Never patched for multi core?

I know FSX was coded near the end of the 3.0Ghz plus single core era when MS expected single core speeds to approach 12-15 Ghz. Fast forward to 2015 technology and you have 2.0 Ghz Quad core Celerons more then capable of running a 10 year old game at max settings if MS would only patch the game to utilize the other cores. Has anyone abandoned FSx for it's over the top hardware requirements , Or did you buy the latest i7/Xeon chip to hit the 30fps holy grail in Downtown LA? :cool:

I love the game to death but it still seems inaccessible to most people even 10 years later

You might want to give this a read about utilizing multi-core processors.

https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?251736-FSX-Affinity-Mask

I know FSX was coded near the end of the 3.0Ghz plus single core era when MS expected single core speeds to approach 12-15 Ghz. Fast forward to 2015 technology and you have 2.0 Ghz Quad core Celerons more then capable of running a 10 year old game at max settings if MS would only patch the game to utilize the other cores. Has anyone abandoned FSx for it's over the top hardware requirements , Or did you buy the latest i7/Xeon chip to hit the 30fps holy grail in Downtown LA? :cool:

 

I love the game to death but it still seems inaccessible to most people even 10 years later

you have 2.0 Ghz Quad core Celerons more then capable of running a 10 year old game at max settings

Err, no. No matter how many cores you have, software developed for single core operation will always use only one. The OS can distribute it a little (GPU tasks, disk access and such) but nothing inherent to the software/game will magically be processed in parallel. Drop a 10 year old game (or any other software) that ran OK on a 3,4 GHz Pentium on a 2.0 Ghz multicore Celeron and it will only run at 60% of the FPS.

FSX is a little different, as it is not coded like a game. It is supposed to make things happen accurately. Crude example: you just can't have one thread in one core calculate the FDE of the left wing while another core does the FDE of the right wing. They have to be perfectly in synch and (most importantly) they depend on each other. So you have to find things you actually can run in parallel first, without everything going severly south. This was done with FSX SP2, all the things that could safely be moved to other cores have been moved. This does not change the fact that for the sake of accuracy and the "simulation aspect" a lot of ALU processing power is needed per single core, and this will always be true with this kind of software.

A "game" just moves predefined objects along equally predefined paths, it "simulates" very little (in the sense of applying mathematical models to approximate real world behaviour). Even if it looks realistic, it never really is in the simulation sense.

You will never be able to run a true sim at high settings on sub-par hardware, even if the same system will run a FP shooter to its fullest. It just isn't the same kind of application.

when MS expected single core speeds to approach 12-15 Ghz.

I doubt that. It has been known (at least suspected) for a long time that semiconductor technology has a "speed limit". To make it faster, to augment the clock speed, you have to make it smaller, or else the electric impulses just take to long to travel through the "wires". But if you make it too small and run too high a clock speed, you get in trouble with electrical induction - the electrical currents on parallel lanes influence each other, making accurate calculations impossible. Even back in 2004 it was already suspected this limit would be around 5 GHz, and that CPUs tend to get unstable above 4.0 GHz (no home use water cooling back then). That is why Intel went into implementing parallel cores, even if there wasn't a single application that was actually able to be "parallelized" like this. Nice thing, marketing, isn't it? Everyone suddenly was keen on multicores - but noone had any advantage because of them. Quite the contrary, if the clockspeed was lower. Windows itself was one of the first apps to really use this architecture (had to - no OS = no app). A lot of programs still aren't parallelized, even today. That is just how it is, you cannot just "make use" of additional cores. You have to build your app specifically for parallel computing - and this may not always be possible. Depends on what your app is trying to do.

Actually one of the ACES developers, Phil Taylor I think, did say that when they were doing the initial planning and development for FSX they spoke with Intel. At that point processors were still expected to largely be single core and speeds still expected to reach 10GHz. This was somewhere around early 2004. Multi core models were planned, but were aimed at workstation and server use, not home desktops.

When the change did occur late in 2004 and early in 2005, they were too far along to go back and make any significant changes. At least not without getting into major delays and cost overruns.

Actually one of the ACES developers, Phil Taylor I think, did say that when they were doing the initial planning and development for FSX they spoke with Intel. At that point processors were still expected to largely be single core and speeds still expected to reach 10GHz. This was somewhere around early 2004. Multi core models were planned, but were aimed at workstation and server use, not home desktops.

 

When the change did occur late in 2004 and early in 2005, they were too far along to go back and make any significant changes. At least not without getting into major delays and cost overruns.

This whole thing is a little fishy IMHO. Intel definitely knew as early as 2002. They couldn't have been pulling the multicores out of their sleeve just like that. A new CPU architecture takes years to get to the point you can sell it large scale. And Microsoft must have known too, as they built the OS for them. To me this sounds more like long term strategy. And they needed to come up with the whole marketing strategy too, to convince people that every new CPU generation is still better and worth buying, even if the specs do look like they weren't. In the beginning this was like buying two cars and expecting them to go twice as fast.

As the same Phil Taylor wrote, they went ahead and made FSX multicore ready with SP2. He was all positive about that too, saying that FSX would scale to meet any amount of cores available. But it is still debatable of course if this project was actually finished and well tested, seeing that ACES disbanded before quadcores were widely accepted.