I'm Starting To Think I've Been Very Wrong.....

[Triplane]

     When I left the emergency room on Friday morning the Docs told me to take it easy it for at least 72 hours (everything is OK now).  Just sit around and do nothing they said. So, I said, this is good chance to do some serious investigation as to the best way to overclock my CPU (4790K) without using the built-in MSI OC process. Be macho I said, do it all the manual way. After all, everyone knows that CPU cycles are the Holy Grail of the FSX world. The more, the better.  But.....now I'm beginning to wonder.....is there a limit beyond which more CPU cycles aren't going to help all that much?  I raise this question because, after many hours of testing, I really wonder just how much of the available CPU resource FSX is really going to use.

   Over the years I've gained the impression that FSX would consume as much CPU resource as was available.  At least that, to me,  has always been the conventional wisdom.  More available CPU cycles would yield a higher framerate and a much smoother flight experience. The only problem with that scenario is that now I'm beginning to think it may not be true.

   To begin my OC'ing adventures I decided to do a fresh install of FSX with the following add-ons: FTX Global Base, Ultimate Terrain X USA, REX4 Texture Direct and Soft Clouds, and the Flight1 GTN 750. All of the testing was done with the default C172 flying KMRY-KSNS-KRHV- KSFO. All the FSX sliders were maxxed - as much detail as I could get. All the UTX details were maxxed. Scattered clouds, LOD of 7.5, and visibility 40 miles.

   What I found was that, no matter what I tried, the CPU utilization never exceeded 73%. Framerates were locked at 30 and never fell below that except for the landing at KSFO which dropped to 23 at touchdown. No stuttering or lag at all. Most of the time the CPU was just coasting along at 30-50% with temps in the 50's.  I couldn't even get enough load on the CPU to kick-in the full 400MHz of TurboBoost. The stock clock on the 4790K is 4.00GHz+.4GHz Turbo and the maximum I could get it up to was 4.32 - and then just momentarily.  Clearly, there were a lot of CPU cycles going unused for most of these flights.

   So now I wonder, have we reached a limit with FSX as far as CPU speed is concerned? Are we pursuing an already-lost cause? Will ever-increasing CPU speeds really help? Or, should we forget all this stuff and just enjoy flying the airplanes?

I vote for the latter.

Doug

[ShawnG]

well,  If you are running 30 frames solid, and its smooth, and you like it,  I wouldn't worry about it too much.  however there are things you can do well beyond "all sliders maxed" if you want to give your processor a workout.  go into the config and make the LOD radius 8.5 or 11.0, say.  use other lines to bump up the autogen trees or buildings to a ridiculous amount,  etc...   now,  you may end up giving yourself an OOM before it works the processor too hard anyway.  personally I haven"t really felt the need to go beyond my 4.2 OC on my old (ivy bridge) i5 quad, but there's a few times when I wish I had more power, like while running carenado or flight1 aircraft with heavy hitting glass cockpits in urban areas.  if you mostly fly steam guage GA you're probably set.

[Ken Terry]

Doug, see my computer specs below, I have found that 4.5 Ghz id the best speed for my CPU.   Higher speeds work but FSX DX10 flying over ORBX scenery in a complex aircraft starts to heat the chip and performance declines.   I set my FPS to Unlimited.

Regards

Ken

[Hobnobs]

I think your results show that the engine has reached its limits on today's hardware not vice versa.

 

When you install scenery it stretches the engine not the hardware beyond a certain spec. When Gen 5 i7 CPU's with 980 GPU's can't get any real tangible benefit over my modest Gen 3 CPU with 660 GPU I don't see a compelling reason to upgrade.

 

Performance is all very subjective and if I spend my time tinkering rather than doing I get frustrated very quickly.

 

I back up my FSX install frequently. I can't bear the thought of all the pain of setting it up again. But I use mine mostly for training these days with occasional session for fun when time allows.

 

 

 

[GlennH]

I'm guessing that you are only viewing overall core usage on a multi core and  / or hyper threaded cpu?

 

This wont tell you anything. You need to view the usage of only the core which runs the main thread of fsx or p3d.

 

i think you will find that this core is pretty much pegged at 100% throuout the time the sim is running. You have to remember that the fsx engine is still primarily a single thread application.