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Hyperthreading on for P3D 4?


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I did some forum searches and couldn't come up with a clear answer to this (apologies in advance if I missed something obvious)... am wondering if there's consensus on this forum on whether or not to turn hyperthreading on for P3D v4.  Very interested in your opinions since I've come to regard the Aerosoft forums as an oasis of sanity in a sea of tweaking madness.

 

I know there are strong advocates for hyperthreading at Avsim and elsewhere.  I've tried it - and at times I've felt that I've gained smoothness.  At other times I've felt like that's a placebo effect.  Whatever gains I've had, have been pretty subtle.  True, small gains might be worthwhile.  But on the other hand, use of hyperthreading also requires turning down the CPU clock, and working with batch files for other add-ons in order to keep Core 0 clear for P3D.  In other words, there's a lot of futzing (technical term) involved.  And I'm at a point in life where I'd like to avoid futzing to the extent possible.

 

One more observation - my system has seemed marginally less stable with hyperthreading on - not fatally so, but I've had a greater number of crashes and balked starts.  Haven't had enough trouble to make it a clear dealbreaker - this is just an additional piece of evidence.

 

Relevant specs: I'm using a homebuilt system with an i7 7700k from Silcon Lottery, rated at 5.1GHz.  I typically run it at 5.0 without hyperthreading, or lower the clock to 4.8 with hyperthreading on (maybe I ought to think about going lower).

 

Thanks in advance for weighing in.

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I keep it turned on for my rig, but this is because of all the other software I run while in flight.  You very well may find that keeping it turned off is better, but it's simple to turn on/off so I would test it on your system to see which is best.

 

As is so often the case in flight sim, what works well on one rig doesn't work well on another, so always better to check this for yourself.

 

Best wishes.

 

 

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I have an 8700K.  It seems to give better performance with HT on -- but admittedly I only did a little testing when I first set up the machine a few months ago.  I wanted to fly more, tweak less, and this rig has allowed me to do that.  I plan to do some in-depth testing with HT soon though.

 

Based on what I have seen around the forums, HT on or off seems to work differently for each person's machine as was said by Dave, above.

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Thanks for the responses, guys... figured it might be a system-specific thing, but thought it was worth asking.  I'll keep experimenting.  I understand the value when you're running multiple add-ons... but that's something I'm trying to cut back on a bit.  Would like to simplify things to the extent possible.  I'll see if hyperthreading helps with that.

 

So far, differences have been subtle.  With hyperthreading off, the only add-on that's sometimes a challenge is the A2A Constellation - which I think might be related to the amount of sound processing involved. At some point I'll try a third-party sound card as another variable.

 

Will post here again if I turn up anything worth reporting.

 

Thanks again!

 

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8 hours ago, Mathijs Kok said:

90% of what people do to tweak the sim is useless.  But after you spend a whole evening tweaking you are really looking for a result so often people report that one time things worked better then before. Snake oil.

 

See, that's where I'm coming out.  I've been at this for more than 30 years, and in the context of this discussion, I've gotten pretty adept at writing batch files, but I don't want to be writing batch files - as the bumper sticker might say, I'd rather be flying.  

I'm thinking seriously that when P3D 4.3 comes out, I'll do a clean install and try to strip the sim down as much as possible - maybe some (low-ish resolution) textures, ORBX Global and landclass (but maybe not Vector), a few add-on aircraft and airports. And that might be it.  A small part of me wants to get hyperthreading right, but the bigger part wants to stop thinking about it at all.  So... simplify, simplify, as the man once said...

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  • Aerosoft

We go to a lot of shows and events and always there are people who say that they feel some products are too slow, stuttering etc. Then we look at the cfg files and often see the weirdest teaks, stuff that stopped working with FS2004 but somebody 'on the internet' said it worked great on P3D. Or people who have visible range for trees that are 70 miles or more (that's one way to run out of memory on a 64 system). Often they have tweaks to make things look better without understanding that all these things mean using more memory. 

 

Moving the cfg and restarting the sim solves so many issues it never stops surprising us. Tweak your heart out, but at the end of the session do an honest comparison between your tweaks and a fresh cfg. 

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13 hours ago, Mathijs Kok said:

Moving the cfg and restarting the sim solves so many issues it never stops surprising us. Tweak your heart out, but at the end of the session do an honest comparison between your tweaks and a fresh cfg. 

 

Thankfully I don't have much by way of tweaks in the cfg - not any, that I'm aware of - but at minimum, on the upgrade to 4.3, I'll rebuild the cfg as required and then maybe leave it close to default settings for a while and see what happened.  Hoping to find that in the matter of performance adjustments, less is more.

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