Hey all. I am not sure if this has allready been posted but if so disregard this as the results I just got (off a tip of other folks) have made a world of difference to me. Even more so that I could bump up graphics to 4k on high settings with an acceptable FPS.
First of the specs: (not a beefy one but no potato either)
Ok. so before I had to run in 1440p with some medium-high settings and all the FPS counters etc. etc. would not even made the GPU sweat one bit. It hovered arround 55% utilisation. The CPU on the other hand (wich is a 6-core) was hoveringen around 80-90% with spikes to the dreaded 100% wich kills off all performance as we now now after a week.
So… By using the task-manager, and again via a tip of others on the net, I went to the details of flightsimulator.exe and set the affinity by unticking one (1) core.
Holy cow… my system stabilised and the CPU went hovering around 50%. So now I had room to spare and could even beef up to 4K res again and it still held up nicely. Again med-high settings and not overdoing it but the stuttering and jerkiness was gone.
In conclusion we know that FS2020 is CPU hungery to the fact it even gobbles up all that the rest of your PC needs to run. Give your windows a core back and see how it goes.
As soon as I read this I felt like it was stupid enough to work. Lo and behold, I ticked off one of my four cores, and the 90 seconds of stuttering that I got routinely during the first training mission (as close as I get to a benchmark here because I don’t have to fly it) was cut drastically to about 15 seconds.
Now, on my i5-7600k, losing 25 percent of my already unimpressive horsepower caused other problems in that I took occasional FPS hits where I wasn’t before, though they were minor by comparison. Even with all four cores I’d still hit 100 percent CPU once every 20 or 30 minutes and be frozen for 4 or 5 seconds, it does seem a bit more dignified this way, though the main problem of my terrible chip is something I’m going to have to deal with at some point.
I’m using the medium quality settings in 1080p. If you have anything faster or with more cores than my i5-7600k, and even if you are using one of those, I’d strongly recommend doing this because it will probably reduce or eliminate the startup stutter.
Lemme tell ya guys… this WORKED! I went from an average of 40-50fps with mostly med-high settings, to a crazy 100fps average with ULTRA everything. @Cruissix you’re a genius.
This also fixed a few of what I perceived were bugs… (flickering panel lights, difficulty pressing ATC messages like it wasn’t registering the click, and worst of all a couple program crashes.
I literally had to stop mid-flight to post this reply and thank you. I was so disheartened for the last few days, but this changes everything!.
i7-8700k OC @ 4.5 GHz
MSI 370-A Pro mobo
MSI 1080-TI OC
32GB DDR4 2400
addLink M.2 3X4 SSD
1080 res (4k is on my shopping list)
Glad it helps some of you. I honestly do not know if it has something to do with HT as the CPU I have (the I5-8600K) has no Hyper Threading and I have not looked into the 8700K but assume it is the same. @WeamDreaver What other settings do you have. I fiddled arround some more and even though the CPU has overhead now I cannot push all settings to max.
Aside from the xxxxK family for people who do have HT: Disable HT and then untick one core in the taskmanager?
Regardless I will try some more comparising tonight but for me it was a relaxing evening last night flying around.
@CorsairDriver: Start flightsimulator the regular way. Once booted Alt-Tab out to Windows and start your taskmanager (either ctrl-alt-del > Taskmanager or right click taskbar and then taskmanager) and find the process of Flightsimulator. Then go to the detailsl of it and you will see Flightsimulator.exe. Right click it and you’ll get a drop down box. Select Affinity and unselect (untick) a core. I chose the last one on my 6-core wich was core 5. Press OK and alt-tab back into the sim.
I only think what happens to you is, if you go for 5 Cores your CPU gets more speed than with 6 Cores!
Im a bit confused about this… because the limiting factor for me is the Graphics Card!
see my screenshot GPU is @98% and CPU just @31- 35% with all 16 Cores used (8+ 8HT)
Tried it and saw no improvement and a general drop in smoothness. So there is only a very small benefit in using less cores. I would have thought that the benefit of the higher boosted cores would be offset by using less cores.
From a google search about my CPU “you cannot push it to the 4.1GHz turbo frequency on all cores. That speed is for single core boost. For up to 4 cores boosted you’ll get 4GHz and for all 6 cores on boost, the max is 3.9GHz.”
Hmm @Alphawuschel that is confusing to say the least. Also too bad not everyone benefits equaly to this. Fact remains some optimizing needs to be done at Asobo. What GPU do you use btw?
@BilingualHarp7 I have disabled boost the minute I build this system a few years back because it was wonky back then and never turned it on. So my stock speed is 3.6Ghz and it never fluctuates. Daresay I might need to try to turn it back on haha.
As for @TaffyRailway I did read that a minimum of 4 cores is/was needed so reducing to 3 would indeed make it worse across the board.
If you use in Windows the energy safe mode it could go down to 800MHz this save energy and longevity of your CPU and is much colder and quieter.
But an 8600K at only 3.6 Ghz… that is real waste in my eyes…
Going to 4K is a bit of overstatement as I said but before freeing up a core my system choked it self on 100% CPU and that gave nothing to do to my GPU. Now, and it seems there is a lot more system wise going on configuration wise wether it works or not, the game uses about 80% with everything on at 1440p and because my system does not grind to a halt gives the GPU room to move. The GPU now has higher settings enabled allowing it to use about 60-75% of its capabilities instead of the 50% I got before using affinity selection on the CPU.
And it’s not removing a CPU bottleneck. It’s freeing up a core to give your system some room to breathe WHILST running the sim as Asobo just hijacks all cores.
The simple fact that it worked for you and for others make me strongly believe that we are going to get a better sim soon, with updates and patches. I don’t care if it works for me or not, just a couple of cases is enough to conclude for myself that everything is going to get better performance-wise. Just imagine what they can do having the source code.
@CerfEtudiant57 If my French does not let me down you are saying it did not work for you on a Ryzen?
Could be another difference then that we found that it presumably works best, the idea I relayed, to non-hyperthreaded Intel CPU’s with at least 6 cores?
Would be nice if Asobo pitched in that they at least are looking at our findings on all subjects regarding performance.
