This is more of a curiosity question then an issue for me. Ultimately I am happy with how the sim runs for me but if I can do something to do even better then that would be great too. Here’s the issue.
I was flying around New York City. Settings all high, one or two on ultra.
My RAM usage never goes past 60% 20.2/32g
My CPU usage goes up to like 60-70%I think maybe lower, never passing 58C
GPU gets up to about 70% usage.
But my FPS is 22-28. Like I said I don’t mind it and can Handel it but I would think with my hardware not being fully used or even used a little higher it would have some FPS increase somewhere. With how little it appears the hardware is being used wouldn’t the FPS be greater? Maybe I’m totally wrong.
My Specs are:
I7-8700 CPU
RTX 3070
32g RAM
On SSD 1TB
34” HDR monitor 166hz 3440x1440
I know hardware shouldn’t be all maxed out usage, well if it did it would be hard it but I feel my hardware is mainly low compared to average temps and usage. Also with how CPU intensive this game is I’m shocked that my CPU is only used that much in a place like New York.
If anyone has an idea how to get more out of it or maybe a have some setting that is Limiting my performance. Or maybe this is totally normal and I should move on
“Main Thread Limited” is likely the cause and it’s just about the most posted topic on many forums. The sim is not optimized to use many cores of a CPU so it tends to over-use one thread at a time, so your average usage status will look like, for example, 60%-70%, when in fact one core of your CPU will largely be pegged at 100% and thus limit the overall performance rate (FPS) of the sim. Turn on the “developer mode” of the sim and at the options across the top of the screen you will see one to turn on the “FPS” counter. That display is large and shows a lot of data on the usage of the CPU and GPU. While flying in busy areas like NYC take a look at the display and you may see “main thread limited” and a lot of flashing red on the graphs for the CPU. This is the same reason why folks with very strong GPUs are getting only like 50%-60% usage from their GPU because the CPU can’t keep up. There is some hope for better CPU optimization coming with DX12 and the work being done by MS/Asobo on XBOX version of the sim, where some of that may also benefit the PC version in terms of how the sim code uses multiple cores and also how it optimizes memory usage. But the reality is that this sim is very heavy on CPU and GPU and just isn’t written to optimally benefit from multiple CPU cores, it really uses single core speed as its limiter at the moment. Hopefully that gets better over time as they keep optimizing how it runs as many users have multiple cores that are not being utilized nearly as much as they could be.
Watercooled RTX 3090 sitting at 40 % with 40-ish fps because a single core at 5.1 GHz of the watercooled 10900K is flooded with commands while the other 9 cores are having a cool time. And if I go to the outside camera I get 60 fps so it’s definitely not the rendering of the world but the calculations being one for the cockpit view.
Real Multi-Threading will boost fps by at least 50 % (60 fps instead of 40 fps) for everybody.
As already explained well by other above, the game hammers one core.
The game does multi thread but there is only enough “other” work outside that main thread to fully utilize 4 or 5 other threads. If you have something like 20 threads available the game will spread that "other " work nicely across 19 or so of the threads letting them tick over at 10% or 20% each, and still max out one of the threads at 100% usage.
This is why some people turn off hyperthreading.
It is also why with an ITX case, I can get away with running a 9900K on a 450W supply with a low profile cooler.
