a good clue in his terrain paper: "Since the rendering pipeline (Direct3D in this case) uses 32-bit floats, the final coordinates used for rendering must be converted to 32-bit offsets from a 64-bit local origin no more than several thousand meters away... ...As the viewpoint moves through the world, the local origin must be periodically updated to keep it within a few kilometers of the viewpoint. Otherwise, a loss of precision results making the terrain vertices appear to wiggle around as the viewpoint moves, an interesting but obviously undesirable outcome. Whenever we update the local origin, all the vertex buffers in every cell of the quad tree must be recomputed relative to the new origin. As this can take several frames, the new vertex data is double buffered and then made active only when all are ready to avoid visible cracks."

Its FSX terrain engine at work recalculating the vertex buffers. The 3 factors that have a big effect on this vertex update stutter, the most noticeable and longest of all stutters, are BP=0, LOD value and CPU speed. A faster CPU reduces this stutter."

The recalculation of the vertex buffers in FSX happens on the CPU as the GPUs of the time didn't have good FP64 support if they even had it. Given that the CPU speed still affects it a lot it seems like it's still done on the CPU in P3D. The higher the LOD, the more vertices you'll have and the more work for the CPU to keep them updated as you fly along. I believe BP=0 is already implemented in P3D.

A quick word about FFTF. Don't set it too low. I've looked in to effects of it in great detail in FSX and it looks like it behaves the same way in P3D. In a nutshell its a way to trade autogen/groundtexture loading against FPS.

A lower FFTF gives you higher FPS but lower autogen/groundtexture loading. Up to around FFTF=0.67 you get higer autogen/groundtexture loading at the expense of FPS. Settings above FFTF=0.67 don't yield any better autogen/groundtexture loading but still gives you even worse FPS.

If you however have FPS internally locked AND your CPU is at the moment sufficiently powerful to easily maintain the FPS lock you get maximum autogen/groundtexture loading even if the FFTF is set really low. That's why you don't always get blurries with a really low FFTF.

As the scene gets more demanding on your CPU a low FFTF let you keep your locked FPS longer before dipping (hence gives you higher FPS), at the expense of autogen/groundtexture loading.

In FSX you very rarely see a reduction in autogen, just blurry ground textures with a too low FFTF as you pretty much have to have a slow dual core CPU not to get full autogen. I suspect P3D might have a higher demand on more/stronger cpu threads as it has a lot more autogen.

It's interesting to see that locked frames inside P3D generates less microstutter vs unlocked. They have obviously worked on it. In FSX it was the opposite, but in FSX you can remove the visible microstuttering by using 1/2 rate v-sync and locking to 30FPS in fullscreen. (you can still measure it with FRAPS but what's actually displayed is a butter smooth experience as long as the vertex stutters don't get too high) I believe 1/2 rate v-sync does nothing for P3D as its fullscreen mode is actually a borderless Window and therefore 1/2 rate v-sync doesn't work.

Thanks for sharing your testing.

What's clear to me is that a procedure like FSXmark11 could really be of benefit for P3D v3 for hardware guidance.

The most obvious name for this benchmark would be to name it P3Dmark15 if it was created now.

It could use the same flight path as FSXmark11. (Wouldn't have to)

It could use the same testing procesure as FSXmark11. (Wouldn't have to)

It would have its own unique, specified settings for the benchmark. (Including aircraft type)

It could have a set of different optional resolutions specified on top of a standard 1920x1080 that I believe almost everyone's rig is capable of today. (My suggestions would be 2560x1440, 5760x1080 and 3840x2160)

It wouldn't take very long to define this benchmark if the same flight path and test procedure as FSXmark11 was used.

Would this be the most optimal benchmark one could concieve for compareing how different hardware perform in P3D v3? No.

Would this be more relevant than 3Dmark scores for how different hardware performs in P3D v3? Yes!!!

It's probably not a bad idea to upgrade FSXmark11 to FSXmark15 either. With a few optional resolutions specified and maybe a few changes to the settings etc? (Any benefit from harmonising with the settings for a P3Dmark15 as far as possible?)

FSXmark11's resolution was specified to what it is because it was the highest resolution almost all monitors of the day were capable of in order to be able to facilitate as many people as possible to do the benchmark. That could obviously be changed today.

Hi Rob,

Not sure if its just me scratching my head trying to understand what you are trying to say with this thread?

In your initial post you start it off with "I get a lot of questions about PC performance in P3D V3 and it's very hard for me to judge (close to impossible) how other systems are going to work in P3D V3.", end with "These don't necessarily translate into how well a system will run P3D, but it can be used as a generic reference point." and in the middle you post a lot of 3D mark results at different component clock speeds.

I'm really struggling to understand the relevance of 3D mark scores for P3D (or FSX) as they are very much different apart from that they all put a considerable (but different) load on the computer hardware. I know you say its a generic reference point of the performance of your computer. But as you say"it is NOT a relative indicator of how well one's PC will work in any given Flight Sim" So how could they ever help answer your initial questions about PC performance in P3D V3?

Is it to trigger a discussion of how to design a benchmark for P3D V3 that could help answer your initial questions?

I'm not trying to shoot you down or discredit any of the effort you put in to this. I'm just not understanding the relevance of the 3D mark results for us flightsim users.

Cheers

Lars

I am pleased to report that Microsoft seem to have patched the issue about a week ago. Toggling "Show tips about Windows" on, doesn't induce a lot of CPU load for me any more. I've been checking the issue regularly and up until a week ago it was an immediate CPU load toggle switch. Have had it active again since with no re-occurrence.

   Hello everyone ! I just came  back to FSX after a long time and  the obviously conclusion is  I need to upgrade. Right now I have a xeon E5450 running at 3.6 Ghz. Average score in fsxmark is 21.5. Not a good playing experience with addons.

 

   First, considering money is problem, will be i5 4690k enough, or I should make the effort for i7 4790K ? I am truing to figure, on same system, what is the gaining in FPS if using i7.

   Memory should be anyway at 2400 speed. I have a GTX 650, planning to upgrade for GTX 960.

   Any advise is welcome !

Welcome back, and welcome as a poster finally. I know its been 7 weeks since your post so you might already have built a new system. There is little/no difference in FPS between an i5 and an i7 at the same clock. Hyperthreading on the i7 can be used for loading in photo scenery slightly quicker in FSX, so i5 is the way to go on a budget.

Skylake has now been launched and I'd go for the i5 6600K with 3000mhz DDR4 RAM and a Z170 motherboard unless you are on an extremely tight budget. DescendDescend has now shown that there is a small improvement going for Skylake over Haswell. As you'll have to upgrade all of CPU, MOBO and RAM you might as well go for the latest platform as well.

As far as the GPU goes, I'd do the CPU, MOBO and RAM upgrade first if you're really tight on money. The GTX 960 is probably a great match for FSX though, and most other games as well if you are on a 1080p 60fps display.

I've got the same 128GB i5 version.

As you say, its normally either dead silent or very quiet. A very nice piece of kit.

I'd like to share an experience I've had after upgrading from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 on my Surface PRO 3. A bit of googling has shown me that I'm not alone having this problem, but far from all systems are affected.

I don't use FSX on my Surface but if this problem was to happen on a FSX system I realise that, by the way FSX works, it has the potential for reduced performance.

I first became aware of the problem as I noticed that the fan on board the Surface started spinning way more often after the upgrade, and I also felt like i wasn't getting as long battery life out of it. That prompted me to have a look in Task manager. There I could clearly see that the Windows process Runtime Broker was eating about a core load of CPU cycles. End task didn't cure the problem as it soon restarted.

A bit of googling later and I found more people with the same symptoms and also a solution that worked for me. It's very simple and it just involves switching off "Show me tips about Windows" under Settings/System/Notifications & actions.

I only became aware of this problem as I could hear the extra CPU load from the fan spinning up on the Surface and notice the extra power use due to the quicker battery drain. On a desktop I wouldn't have these clues. So I thought I'd share it here so people can check in Task manager if their Windows 10 systems are affected.

The last few Windows updates haven't solved the problem,so far, but hopefully an update in the future will. In the meanwhile I can toggle on and off one core worth of CPU load with the "Show me tips about Windows" switch. 

Do I still need to defrag SSHD?

 

Thanks,

Dirk.

Yes. The downside to SSHD is that it is still a HDD. It has a small SSD portion that constantly adjusts what's on it. The SSD portion doesn't contain files. It just contains copies of certain data blocks of your HDD you accessed most frequently lately. It has no idea of what that data is. Just that you regularly read that data often, so lets cache it.

I have flown about 10 hours on the new drive with FSX and P3D and have to say they the performance loss is negligible

Performance loss in what way if I may ask?

I'd pick SSHD over HDD any day of the week. It improves initial load time loads vs HDD. As long as it's dedicated for FSX addons only and not the OS. But still SSD over both. For photo scenery texture loading at high LOD mainly and the even quicker initial load time secondary. And SSD for Main FSX install (+OS) all the time. To avoid stutter when some sound files are loading. (Not gonna explain why you want the OS on a SSD)

FPS wise there's NO difference. 10 year old HDD Vs fastest SSD today wont make a scoobydoo to FPS. But if you have OS or main FSX install on the 10 year old HDD you'd get more stutters.

Here's some disk performance tests in FSX:

and

An SSHD can at worst case act like a lousy HDD. At best case scenario (all you want from it is in the SSD cache) it will act like a lousy SSD. Normally it's somewhere between.

Edit: 3rd I'd pick SSD due to no defragging necessary. 

I used HD Tune trial before to know when my 840 Evo encountered read issues early this year.  But that trial period is long gone.  Is there a freeware program that can tell me something?

I know you've already found another free program to check your drive with but just wanted to mention for other readers that the regular (non PRO) HT Tune 2.55 is free to use with no trial period that expires. It is limited to read test only (where the PRO version will let you test writes as well). But to test read performance degradation of the Samsung disks the HD Tune 2.55 works fine.

If that is true, then something is messing with FSX loading when you have side-by-side scenery loading off different drives right next to each other while slewing too quickly.

The 'side-by-side' video is obviously separate videos that have been cut and combined next to each other.

I am guessing it has to do with the internal indexing code process in FSX while slewing across the tiles too fast. I know the FSX code here is messed up because it forces us to reload the scenery if you slew too fast.

Sounds interesting. Tell me more.

Now I am just starting to wonder if you are just testing something entirely different or if these numbers are somehow being recorded incorrectly.

I'm not picking a fight and I'm not doubting your competence in your profession. You really sound like you know what you are talking about. All I've done is record videos and put them side by side showing how the ground textures load slower when the photo scenery bgls are stored on my Velociraptor vs stored on my SSD. The only difference between the two sides of the video is what storage the photo scenery is stored on. That's the only difference. There's no tricks. Just a visible difference in load times. The times i quoted are the time in seconds between the aircraft stopping and the ground textures you can see are fully sharpened.

As I understand it, you can get OOMs relatively easily with photoreal scenery if you have lots of these areas enabled in the Scenery Library, because FSX/P3D loads all of the photoreal scenery areas that are active (rather than just the ones within a certain radius of your aircraft). In fact, I can easily induce OOMs even when I have unused photoscenery areas disabled. That's because I use ES TreeScapes autogen at maximum complexity, scenery at maximum complexity, and UT2 AI @ 100%!!

As far as I can recall from logging disk reads last year, FSX reads the first 4k of every active scenery bgl shortly after initial startup or when you load your first flight if you have disablepreload=1 in the cfg. That's why the initial load time takes forever if you have a lot of active scenery and also the reason the SSD is so much faster compared to HDD when it comes to that. SSDs are great at short 'random' reads.

During a flight from SanDiego to LA with LOD9.0 in the cfg i saw photoreal bgls in western NC getting loaded from disk so it does load photoreal far from the plane as you fly along. Way, way further than the horizon. Obviously at lower LOD the further away from the plane you get. Never saw it load any of my active New England states or the active UK photoreal though. It did however touch mesh as far away as Turkey whilst flying on the US west coast. That's almost half way across the globe. Guess it would have touched the NewEngland photoreal bgls should I have selected top down view and zoomed out until half the globe was visible.