Classic British Flight Sim

Further to my previous post, I've now got the dual core laptop that I mentioned. It is running Vista Home Premium and I have just loaded FS9.

This is a good test because it is a clean machine and FS9 is the first program (apart from AV of course!) that I have loaded. I have loaded FS9 plus the 9.1 update and the only add-on is Mr Maltby's SVC10 (now there's a surprise ;-) ).

I turned all the sliders and traffic to maximum :o , set the graphics card to max quality (vice performance) and did some circuits at LHR. The lowest FPS was over central London (exterior view) at 25-30 with the average FPS between 45 and 55 with occasional forays up to 70. LHR gave me 30 ish from all views. Default scenery, though.

I did the check to see if both cores were being utilised and they were by default. I didn't have to do anything to force them. So it would seem that it is Vista that is the answer. If you have a dual core with XP you may need to force FS across both cores but if you have Vista it will do it for you.

I'm extremely pleased as the machine was a very reasonable £800 and I've never seen FS perform to that standard.

Yours (very chuffed)

Ian

Tks for the update Ian. Interesting reading and much food for thought ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

speedbird591 wrote:Further to my previous post, I've now got the dual core laptop that I mentioned. It is running Vista Home Premium and I have just loaded FS9.

This is a good test because it is a clean machine and FS9 is the first program (apart from AV of course!) that I have loaded. I have loaded FS9 plus the 9.1 update and the only add-on is Mr Maltby's SVC10 (now there's a surprise ;-) ).

I turned all the sliders and traffic to maximum :o , set the graphics card to max quality (vice performance) and did some circuits at LHR. The lowest FPS was over central London (exterior view) at 25-30 with the average FPS between 45 and 55 with occasional forays up to 70. LHR gave me 30 ish from all views. Default scenery, though.

I did the check to see if both cores were being utilised and they were by default. I didn't have to do anything to force them. So it would seem that it is Vista that is the answer. If you have a dual core with XP you may need to force FS across both cores but if you have Vista it will do it for you.

I'm extremely pleased as the machine was a very reasonable £800 and I've never seen FS perform to that standard.

Yours (very chuffed)

Ian

Hi Ian,

I can Guaruntee you that FS9 was only being used by one of the cores... Vista is better at sharing the load between the two, but there is no way that FS9 can run on both core simultainiously... the program is not multithread aware, thats nothing that the opperating system can change. What it may have been able to do, which you should notice is load your AV and opperating system processes on to core 0 and see that there was no load on core 1 so its possibly running FS9 on a core of its own if that makes sense.

XR219 wrote: .... if that makes sense.

None of it makes any sense to me, Ben - That's what we've got you experts for

Just to clarify, both core check boxes in the 'set affinity' screen are ticked by default for fs9.exe and the CPU usage graphs are showing equal activity. If you pop back Ben, I'd be interested in how the performance of the graphics card rates. The Vista performance rating for the card is 5.1. It's an Nvidia 8600M GT. Would this be considered a good rating?

Ian

Hi Ian,

Expert... not me mate... God help you if you think that.

The processor affinity will be set to all cores by default, so you'll find that on all your apps, unless you change them.

In order for something to multi thread (i.e. use more than one processor (or core)) the program has to be written in such a way that it breaks the workload down into 2 or more threads. Each of these threads is processed by a separate processor or core. FS9 is singularly threaded in the way it was written and therefore there is no way (other than devine intervention) that this can multithread.

My guess is that fs9 is running on one of the cores and everything else on the other. This is something that Vista can do quite well (distripute the workload i.e. I'll run Internet explorer on that core and Anti Virus on the other one etc.)) The other probability is that the proformance graphs in task manager aren't acurate.... and theres probably some mileage in that.

Hey! I did understand that. It does make sense after all

Thanks, Ben.