SolarEagle
February 4th, 2009, 22:13
Been playing with my new i7 system, which I've got running at 4Ghz using a Noctua air cooler and the memory is doing 1600MHz at 7-7-6-18 1T. I also switched to Windows 7 for this build. Not a bad system for $820.
I must say FSX runs quite impressively on this setup. The overall framerate is not what impresses me, but the increase on minimum's as well as the fact it seems like I've now got eight cores.
When I went from a 3.5Ghz Core 2 Duo to 3GHz Core 2 Quad it was clear the doubling of threads gave me nearly a two fold increase in terrain texture loading power, as my propensity for blurries was cut in half, and as was the amount of stutters I was seeing. So I have always advocated 4 cores, even if at the expense of clock speed, if you want the best experience in FSX.
Moving to the i7 is again giving me the results I would expect from doubling my cores, from 4 to 8. i7 does have hyper threading, so it has 4 physical cores, but also 4 more logical threads, for a total of 8 processing threads. I had hoped it would run eight with FSX and double up on terrain loaders, though I had heard the logical threads are inactive with FSX. I thought that was true when I viewed task manager, as only four threads are active, however my results in game spoke contrary to that.
With i7 I now fly over the highest LOD terrain at all times. No longer am I one, two, or three steps behind on terrain LOD. So not only is blurred terrain a thing of the past, but stutters as well. With my Core 2 Quad, in order to fly with a glass smooth stutter free experience I had to lock the framerate at a value I consistently achieved. Now with i7 I can run with the framerate unlocked and it's like glass, no stutters, no hitching, just silk. The fact I can now run with an unlocked framerate and get results superior to locked framerate is just amazing. Never with my Core 2 Quad, no matter how low I would lock in relation to the framerate I was achieving, have I seen textures load as well as they do with i7.
Now back to threads. With i7 task manager only shows 4 active threads, though those 4 threads are often at 100% utilization, and do not drop below 50%. With Core 2 Quad the three non-primary threads would be at 50% utilization or less. What this tells me is i7 is actually running 8 threads with FSX, and task manager is mis-reporting. As evidence to this is the fact I can fire up only four threads of Prime95, and task manager dispalys that load as 50% on all 8 threads, for a total of 50% CPU utilization. Given this I would not be surprised if the reason the other threads run around 100% instead of 50% as with Core 2 is that the load is in fact being spread, just not reported correctly.
In regards to framerate performance, I am seeing a 50% gain on minimums compared to my 3Ghz Core 2 Quad. Doing my Coffs Harbour benchmark pass, the lowest part was previously 16fps, and now I'm seeing 24fps. The mid and upper frames don't see that kind of gain, but that's ok as bringing up the low end is what matters most.
So that's what I've got. Hit me back if you have anything to add or with questions. Given blurries are cured one thing I'd like to play with is some new cfg tweaks. A low fiber fraction time gives a massive framerate gain at the cost of terrain texture loading power, so I might be able to balance that a bit to get more raw performance while maintaining sharp terrain. Below are the tweaks I use currently with autogen set to very dense in the sim, but I have not yet tried adjusting these values for my new system. I've found using a bufferpool pool over 50MB makes a nice difference when down low above heavy autogen, while values up to 10MB don't do much at all. Cheers.
[DISPLAY]
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=80
[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=1700
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=2000
[MAIN]
DisablePreload=1
[SCENERY]
SmallPartRejectRadius=3
[BUFFERPOOLS]
PoolSize=80000000
I must say FSX runs quite impressively on this setup. The overall framerate is not what impresses me, but the increase on minimum's as well as the fact it seems like I've now got eight cores.
When I went from a 3.5Ghz Core 2 Duo to 3GHz Core 2 Quad it was clear the doubling of threads gave me nearly a two fold increase in terrain texture loading power, as my propensity for blurries was cut in half, and as was the amount of stutters I was seeing. So I have always advocated 4 cores, even if at the expense of clock speed, if you want the best experience in FSX.
Moving to the i7 is again giving me the results I would expect from doubling my cores, from 4 to 8. i7 does have hyper threading, so it has 4 physical cores, but also 4 more logical threads, for a total of 8 processing threads. I had hoped it would run eight with FSX and double up on terrain loaders, though I had heard the logical threads are inactive with FSX. I thought that was true when I viewed task manager, as only four threads are active, however my results in game spoke contrary to that.
With i7 I now fly over the highest LOD terrain at all times. No longer am I one, two, or three steps behind on terrain LOD. So not only is blurred terrain a thing of the past, but stutters as well. With my Core 2 Quad, in order to fly with a glass smooth stutter free experience I had to lock the framerate at a value I consistently achieved. Now with i7 I can run with the framerate unlocked and it's like glass, no stutters, no hitching, just silk. The fact I can now run with an unlocked framerate and get results superior to locked framerate is just amazing. Never with my Core 2 Quad, no matter how low I would lock in relation to the framerate I was achieving, have I seen textures load as well as they do with i7.
Now back to threads. With i7 task manager only shows 4 active threads, though those 4 threads are often at 100% utilization, and do not drop below 50%. With Core 2 Quad the three non-primary threads would be at 50% utilization or less. What this tells me is i7 is actually running 8 threads with FSX, and task manager is mis-reporting. As evidence to this is the fact I can fire up only four threads of Prime95, and task manager dispalys that load as 50% on all 8 threads, for a total of 50% CPU utilization. Given this I would not be surprised if the reason the other threads run around 100% instead of 50% as with Core 2 is that the load is in fact being spread, just not reported correctly.
In regards to framerate performance, I am seeing a 50% gain on minimums compared to my 3Ghz Core 2 Quad. Doing my Coffs Harbour benchmark pass, the lowest part was previously 16fps, and now I'm seeing 24fps. The mid and upper frames don't see that kind of gain, but that's ok as bringing up the low end is what matters most.
So that's what I've got. Hit me back if you have anything to add or with questions. Given blurries are cured one thing I'd like to play with is some new cfg tweaks. A low fiber fraction time gives a massive framerate gain at the cost of terrain texture loading power, so I might be able to balance that a bit to get more raw performance while maintaining sharp terrain. Below are the tweaks I use currently with autogen set to very dense in the sim, but I have not yet tried adjusting these values for my new system. I've found using a bufferpool pool over 50MB makes a nice difference when down low above heavy autogen, while values up to 10MB don't do much at all. Cheers.
[DISPLAY]
TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=80
[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=1700
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=2000
[MAIN]
DisablePreload=1
[SCENERY]
SmallPartRejectRadius=3
[BUFFERPOOLS]
PoolSize=80000000