Does X-Plane benifit from cpu affinity settings? If it does what are some of you guys using?

Played with that once, on my i5 2500k, and found out it's not a good idea....  XP10 is optimized to take the most out of your cores ( but I really do not recommend having HT On ! ).

 

At most, I can force affinity for satellite apps, like FSGRW...

Played with that once, on my i5 2500k, and found out it's not a good idea....  XP10 is optimized to take the most out of your cores ( but I really do not recommend having HT On ! ).

 

At most, I can force affinity for satellite apps, like FSGRW...

 

Why do you recommend not having hyper-threading active? I have 6 cores and use hyper-threading. The effect is to use 12 threads during the scenery loading phase during startup which given that I use photoscenery, speeds up loading times quite a bit indeed which I find very beneficial.

Well, I had the idea that users had reported bad performance with HT on ?

 

I don't have that option so, never tested it myself with XP....

Xplane works fine with HT on, on the other hand, there are a couple of disadvantages having HT on:

 

1- Core temps tent to be a couple of degrees higher

2- Not good for overclocking

 

...other the that, I don't see the problem keeping it on, and like Propsfan said, it does help loading times.

Good idea Paul, I would say definitely try it out and use your FSX/P3D AM skills. (Paul's recently got Process Lasso which can handle affinity of anything). I'm not sure if or where an AM can be specified for XPlane. But as far as I know, I would say yes, because XP splits itself up over the number of available logical processors (LPs, two per HT enabled core). Has no idea if running on HT mode cores, treats each LP as a core. So to enable HT doubles the number of jobs and increases heat a lot. To keep heat down in HT mode use an affinity mask that enables alternate LPs, so in other words core count looks the same as HT disabled to the sim. Then to increase background loading, some of the LP pairs can be enabled, except the first one, core zero, usually leave that with one LP masked so the first thread can gain full bandwidth. Depending on system speed and settings there will be an optimum count of background loading that beyond which can't be handled and become wasted energy. Testing to determine performance sweetspot would be difficult, since display frequency doesn't change much with the number of LPs allocated, only the concurrent tasks in the background benefit. Although overloading with too many jobs may reduce the fps capability, so needs checking.

Thanks Steve, I will give it a shot and see how it goes.

Thanks Steve, I will give it a shot and see how it goes.

 

 

Paul, if yo find a way of using AM please let us know, so far I haven't heard or read anything related to the us of AM in XP like in FSX/P3D.