Prepar3d poor performance with amd 6100 bulldozer black edition

[adamjedgar]

Hi guys,
i notice neilh has some very insightful information that he gratiously provides to this forum and i guess im aiming this question at people like him.

i am suffering with frame rates at present in prepar3d. on low settings, i get around 8-15 fps on ground during take off run and landing. Now im sure that most of my problem stems from the amd 6100 bulldozer black edition processor im running. However, it would seem that a very significant problem with the amd bulldozer performance is encountered when running software that is not utilising true multi core programming
(for example fsx and prepar3d). i notice that in benchmark testing, when multi core multithread abilities are being tested, the amd processors seem to perform much more comparibly to intel cpu's. now im not saying they are at, or beating the intel standard, but they are performing more comparably.

now having said the above, im stuck with the bullzer 6100 for now ive spent far too much money to change it (only had it a few weeks).

now for the questions

1. would altering the processor affinities improve my frame rates. i know prepa3d is still very much a single core intensive program. I have affinity for prepar3d set to all cores at the moment, however i notice that it seems like only core 0 is actually being used for it. does this mean it is competing on core 0 with any other software that require cpu resources? would it help if i dedicate 1 or 2 cores specifically to prepar3d only (e.g cores 4&5 as they seem to be idle most of the time) thereby leaving the first few cores mainly for whatever else windows seems to being using core resources for at the time?

Also,

2. i note that someone has mentioned that running undocked windows is a real performance destroyer. how do i set up left and right side window views on my other 2 monitors correctly to avoid this problem? (at present im losing 10fps per undocked window)

3. finally, if fsx and prepar3d are mainly single core intensive programs, i do not understand why my processor running 4 ghz is not able to produce frame rates equivalent to an intel processor running at 3.6 ghz? what is it that allows the intel processor running at slower speed to actually produce faster frame rates compared to my bulldozer?

kind regards
adam

System
amd bulldozer fx6100 black edition (overclocked at 4 ghz)
HT link 2740mhz
Bus 211mhz
multiplier x20
L1 Cache 6x16 KBytes
L2 Cache 3x 2048 KBytes
L3 Cache 8192 KBytes
8 gig kingston dual channel ram
ati radeon hdd6970 gpu 2gig ddr5
GA990 FXA UD3 motherboard (AM3+, BIOS version F5)
PSU 700 Watt Cooler Master RS 700 PCAA E3
O/S
1. Windows 8 (dedicated to fsx and prepar3d only) &
2. Windows 7 32 bit (all usual programs and simulators)

[Neil Hewitt]

Hi Adam.

Well, since you name-checked me, I guess I ought to reply :-). But there are many people on this forum who are as knowledgeable about hardware and FSX performance as me, and more so. Even Peter Dowson posts here from time to time.

First off, I need to make the disclaimer that I am not an AMD guy, I'm an Intel guy. I haven't built an AMD system since the days of K6. Much of what I'll say is based on a little light googling.

It's clear that you should expect better performance than you're getting, all other things being equal. Your GPU is nice and fast and capable of drawing the frames quickly. You have plenty of RAM. Your CPU is modern and certainly not slow. So why the poor frame rates? I think you need to eliminate a few possibilities up front.

What frame rates do you get in FSX in similar scenarios on this system? Is it on a par with Prepar3d, or much faster? If much faster, that suggests the problem is somewhere in your P3D setup.

I note you say you're running P3D and FSX on Windows 8 - is that a typo or are you really running them on a beta OS? If so, you really ought not to. Windows 8, especially the Developer Preview, is not properly optimised and is full of instrumented code that spends time collecting data to send back to MS as part of the beta test. Put P3D on Windows 7 x64. Depending on how you licensed Windows, you may have the right to do that already without extra spend.

Now, on the specifics - the Bulldozer architecture has been generally seen as a disappointment in terms of single-threaded performance. It has a turbo mode, like the Intel Core range, but the frequency uplift is generally quite small - for your CPU, from 3.3GHz to a maximum of 3.9GHZ with 'half load' (which single-threaded code would be). You say it's overclocked to 4GHz - is that the base speed, or the turbo speed? If base, what does it now turbo up to? I'm not hugely familiar with the OC story on the AMD side. Intel Core chips employ lots of clever trickery to ensure that they can do as much as possible in a single clock cycle, and AMD still can't match that level of performance. Hence the edge Intel chips enjoy. But people still need to overclock the Intel chips up to extreme levels - 4.8GHz or even further - to really get max-slider capability in all situations. The AMD chips can't be overclocked that far, as far as I know - they need too much power and put out too much heat.

Because P3D, at least right now, is basically FSX SP2 + some extra bits, which is to say it's still essentially single-threaded, it will be CPU bound just like FSX. Changing the affinity for the process won't do a great deal, since it's only usually running on a single core anyway. In theory, if you could reserve a core solely for P3D's use then this might help a bit, but the Windows scheduler should be clever enough to not dump tasks on a core that's already maxing out running P3D.

You need to make sure your OS is properly tweaked - stop all services you don't need, defrag the disk, stop unnecessary processes from running at all. Run all the relevant tweakers on FSX and P3D. Then do a test flying the same basic setup in each, and compare.

I suspect the undocked windows may be causing you a problem, as you suggest. I will leave it to someone with more experience than me of running FSX multi-screen to make a suggestion there.

Hope any of that helps...

[adamjedgar]

i have run fsx and prepar3d on the following o/s... Win 7x32, win7x64 and currently win8. im no expert however initially i thought both programs ran better in win8. now im not so sure as fsx has suddenly started to stop working after only about 30 seconds of running it. i have obviously done something to cause this since the instillation. prepar3d seems to be working ok in win8, and whilst i have no actual figures, i am sure it gets better frame rates (however,. for those amd fx guys who were hopeful, i wouldnt say the difference is sparkling).
im not sure with the overclocking, as i am new to the idea (have never overclocked before installing this processor), however, what i can tell you is the following...it still throttles down when not loaded, however i run AMD overdrive, and when i click on that round green button on top right of screen to lock in my overclock settings, she steps up to 4.02GHZ as i set in the BIOS (not in windows overclocking apps) and stays there!

oops go to go. i add more later!