Serious speed!

[pgt250]

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON Dec-30-01 AT 11:31PM (EDT)[/font][p]>if you already have a pretty
>fast intel processor, then upgrading
>to that thing probably won't
>give you an increase in
>frame rates. you need to
>determine whether your performance bottleneck
>is at the cpu or
>the graphics card. for games,
>usually the bottleneck resides in
>the graphics card.

Yep. Upgrading to a 2.2 won't make that much difference. Other problems are beginning to show up. PC800 RDRAM running at 400MHz, is only producing a bandwidth of 1.6GB/s, only 1.6 times the rate of PC133 SDRAM (1.066GB/s bandwidth.) So while a 2GHz processor is clocked 2.5 times faster than my 800MHz PIII, the system RAM is choking that somewhat by offering bus bandwidths 1.6 times my current machine. DDR SDRAM at 133MHz is better but still falls a bit short of the processor speed upgrade at just 2x. Got your AGP clock at 66MHz? Even if you've got AGP 4x set, you're only able to transfer 1.017GB/s. Until these types of issues are addressed, incremental increases in main CPU speed will bring only small increases in frame rates and probably won't bring value to the huge $$$ required for that extra clock speed.

Faster memory transfer, both to main memory and to the AGP port is what's really needed...at least as much as warp-speed CPU clocks.

--
Mike
http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...401ffe9608.jpg

[eagle013]

When you increase CPU speed, it simply changes your FPS up to the next bottleneck. If you have 32 mb ram, a 1 ghz processor, and a GeForce 3, and you increase to a 2ghz processor, you won't increase your speed more than about a tenth of a FPS because your RAM is your bottleneck, see what I mean?

***can't wait to see the percentage increase for when I go from 300mhz Cyrix M-2 MMX to an Athalon xp 1500+ (operates at about 1.7ghz pentium 4 speed) It's like 5-6 times as fast and my current FPS is an average of 8 (Semi-Urban).


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http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...8c6dabd9fb.jpg

[sewells]

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON Dec-31-01 AT 01:58AM (EDT)[/font][p]This is where the motherboard chipset guys earn their keep. There are huge data rates all going into one chip. 3GBPs from the processor bus, 1-2GB/s to the ram, 1-2GB/s to the video. Plus all the legacy support of PCI, ATA, Audio, LAN, and on and on and on. The validation is huge! Amazing these chips cost $10s. My two cents is that VIA just doesn't have the ability intel does in this area.


http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...e93e163a8d.jpg

[Captain_Slarty]

ah, but, if you have a one gig processor and 32 mb ram.. you are seriously disturbed :-)

your generalising is fine, but not real world..

at the moment, fs2002 is relying on cpu speed to all intents...

one would presume that the rest of the machine is nowhere near bottlenecked.. yet.. :-)


http://www.captainslarty.com/images/sl0015fps.gif

[Captain_Slarty]

again, this is generalising...

fs2002, on a raesonable (>1gig / 256-512 / gf2)) machine is still processor dependent.

the ram and agp are not causing a bottleneck yet...

so, the increase in fps will be apx linear.

;-)

http://www.captainslarty.com/images/sl0015fps.gif

[MisterC]

Yes i tend to agree with captain.

I read somewhere graphics card are very powerfull processors, due to their specification. They have only one thing to do, and they do it well. So, if you have a really fast video card, it spends time "waiting" the processor give it informations to process.

So i guess the card bottleneck, and i think the RAM bottleneck
too, are far away from the CPU one.

I thereby would think FPS, on a certain extent, is linear with CPU speed.

I run FS2002 at 13 locked, if i unlock it runs at 20 over most areas... I have an Athlon 1200... If i upgrade to XP 1900, let's say (1900/1200)*13 = 20 locked, or 31 free...

Mmmmmmmmm... Sounds good, isn't it ? :-jumpy

Don't think i should ?

Regards

MisterC

PS : i would sure be glad to express in a better english, but sorry, that's all i can do, unless some advices from you, guys
:-lol

http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...65492b499b.jpg

[MartijnPleines]

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON Dec-31-01 AT 06:19AM (EDT)[/font][p]>My
>desire is to extend the
>life of my current machine
>through the release of the
>next version of FS.
>Based on the timing, I
>imagine 4GHz Cpu's will be
>common.
>Dave

...hmmm, and that next version of FS is going to run quite well at 5 Ghz!

Just kidding...have you tried switching to Windows XP? Although I still do keep frames locked at 12 fps (smooth enough), texture blurring has all but disappeared on my sys (Athlon 1.2@1289 512 DDR GF 3@245/540)
with all other sliders max, all options on and even using 30m mesh I can maintain 275 kts IAS at low altitude even in a scenery intensive area such as San Fransisco.
That used to be around 160 kts with default mesh, mesh complexity at 85, clouds at 75 and ground/AC shadows off under Win98...

[Simon Evans]

Slarty's right, use `50/50 Rule` for upgrades...

which states.

"Only upgrade when you can improve performance by 50 percent over your current setup for less than 50 percent of the cost of the system you currently own."

In this case if you have a 22 fps average, you want a system capable of giving you 33, for less than mega bucks.


Simon Evans

[pgt250]

>again, this is generalising...
>
>fs2002, on a raesonable (>1gig / 256-512 / gf2)) machine is still processor dependent.

I agree that all flight sims from MS have been intensely processor dependent. However, it's not the only dependency going on. Getting data into and out of that 2.2GHz brain is as important as how fast that brain is executing opcodes. Comparatively narrow bandwidths (e.g. 16-bit Rambus transfers!), IMHO, are choking things at least as much as processor speeds are.

>
>the ram and agp are not
>causing a bottleneck yet...
>

I believe they are contributors, and not minor players either. More work needs to be done on increasing memory through put...at least as much as what's going on in the marketing-driven engineering of Intel and AMD where the almighty GHz reigns supreme.

On the note of processor speed: WinXP Pro supports multiple processors. Any mobos out there with a couple of 1.6GHz P4s (or Athlons)? Can FS2K2 take advantage of two processors? is this application- or OS-dependent?

--
Mike
http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...401ffe9608.jpg

[sewells]

I have spent some time a few years back on pentium pro with multi-processing with win nt. In theory (IN THEORY!) if an application spawns multiple threads (and many do) then the OS can partition the multiple CPU resources against the multiple threads similar to a single CPU system time-slice partitioning a single CPU system. But that is a big IF! Some pretty basic stuff was still crashing and it wasn't the CPU/chipset that had the bugs. At least intel/microsoft laid the ground work for this about 10 years ago.

I suspect that RTS games like flightsim there is careful partitioning of cpu bandwidth between graphics, simulation engine, audio, etc and do that themselves as a single OS thread rather than just spawn a zillion OS threads and let the os take care of the timeslicing. This is somewhat speculation on my part as I have only done somewhat simple windows programming. Maybe someone with some directx coding experience can comment on this.

Multi-cpu systems are a chicken/egg problem for the market. Since 99% can't value it then getting the development/validaiton mindshare in the cpu, motherboard, software community hasn't emerged. It just seems easier to plunk two boxes next to each other and use some fast interface, say firewire or LAN, to have then interact. If any game would consider multiple processing within microsoft, fs2k4 would be it!

http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...e93e163a8d.jpg