To MT or not MT

I have had a few hangs and one bluescreen so far. Been beating it hard, as the kids and wife were out today :nerd_face: Notice that opening the F-10 map can be hard on the poor thing. I also want to upgrade my CPU.

What do you guys think? 5800X3D or a couple hundo more for a 13700K? Latter has more cores and has more Ghz, but the former has more L3 cache and used to be undisputed king of DCS. Now… not so sure no more.

I have noticed that a few things that used to be really forkin’ difficult have become more doable to me now, such as doing basic airmanship in a spitfire (taxi, takeoff, landing) and putting helicopters on dots. Mind you, I still broke at least a squadrons’ worth of helicopters today :wink:

I :heart: that skin @EightBall once made for my huey. It is awesome :smiley:

6 Likes

Would someone be kind enough to explain the CPU VS GPU bound concepts to me, pleez! I think I understand what they mean but people seem to have different takes on what they imply. I also noticed on some maps using MT in 2D I get a consistent 180 fps but the sim also seems to be capped at that rate. Someone explained that it is a .lua setting that set my max fps to 180. I haven’t investigated it yet.

Thanks,

For me, yes. I used to only have a performance hit on overcast days. Now it happens any time I get near an average sized cloud at high or ultra settings. Right now I’m on standard, but I might try low.

2 Likes

A bit in my wheelhouse here so let’s dive in. I do not know off the top of my head what you currently have so I cannot say how good a 5800X3D upgrade would be. To prevent a total derail, I am “details” tagging it to save space. Enjoy the read!

Modern CPU Situation

If you are already on AMD AM4 socket, and you can do it as a cheap in-place upgrade and don’t want to do a whole rig rebuild for some time then I would suggest that. If you already have a 5000 series Ryzen anyway, not much point. AM4 is a dead end platform now however.

13700K - as with any of the current Intel 12/13th gen chips that have the big.little architecture of P & E cores, you must also be willing to move to Windows 11 for best performance. Windows 11 has the proper CPU scheduler / thread director update to properly assign tasks to a P or E core as appropriate. In some games you can get away on Windows 10 without issue, but for a CPU hog like DCS, especially if you have background tasks - you’ll probably want that update. I have not moved my gaming rig to Win11 or a 12/13 gen CPU yet but my laptop and work PC are on 11 but with 9th gen Intel so I have not tested that scheduler update but can say Win11 is otherwise fine and stable. Microsoft is not backporting that scheduler to Windows 10 as far as any news and documentation I have found.

You can buy DDR4 boards for Intel and carry RAM forward, but it is also worth looking at DDR5 for the higher memory bandwidth if you are going to spend the money and want it to be relevant for longer.

AMD Ryzen 7000 - Curve ball, if you like AMD you can also consider Ryzen 7000. These are still homogenous cores except the new X3D parts, so there is no need to move to Windows 11 if you do not want to yet. You will have to get DDR5 because AMD does not support DDR4 on the AM5 platform.

There are also the new released Ryzen 7000 series X3D chips but these have a twist this time around - there are a heterogenous core design. The CPU’s have two chiplets with the half the SKU’s total core count, and only one chiplet gets the 3D stacked extra cache. It has to be lower boost clocked because it basically has a thermal blanket on top. This leads to the Intel problem of needing Windows 11 again because you need AMD’s new CPU scheduler to handle picking between the cores with extra cache, or the cores with more boost clock. It gets further complicated because the software is also designed to just “park” (shut off) the cores without the bonus cache in games which may or may not be an issue depending on what else you are doing at the same time. This is a just-released product set and the software is still very much WIP by AMD. No word on Win10 support that I have seen, but this is also just launched so news may have yet to spread.

So far there are two SKUs:
7950X3D with two 8-core chiplets, one has 3D cache.
7900X3D with two 6-core chiplets, one has 3D cache.

There is a later launching 7800X3D which is 8 core. This may be the golden replacement for the 5800X3D if it is one 8-core chiplet with the bonus cache as then there is only one core type and you don’t need the new scheduler. If they do it as two 4-core chiplets, one with and one without cache - then it’s in the same boat as its two big brothers above. News seems to imply it will be the single chiplet design and is due out in April - likely to be the star of the new AMD lineup performance wise.

6 Likes

I would have said it was less of an impact than in 2.8.2, but I didn’t formally A/B test it and of course MT (in my testing) freed up a lot of overhead so maybe I experienced less impact because there was more overhead available?

But in the end, I can’t raise clouds above “Low” when using VR, even with MT. Too much frame rate loss.

1 Like

I fixed my initial issues with MT. I read motion blur has issues so turned that off and ran the install repair utility. Now it looks good! Both issues resolved. Today I will be able to get a feel for what MT will bring to my set up.

Thank you sir for the write-up. I am currently on an i5 9600k with 32gb of fast ddr4 which I’d like to carry forward a bit. Running win11. I guess I’ll hang fire for a bit to see how 7800x3d shakes out. Ain’t easy though!

7 Likes

I just had a quick hind flight on Hollowpoint north server, running the Offensive posture mission.
previously i used to get anywhere between 25-32 fps with some stutters. With MT my fps is pegged at 40, with no stutters and feels so smooth, that was until i got slightly over confidant that i had taken out all the avengers in a particular area… and took a missile to the face

5 Likes

Just a note in case it happens to others.

I have an Nvidia card and have a separate profile/config to run DCS. Well, I was running the MT version of DCS and remembered last night that I forgot to update the profile to point to my custom DCS profile (it was running Nvidia default config).
Gave me a 10-15 fps boost…[yes, I am a dumbshit]

8 Likes

Sooo…. What’s the settings of that profile?
Asking for another dumb :poop:

7 Likes

Uh, hadn’t even thought of that.

That gets my vote for “DCS PSA Of The Quarter”!

Thanks

4 Likes

30 years ago I’d’ve said “OMG! OMG! OMG!” (if such a language existed back then). The smarter, more mature me can only say:

OMG! OMG! OMG! This is no small improvement! Right out of the box. No tweaking. No worrying. Just launch and go. Went straight to the most stressful (performance-wise) place I know to go: Rotorheads/Syria. Farp “Bravo” is currently at some big city in Turkey. For the first time I watched my MI-24 rotors turn smoothly. Over the city I was doing at least 40 FPS. For me, my 5yo CPU and my Rift2 [MEANT: Quest] and this particular server, this is outstanding. OMG indeed! I saw an AH-64 go by and I could see is rotor-disk. I never saw that on big servers before. I caught up and formed. It was so sweet! No skipping or lagging. Just easy-peasy smooth aviating. Change this thread title to “MT or You’re a Masochist!

10 Likes

I flew the second Museum Relic campaign mission in Multithreading and measured using CapframeX. It reports a consistent 55-60 fps which is the best I have ever experienced in DCS. It felt very smooth all through the mission. Thank you ED!

8 Likes

I’ve got a new R7 5800X3D installed with an RTX 3090ti. With a Meta Quest Pro using MT and FSR via OpenXR I’m seeing a moderate FPS boost with the CPU bound (main thread) displayed. Perfomance is very smooth with good image quality and no stutters. In Beware! Beware! campaign with 12 x Spits, 36 x AI B-17, and 4 x FW-190 Anton nearby, fps was 72 at altitude, 36 down low. It never dips below 36, so I’m thinking that the actual frame rate is somewhere between 36 and 72. I should mention that I have Default Super Sampling set on 1.8, which leaves the image razor sharp. If I lower it to 1.0, FPS locks in at 72, but image quality suffers. With FSR enabled and SS on 1.8, the image is fantastic.

CPU view resource monitor in 2D with MT enabled. FPS is usually around 180 fps, Spitfire free flight, Channel map near Manston. What I’ve noticed is that in VR, performance is CPU (main thread) bound and mostly GPU bound in 2D in high settings which makes sense. Looking at CPU 0, it seems to have the highest utilization. Is that what you Intel boys are seeing?

4 Likes

What I found (it’s starting to corn-fuse me too)

5 Likes

I just tried the South Atlantic map and got some surprising results

80!!! FPS… i have never seen figures that high,

(sorry for the crap pic)

5 Likes

Seems I’m CPU Bound.
I’m getting no FPS increase and now trying to figure out why.

CPU-Bound here too. So, based on the link I put above, I can add more eye candy :slight_smile: to the GPU?

OBSERVATIONS In VR

Performance: FPS

Finally ran it (my custom mission generator) in VR. Nice. Gonna call it a 35%+ FPS increase? Note that even with 75-80 FPS I still get a little…what to call it?..‘jitter’. I’ve been using Motion Repro for so long perhaps I’m really sensitive to this. Via OpenXR Tools I turned Repro back on to 45 and smooth as butter with little Reprop artifacts noticed. Smoothest ride I’ve had in a while. Only setting changed was MSAA = 2X (from Off).

Performance: “Simulation”

I’ve worked really had to throw a lot of ‘stuff’ into the mission (dynamically and automatically) -WITHOUT- hurting your performance. If you’re in a server or using a DLC mission and you see your FPS low look at the “Simulation” value; if that number is high this is likely an indication…

Double-tap the FPS button (Left Ctrl + Pause) and look a few lines down to see the “Simulation”. This is, roughly, a clue as to how hard it’s working on ‘objects’ (trains, planes, and automobiles…and missiles, bombs, bullets, etc). Lower = better.

  • On my Dev PC [1] it has bounced between 3-6 (there 100’s of possible objects in there)
  • On the Play PC [2] before MT about 1-2.
  • On the Play PC, with MT, it stayed at 0 the entire run - it never even blinked. Now, maybe they broke the output for this value but I dunno…it makes sense I guess; the cores are burning through all that stuff so much faster it doesn’t even register.

BAD Stuff

F10 Map Switching: It doesn’t seem to like this much. First time or two it ‘burped’ when I went back to the cockpit. Last two runs, eventually (like the 3rd time?) it hung up requiring Cntrl+Alt+Delete to end it.
And it will never give me the prompt to submit a a bug report (and I did wait for like 5 minutes last time).

In its defense I do have a lot of drawings there, maybe two-dozen or so; lines/arrrows/labels/polygons.

[1] Dev PC: ~6 years old, i6700K/32GB/nVidia 1080 - in 2D - V 2.7x
[2] My ‘play’ PC (5900X/64Gig RAM/3030Ti - windows kept as ‘clean’ as I can. Windows 11, VR, Seat Shaker.

5 Likes

@bignewy responded on the ED MT Bug thread to another about the F10 map view crashing so looks like he’s on it. Nice. I’d send a report but it didn’t give me one.

2 Likes

Did find that after some tweaking in XTU, I brought my CPU up to 5.1Ghz.
Additionally, I deleted my saved games folder and let DCS rebuild it. Something (not fxo/metashaders) in there was holding my FPS back and I’m seeing 130+FPS in 2D. I’ll try VR shortly.

4 Likes