CPU Power for 3rd party applications and home cockpit setup - Looking for feedback

General Discussion & Community Support Home Cockpit Builders
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I am starting to work on my home cockpit, and I am starting to get a little worried I don’t have enough horsepower to handle some of the add-ons I like to run (want to run) as I start to scale up.

My ultimate goal is to have a 3 monitor setup, with pop-outs or other methods of showing my gauges / controls etc. Basically moving the cluster to another set of displays, either streaming via SimConnect or driven by the GPU.

Before I even get to that point I am finding that I am running out of computing power running SPAD (FIP Gauges, controls, stream deck) + SkyPark and little Navi Map.

Spad, SkyPark, Navi map already consume 20 - 30% of my CPU Load (5600x) right now on top of FS2020 which runs a solid 40 - 50% depending on the plans I fly.

My target aircraft for the build will be Kodiak, Cessna 172/152 and Islander. None of which are “demanding” on the CPU like some of the airlines.

On a separate note in the beta, 3 monitors running 1400p on a 3070 = Stop-Motion performance wise. I have yet to get rendering to work, period, in the beta. VRAM usage explodes over the 8G on the card (Known issue with DX12 already but not sure if this is exacerbated with Multi Monitor) I am thinking higher power video card is also in my future as well. Or at least a second rendering option for pop-outs. G1000 pop out performance is 10000x better! Very happy there.

My Setup:
5600x
32g 3400mhz ram
3070
NVME Everything.

Cockpit Setup Target:
FPS target is 40 - 45.
3 Large monitors or TV screens 36" or larger (1080p or 1440p TBD)
Pop-out gauges, on small touch screen monitors or tablets (Air Manager or SPAD or ???)
Stream Deck XL
Track IR
and my honeycomb hardware.

Flying preferences
Almost entirely VFR, light IFR ( no airlines)
Maybe HELO’s at some point :wink:

Should I be looking at a higher core count CPU to offload some of this work to? Is my GPU setup for failure with MM when it comes?

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I’m a bit surprised that these add-ons are eating so much of your CPU - Spad.neXt ought not to take much, although you mention vFIPs and I think those might be CPU-intensive; do you really need these for a Kodiak cockpit, or could you switch to Air Manager perhaps? It doesn’t hit my CPU particularly hard. Can’t speak to SkyPark or LittleNavMap as I don’t use either.

That said, the more single-threaded power you can give the sim, the better it is. The 5600X is no slouch, I have one in my desktop here, but my sim PC is an Intel i9 12900K and that single upgrade
(from a mildly-overlocked i9 9900K) improved my performance more than anything else. I also noticed that going for DDR5 RAM at 6200MHz vs DDR4 at 3200 sped things up, presumably by removing a bottleneck.

You might think about Process Lasso to keep LittleNavMap etc off the cores that MSFS uses. That may help spread your CPU power a bit more evenly. Having said that, Windows usually does a good job of spreading the load across the cores you have available.

I think 8GB VRAM is not going to cut it for multi-monitor no matter what. I think 24GB+ will be the new standard for flight sim PCs. I have 12GB on a 3080 Ti and it’s getting near the limit with a single window in 4K on High settings quite often. With 3 x 1080p monitors the overall load will be less but I still think 8GB won’t cut it. So yes, I would be looking at a new GPU - perhaps wait for the 4000 series, it’s not too long to wait, or find a bargain on a 3090, the prices have become much more reasonable these days.

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I relied on them pretty heavily as the G1000 Pop’outs were a worse performance hit. Now that is “fixed” in SU10 beta, I won’t use them anymore.

I want to try this product, I have not used it yet. Seems like the smart way to go.

SkyPark is REALLY CPU heavy. I found that if you keep the SkyPad in “fly mode” its a heavy drain on the CPU. If you are @ the home page its much less. Combination between Transponder and SkyPad can hit 20-25% pretty quickly. Little Navi Map has started to be a much bigger drain on resource than I remember. I haven’t bottomed out why quite yet. I typically use it for Airport Info (destination metar, frequencies, field elevation, preferred approach etc). Some of that is in the VFR map, but only for established air fields. Small strips you get nothing. I also use Navi Map to plot out elevation tracks for the flight, TOD/BOD based elevation data, etc.

I agree.

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BTW, I solved the high CPU load with Skypark. If “Window Frame” is enabled, it hammers the CPU. Feedback to //42

I am planning on going to a 5800x3D and looking at card options with 10-12g VRAM. Should cover my needs for a while.

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You might want to hang on for the X3D versions of the 7000 series CPUs. It’ll mean a new motherboard and DDR5 RAM, but supposedly in performance terms they will make the 5800X3D look like a Pentium. Well, not quite, but they’re expected to beat it. By a lot. Intel’s 13th gen CPUs are coming soon and they are beating the 7000 non-X3D series in tests by quite a long way. If you believe Intel, that is. It’s a good time to be a simmer in terms of new generation hardware!

I think in terms of GPU, with the 3090 and 3090 Ti prices dropping as the 4000 series launches, there might be a case to stick with this generation to get the 24GB VRAM at a reasonable price. That’s something I’m actively considering. OTOH we need to see independent benchmarks of the 4000 series cards with MSFS. They are absolute beasts and I’m expecting DX12 performance to be phenomenal. Well, hoping.