The affinity mask may be a see how it works on your system but I have been making close observations with mine. They are as follows:

1) setting it to 7 worked and seemed to be fine in my test except for when I tested with all my addons chugging along. I set the addons to run on core 1 as that is the core left open with a setting of 7. What happend durring the test with all addons on core 1 and FSX on 2, 3, 4 was a hard crash saying my OC failed. When rebooting durring POST it was reading stock the speed 2.93. When going into the BIOS, all my OC settings were in tack. ALT CTRL DELETE and reboot all all was back to normal.

2) setting it to 14 seemed to be best during my test but did notice some stutters when on takeoff roll and taxi and initial climb. These were small stutters but would repeat untill in a calmer area.

3) setting it at 15 activates all 4 cores and produced stutters in busier areas.

4) no affinity mask really seems to do a better job of evening things out while transitioning from heavy to lighter areas. The stutters seem to be reduced as well where they were more prominent. While testing this setting I watched my CPU temps as well as the performace in the task manager. Core 1 was almost always at 100% and the other 3 would hum along according to the graph equally more or less at around 60% or lower. Then when turning or entering a heavier area the last 3 cores would step in more and even things out. Also with this setting I was able to get higher FPS from 2 to 5 more than with the other settings tested.

My conclusion is that if you fly around in a area that doesnt have large swings in performance an affinity mask may improve things for you. If you fly longer flights or fly in areas that have big swings in performance not applying a affinity mask showed more pleasing results for me with more consistant FPS and smoothness while transitioning from area to area.

Take this info however you wish but I really spent alot of time looking at this and the results of each and wanted to pass along my findings.

The setting that really made the biggest improvement for me was setting the TBM to 90. I started at 70 but got alot of stutters with it. When switching to 80 I saw another notch of smoothness to the sim. I then went to 90 to see what would happen and it again added another notch of smoothness. I really noticed it getting better and better when switching settings while using TRACK IR. I then went to 100 and started to see more stutters comming back similar to the 70 setting. So 90 ended up being my sweet spot. I confirmed this setting with another that has the same system as me.

Hopefully this will help some people in finding a good set of tweeks for those on i7 as I spent alot of time investigating them.  To recap my settings are:

FRAME RATE LOCKED at 30
TBM = 90
No affinity mask
BufferPools = 100000000

Wingo wrote on Feb 23^rd, 2009 at 6:11am:


Disable HT. Im interested to know how it works for you.

Disable HT.. I have confirmation from a Aces source FSX makes absolutely no use of HT what so ever. HT enabled in the BIOS for video encoding and other software which may take advantage of it.. otherwise disable the function because all it does is heat up the proc

Steve, as I posted in your thread in the hardware section, my settings are exactly the same. what did it was the bufferpools at 100000000. textures loading quite nicely as well, which was always a problem before. thanks!

Whats happening with this BP value on the larger memory cards is for some reason it is reducing the latency on the PCIe x16 buss. Its not that the amount reserved is doing anything IN FSX.. it seems to be having a positive effect on the PCIe buss dropping the latency and allowing no lag in communication


Looking further into this however I think it is somthing in combination with how FSX works and the chipset itself. This is being seen on P35, x38, x48 and x58 chipsets and the 1GB Nvidia cards

I'll try it!

It's been very smooth so far though. I thought frame rate drops were normal on the ground at any airport. I know that my frames are always lower as I takeoff even though it still looks smooth. I do see a few quick "bursts" of stutter. Hopefully this is the trick.

hey guys. if you don't mind, I'd like for you to run a quick test to see how your systems manage large amounts of autogen trees. the reason I ask is because I do a lot of bush flying and I'm always around large, forested areas. my system at this point begins to stutter a lot and all smoothness disappears. I set the autogen density down to very dense and it still doesn't help, but setting it to dense finally does the job... it's not that big of a problem, but if you don't mind I'd like to see how your systems react to this. I have the same settings as you TBM 90 and BP 100000000 locked at 28.

for the test location, PAKT (Ketchikan Intl') is a good place. just to the West or Southwest of the airport you'll notice hills and a LOT of trees. fly over the area in low altitude and see how your systems react to this. I want to see if it's normal for the stutters to happen even at "very dense" autogen settings or if it's just my system that falls apart at this point

let me know what happens if you do decide to try it... thanks!

Andy

Baron 58