Summary: Hosted by Eric McClintock, Nolan, Brendan, and Adam. Listen Here: Subscribe to automatically get the latest podcast: iTunes, Zune, RSS XML, E-Mail, All Other. FSX: More than 4 Cores? Comment from Juan on FSBreak 8 about FSX and multicore. [Link] Phil Taylor is quoted saying that "FSX will scale up to 256 cores". Does FSX use 8 cores? CAN FSX use 8 cores? Quoting an article from Phil Taylor in 2007 about FSX's multi-core capabilities: Today Intel announced their new 2.93G QX6800 Quad Core processor. As part of this press release, Aces Studio participated with a quote about our improved multi-core support in SP1. The quote stated ldquo;The latest version of Microsoft Flight Simulator* X, Service Pack One (SP1), due out later this month, is a great match for the extreme multi-core processing delivered by the new Intel Core 2 Extreme quad-core processorrdquo; ldquo;Flight Sim X SP1 greatly increases multicore utilization and will scale as more threads are available leading to reduced load times as well as frame rate improvements and greater visual complexity during flight. The Flight Simulator team at Microsoft is pleased to work with Intel to provide our end users with a great gaming experience." Our multi-core support will take advantage of both 2 and 4 cores today, and more cores in the future when they become available via a config setting. This is for both Intel and AMD processors. At render time, we run the terrain texture synthesis on threads across the cores. During flight on multi-core machines, as terrain and terrain textures are loaded you will notice significant multi-core usage. As all tiles are loaded, the multi-core usage will fall off, this is expected. As the terrain is re-lit, approximately every minute, you will see multi-core usage increase. As you bank and load terrain tiles, or as you fly forward and force a load of more terrain tiles, you will see the multi-core usage increase. Note - hyperthreaded is not multi-core. Our current plan is to treat HT machines as single-core since we noticed extensive collisions between threads which caused stutters. You can find the article here [Link]. This article was written in April 2007, and since then FSX SP2 has been released. Here is an important bit of information: The new Core i7 It is a physical 4 core CPU, with 4 logical cores - Otherwise known as hyperthreading, which makes it look like 8 cores to the OS. Since the release of SP2, the "Not Using Hyperthreading" statement could be false. Tweak FSX for 8 Threads As it turns out, some members are able to 'unlock' all 8 'cores' (or all 8 threads) by making some changes to the FSX.cfg file. Change the "AffinityMask" entry to "AffinityMask=255" if you are a core i7 user, there are reports that this may help with the problem. You can also set it to 254 to leave 1 core free for programs other than FSX that require CPU, such as TrackIR, etc. Members report that using AffinityMask=255 helps with loading speed, but not in game stuttering! Here is a link to the AVSim Forum post [Link], and more information about AffinityMask from Phil. [Link] Members on AVsim report the the method that BEST helps stuttering #38; FPS is AffinityMask=15, With hyperthreading off. Final Intel Core i7 overview here at AVSim. [Link] Share your FSX tweaks, and your system profile to us! Use the form on our contact page, email feedback@fsbreak.net, or call 513-201-5426. Flight Sim Bloggers Network The Flight Sim Bloggers Network (FSBN) is a Network of bloggers dedicated to flight simulation. They currently have over 15 blogs in the Network, covering all aspects of flight simulation. The Network gathers all the news items posted by every member, so they can build up a huge resource of available articles, searchable on any blog in the Network. The number of blogs and websites involved produces dozens of (mostly) FS related news articles every day, this ca...
