Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

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Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby jwenham » Sun Feb 22, 2009 11:46 pm

The affinity mask may be a see how it works on your system but I have been making close observations with mine. They are as follows:

1) setting it to 7 worked and seemed to be fine in my test except for when I tested with all my addons chugging along. I set the addons to run on core 1 as that is the core left open with a setting of 7. What happend durring the test with all addons on core 1 and FSX on 2, 3, 4 was a hard crash saying my OC failed. When rebooting durring POST it was reading stock the speed 2.93. When going into the BIOS, all my OC settings were in tack. ALT CTRL DELETE and reboot all all was back to normal.

2) setting it to 14 seemed to be best during my test but did notice some stutters when on takeoff roll and taxi and initial climb. These were small stutters but would repeat untill in a calmer area.

3) setting it at 15 activates all 4 cores and produced stutters in busier areas.

4) no affinity mask really seems to do a better job of evening things out while transitioning from heavy to lighter areas. The stutters seem to be reduced as well where they were more prominent. While testing this setting I watched my CPU temps as well as the performace in the task manager. Core 1 was almost always at 100% and the other 3 would hum along according to the graph equally more or less at around 60% or lower. Then when turning or entering a heavier area the last 3 cores would step in more and even things out. Also with this setting I was able to get higher FPS from 2 to 5 more than with the other settings tested.

My conclusion is that if you fly around in a area that doesnt have large swings in performance an affinity mask may improve things for you. If you fly longer flights or fly in areas that have big swings in performance not applying a affinity mask showed more pleasing results for me with more consistant FPS and smoothness while transitioning from area to area.

Take this info however you wish but I really spent alot of time looking at this and the results of each and wanted to pass along my findings.

The setting that really made the biggest improvement for me was setting the TBM to 90. I started at 70 but got alot of stutters with it. When switching to 80 I saw another notch of smoothness to the sim. I then went to 90 to see what would happen and it again added another notch of smoothness. I really noticed it getting better and better when switching settings while using TRACK IR. I then went to 100 and started to see more stutters comming back similar to the 70 setting. So 90 ended up being my sweet spot. I confirmed this setting with another that has the same system as me.

Hopefully this will help some people in finding a good set of tweeks for those on i7 as I spent alot of time investigating them.
Last edited by jwenham on Sun Feb 22, 2009 11:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby Wingo » Mon Feb 23, 2009 6:11 am

Thanks for the info. I'll try these settings on my system soon to confirm. did you have HT enabled or disabled?
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby jwenham » Mon Feb 23, 2009 7:05 am

Thanks for the info. I'll try these settings on my system soon to confirm. did you have HT enabled or disabled?


Disable HT. Im interested to know how it works for you.
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby Wingo » Mon Feb 23, 2009 7:36 am

Might be a week or so. I'm STILL waiting for my mobo back from warranty that was sent back over a month ago, but it should be back soon.
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby NickN » Mon Feb 23, 2009 10:50 am

Disable HT.. I have confirmation from a Aces source FSX makes absolutely no use of HT what so ever. HT enabled in the BIOS for video encoding and other software which may take advantage of it.. otherwise disable the function because all it does is heat up the proc
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby stevehookem » Mon Feb 23, 2009 4:18 pm

Jim and I were on the phone working through a lot of this last night. Since our systems are essentially the same I can confirm that my best settings are:

FRAME RATE LOCKED at 28
TBM = 90
No affinity mask
BufferPools = 100000000

I have 28 for framerate since this comes closest to dividing into my projector's refresh rate. I don't know if that matters but I'm flying better than I ever have now! Smooth as glass.

I have the level-d 767 flying a real time flight from ATL to IAH now at 34000 feet. Frames aren't moving off 27.9 (28) and the terrain is flowing underneath just like it really looks.

I'm running the MCP-Pro off the GPS and I feel like I should be riding in the back! Nice and smooth.....
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby SubZer0 » Tue Feb 24, 2009 12:11 am

Steve, as I posted in your thread in the hardware section, my settings are exactly the same. what did it was the bufferpools at 100000000. textures loading quite nicely as well, which was always a problem before. thanks!
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby stevehookem » Tue Feb 24, 2009 8:16 am

All credit goes to Nick for the great guides and Jim for the bufferpool entry suggestion!

I tried every amount from 35mil to 80mil before going with 100000000.
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby NickN » Tue Feb 24, 2009 12:29 pm

Whats happening with this BP value on the larger memory cards is for some reason it is reducing the latency on the PCIe x16 buss. Its not that the amount reserved is doing anything IN FSX.. it seems to be having a positive effect on the PCIe buss dropping the latency and allowing no lag in communication


Looking further into this however I think it is somthing in combination with how FSX works and the chipset itself. This is being seen on P35, x38, x48 and x58 chipsets and the 1GB Nvidia cards
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby jwenham » Tue Feb 24, 2009 10:32 pm

All credit goes to Nick for the great guides and Jim for the bufferpool entry suggestion!

I tried every amount from 35mil to 80mil before going with 100000000.


Hey Steve, try setting your scenery complexity to very dense and autogen at very dense as well. I was getting small stutters at larger airports and set my settings to very dense for both and man alive did it smooth out more. I would almost say it is darn near perfect.
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby stevehookem » Wed Feb 25, 2009 8:23 am

I'll try it!

It's been very smooth so far though. I thought frame rate drops were normal on the ground at any airport. I know that my frames are always lower as I takeoff even though it still looks smooth. I do see a few quick "bursts" of stutter. Hopefully this is the trick.
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby stevehookem » Wed Feb 25, 2009 11:26 am

When I take scenery complexity down to very dense, I actually get lower frame rates than when it is up all the way. I have SC all the way and autogen=dense. Visually, I cannot see any difference between dense and very dense with autogen but it does affect the stutters.

Very, very happy with this system now! It flies like a real plane!
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby SubZer0 » Wed Feb 25, 2009 12:34 pm

hey guys. if you don't mind, I'd like for you to run a quick test to see how your systems manage large amounts of autogen trees. the reason I ask is because I do a lot of bush flying and I'm always around large, forested areas. my system at this point begins to stutter a lot and all smoothness disappears. I set the autogen density down to very dense and it still doesn't help, but setting it to dense finally does the job... it's not that big of a problem, but if you don't mind I'd like to see how your systems react to this. I have the same settings as you TBM 90 and BP 100000000 locked at 28.

for the test location, PAKT (Ketchikan Intl') is a good place. just to the West or Southwest of the airport you'll notice hills and a LOT of trees. fly over the area in low altitude and see how your systems react to this. I want to see if it's normal for the stutters to happen even at "very dense" autogen settings or if it's just my system that falls apart at this point ;D

let me know what happens if you do decide to try it... thanks!

Andy
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby stevehookem » Wed Feb 25, 2009 1:09 pm

what plane do you use to fly this?
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Re: Affinity mask and TBM on i7?

Postby SubZer0 » Wed Feb 25, 2009 4:08 pm

Baron 58
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