PieEater

Please see this thread the answer is you may get away with it but it's not best practice.

Before considering 2 x 970s make sure you are aware of the potential issues caused by the way the memory has been partitioned and that the majority of people who experience issues are running SLI and / or high resolutions. You may be fine for FSX / P3D which aren't too demanding on the memory but if you play games there are a few out there that use large amounts of memory and this number will increase as time goes on.

Further to the above, with a G3D score of 726 the onboard HD4600 graphics of the 4790 CPU is actually superior to your GTX610 which has a G3D score of 355 - Link to PassMark You may be better off not even installing your graphics card.

OK I'll bite. Personally I would suggest that this is a bad decision and one you will most likely regret at a later date if it leads you to buy the non overclockable version of the CPU. You don't have to overclock right away but having the option there is much better than not. Again I think this is a bad decision your current card will be a horrible bottleneck for the new CPU. OK if you cant afford a new card straight away but you will need a new card fairly soon given your ambitions for your new system. Then you will certainly need to rethink your decision on overclocking and your graphics card. There are too many variables to answer these questions and I wouldn't like to hazard a guess. Once you have built your new rig you will need to tune it to your hardware and personal preferences regarding performance over visual quality. Yes by and large this is true but it is a more powerful CPU clock for clock. My advice would be to invest in a decent aftermarket cooler to make sure this is not an issue for you. I appreciate that this probably wasn't what you wanted to hear but I hope it is in some way useful and maybe triggers some more feedback for you.

Sorry I missed the detail in the title, your 780 is still a strong card, your only real upgrade at the moment would be a 980 but these are fairly expensive. 5-10FPS is a fair hit but then your new monitor is quite a beast, what resolution was your old monitor? My best advice would be that you will need to set up FSX for your new monitor to find the best performance / image quality. As I said above I would start by resetting NVidiaInspector (NI) to defaults removing this from the equation for the time being, finding your best settings in FSX then gradually increasing the NI settings. It might not be a bad idea to find out what is limiting your FPS in terms of GPU / VRAM usage, it could be that at the higher resolution your 3GB of graphics memory is not quite enough. Try downloading GPU-z and running it before a flight, click on the sensors tab and change memory used and GPU load to Show Highest Reading then do your flight and come back to check the readings, this will give you the peak figures, if you wanted you could do the same again but with Show Average Reading. If either is peaking at 99-100% then this will be a cause for poor performance and if the average is towards the top end this would also suggest that your graphics card is struggling. Hope that helps.

IMHO this would be more of a sidegrade than an upgrade I doubt you'd notice much if any difference between the two. If the money from your 780 would enable you to fund a 980 then that would be an upgrade but otherwise I don't see the point. Your 780 will probably hold its value more than a 970 which even though it is a decent card is always going to be looked at as flawed.

I think it's going to be difficult for anyone to exactly quantify your expected results but it seems a 25% increase in clock speed (to 4.5Ghz) isn't uncommon for your CPU so you could hope for an equivalent increase in frame rates within FSX (from 20 to 25). Obviously a half decent aftermarket CPU cooler will help achieve the best results with your overclock and therefore maximise the benefits to FSX.

Having said the above I've just completed two flights where my max VRAM got to 978Mb & 1007Mb, this was mostly due to flying through clouds / snow, a similar flight with weather disabled used a max of 793Mb. So as Olli says, just under 1Gb could be considered normal.

No shouldn't necessarily be higher. I've yet to see my 680 reach 1Gb of memory usage even at 100% GPU usage.

What graphics card are you using? If the only thing you changed was your monitor and you got a noticeable drop in frame rates it would kind of suggest your card is struggling with the 3440x1440 resolution. It's probably going to be a case of decreasing graphical settings until you get to reasonable rates. If you use NvidiaInspector then I'd reset this to defaults and try to get FSX running with acceptable frame rates before giving the card extra work. And now is when you tell me you have 3 Titans in SLI

I hope the issue is resolved for you. If the problem takes a little while in-sim to manifest itself it could be heat related and cleaning the card should help. You could download something like GPU-z or MSI Afterburner to monitor your GPU temperature, both have a logging facility where you can leave the app running in the background then come back if the problem happens again to see if there has been a temperature spike or fluctuations in GPU / memory usage. The issue with the 970s VRAM certainly needs to be considered, however with FSX memory usage on my 680 rarely goes above 1GB, admittedly I don't have a lot of resource intensive add-ons but even then I can't see it hitting the 3.5Gb problem point even if I start piling on the extras, the caveat being that I only run 1920x1200 resolution on a single monitor. I don't use P3D but I can't imagine it varies that much as it's still CPU bound from what I understand. I think most people that want to return their 970s are doing so more on principle (4Gb means 4Gb) than because they have actually experienced issues with the card. If you decide to upgrade your whole rig it would be worthwhile holding out for the new Skylake processors with DDR4 support which should be making an appearance towards the middle of the year, which I understand should give a decent performance boost over what is currently available. If your current i7 is overclocked I'm not sure if the outlay on a new board / cpu & memory right now would give you a big enough boost for the investment. If it were me I'd replace your potentially faulty graphics card first then wait for Skylake.

If you suspect your graphics card as being the issue by far the easiest way of proving this would be to borrow another graphics card and see if this resolves the problem, or try your graphics card in another machine and see if the issue follows the card. As you've done a fresh install of your operating system, drivers and FSX / P3D then the issue would appear not to be software related however both of the programs you specifically mention share a core engine so have you tried any other 3D applications or benchmarks to see if you get issues with these (Furmark is a real torture test for stability). It may be worthwhile taking your card out of your system and giving the heatsink and fan a really good cleanout in case the issue is caused by the GPU overheating due to dust buildup, whilst cleaning make sure the fan spins freely and doesn't feel rough when turning. When you refit the card you could clean the contacts with a pencil eraser, make sure it is securely in place and that the power connector is properly connected. When you restart the PC confirm that the fan powers up when you start the PC. As far as diagnosis goes hopefully that will give you a start if you've not tried these already. If it comes down to replacing the card then ultimately you will need to get the best that you can reasonably afford. In synthetic benchmarks the 960 scores about the same as the 680 which is considered fine for FSX although in real world performance I'm not sure it would be like for like and P3D will probably be able to make more use of a graphics card than FSX especially on into the future. If I had to find a replacement card in your shoes I would go for a 970 purely because I am sceptical about the difference in performance between the 970 & 980 justifying the considerable price difference between the two. However if money were no object then I would get a 980 now or if I could - hold on until the 980Ti gets launched.

If you have FSX installed in the default location then the way you describe sounds 100% correct. I guess the advice to create a new profile would apply if FSX was not installed in the location that NvidiaInspector was expecting. If the changes you are making are not making a noticeable difference then I guess the easiest way to confirm changes are being applied would be to set frame rates to unlimited in FSX and use the frame rate limiter in NvidiaInspector then check if your frame rates are capped in FSX using shift+z a couple of times to bring up the FPS info.

If your computer is the one in your profile then have you fully overclocked your 2600k as this will yeild the best results if you are looking for extra performance? You probably would benefit from a new graphics card, if you can afford it and want to splash out on a 980 then great but I think you may be disapointed if you are expecting a huge jump in frame rates across the board. I moved from a 560ti to a 680 and my FPS didn't increase as significantly as I thought, although I was able to turn up the graphics settings within FSX and NVidia Inspector whilst still retaining acceptable frame rates making the sim more enjoyable to look at and use. So as Dave suggests definitely CPU speed for performance but GPU grunt for aesthetics. I can't speak from experience but I doubt that there would be much difference in performance between a 970 and a 980 within FSX, in my opinion not enough to justify the considerable price difference. But if you want, and can afford the best then why not?

Each manufacturer will have a number of different models, generally speaking the cheapest will have a standard cooler and the GPU and memory will not be overclocked, the most expensive will have a much more efficient cooler, a metal backplate to aid rigidity and cooling, and will be overclocked on the GPU and possibly the memory, cards in-between will vary on the cooling solution and overclock speeds. You should be able to see the different claimed speeds for the GPU and memory when checking out the cards online, not all manufacturers overclock the memory. The cheaper models will appeal to those on a budget and also those that will be replacing the stock cooler with water cooling so don't need to pay a premium for the upgraded cooler. The top of the range models will appeal to those that want the best performance without having to overclock themselves. If I were in the market I would be looking at EVGA as they have an excellent reputation for customer service and their warranty is transferrable if you ever sell the card. Because I enjoy overclocking I would get the base SC model but if I just wanted the best out of the box performance then their FTW model would be what I would choose.

As far as I'm aware Bufferpools PoolSize=0 stops FSX from managing your video cards memory so resource allocation is dealt with at driver level. I believe that this can help smooth out stutters in FSX but has a downside in that it may cause texture corruption. It doesn't change the amount of graphics memory that FSX needs just the way it gets processed, so I'm not sure what you were expecting? I don't have the add-ons you list but I understand that they are fairly resource intensive so it wouldn't surprise me if they took you over 1GB.

Have you set the "Minimum Processor State" to 100% as this was what I was suggesting? This will stop Windows managing the CPU speed and force it to use 100% all the time, you should be able to confirm this after making the change (and possibly rebooting) with whatever software you use to monitor CPU speed.

I think you may find that Windows is managing your CPU speed, you'll need to have a look at the power plan that you have selected and specifically "Minimum Processor State" under "Processor Power Management" Start > search for Power > select Power Options under Control Panel. You will see what option you have enabled by the selected radio button, the default is "Balanced" which sets a minimum CPU speed at 5% and a maximum at 100% and leaves Windows to decide how much you need. You could change this setting to 100% and test to see if this does force your CPU to run at full speed if not then you will need to be looking more closely at your BIOS / overclock. If this does make a difference then consider installing Razer Cortex which detects when you are running games and automatically optimises your computer for performance including adjusting the power settings then puts them back when you've finished. Hope that helps.

Yes I need to apologize for that, I was mistaken in my understanding of how hyperthreading works and can confirm that you have been correct all along - there is effectively no difference in performance between either logical processor on each core. I took my own advice and went away and did some testing in FSXMark. Affinity Mask 84 (01010100) 35.36 FPS Affinity Mask 168 (10101000) 35.45 FPS This confirms that there is little to no difference when selecting the 1st Logical Processors (84) over the 2nd (168). For continuity I also tested my preferred mask of 244 (11110100) and although this gave a slight drop in FPS (34.25) to my eye the rendering of textures and autogen seemed noticeably smoother, this was the same conclusion I reached last time and I remain happy to trade off a slight drop in speed for a smoother experience. Unfortunately I'm unable to test the performance using more cores but maybe someone else could pick up this batten. Apologies again Steve and to anyone else for the confusion.

If you could write something that could be benchmarked bypassing the first couple of cores to rule out any OS processes and selectively run on the next 2 LPs in turn that would be really useful. So in FSX the masks that would be used for the benchmark would be 16 (010000), 32 (100000).

I think I've said all I need to. As long as folks understand what the affinity mask does,how to create their own custom masks and convert suggested masks from decimal to binary to understand what impact they will have, then that's me happy. Folks can then experiment with the number of cores they use and test performance on physical and virtual cores, and draw their own conclusions.

The information quoted was from an external source offered as evidence that virtual cores do not offer the same performance as the physical cores that host them.

From the very first article I came across - "HyperThreading is a feature introduced by Intel, and is exclusive to Intel processors. It splits a real CPU (a core) into 2. One is the real core, called the physical core. The other is just a secondary core, called the logical core. This logical core can't do much, but it does provide a little increased parallism. It is far from being a real core. In fact, it offers 10-20% (est., likely less) the performance of a real physical core. That's right, barely any computing power. Its purpose was simply to increase parallelism in a world dominated by I/O bound (non-CPU intensive) processes (actually threads, but we won't split hairs here). When a CPU intensive (CPU bound) thread is switched to one of these cores, its performance will substantially degrade." When I tested this myself I came to the conclusion that virtual cores do not offer the same performance as physical ones but can still offer a boost for the graphics rendering threads.

Playing devils advocate, you have 15% CPU utilisation vs 40% utilisation. All other things being equal if allowing more cores means the CPU is able to do more work surely the result would be a smoother SIM experience? There would be a certain amount of system overheads in managing the workload between additional cores but this would not explain a full 25% increase in CPU use demonstrated. Certainly the processor running the main SIM engine looks like it is not working as hard with the additional 8 threads available and this could potentially mean a drop in FPS, on the other hand it could be that as the other cores are taking more of the workload the main SIM processor has less to do. Without a before & after FPS count and anecdotal evidence as to any difference in how the SIM performs / smoothness in rendering in both settings it is difficult to draw any firm conclusions.

I strongly suggest that you make sure you understand what the affinity mask is doing and then decide for yourself what settings you need to try. If you have a Windows PC the calculator can be set to "Programmer" view where you have radio buttons that allow you to switch between binary and decimal. Use a similar method to what I have shown you to decide what physical and hyperthreaded cores you would like used / disabled this will give you the binary value put this in the binary mode of the calculator and then select decimal mode for the value you need to enter as your affinity mask. You can use the reverse process to see exactly what a recommended affinity mask is doing for example this is the AM of 43648 You can see that this mask limits FSX to 5 hyperthreaded cores. Personally I would not have tried this setting as I would prefer to use actual physical cores over virtual ones as they will not have any overheads and I remain unconvinced that less is more i.e. that you should be limiting FSX to 5 cores. I am therefore not entirely surprised that this setting gives disappointing results. Having said this I fully agree with SteveW that because each user has different requirements in terms of FSX settings, add-ons, hardware performance etc the only way to know what the best mask is for you is by a process of elimination. Due to the large number of cores you have available the process for you will be longer but you should end up making the best use of your CPU and a smoother SIM as a result.