Simviation Forums

As I am buying my dentist a new car and making house payments for my oncologist, a new computer is not in my immediate future. So I am trying to improve this old one. Replaced the Athlon 64x2 2.2 with an Athlon 64x2 3.0 6000+; windoze is faster, Firefox is faster, games load faster, but I am seeing at best a 10% fps increase in a few games. No improvement in FS9, most race sims, or Torchlight 2. Heat isn't an issue, cpu idles at 35C, haven't seen it over 50C; the old 2.2, with stock heat sink, idled around 38C but touched 60C with some games. Since I've always been told FS9 is more cpu than gpu dependent I expected more from a 70% increase in cpu. All tests, plus GPU-Z, show the cpu is functioning normally. So why no appreciable increase in fps?

FS 2004 runs fine with a fairly lowly CPU, 2.8 GHZ, (unlike FSX which needs the fastest CPU that you can afford...i7...!).
(My old Intel Pentium 4 Dual, 2.8GHz ran FS 2004 flat out, smoothly, with frame rates LOCKED at 20 FPS).
FS 2004 looks nice with a decent GPU.
SMOOTHLY is the name of the game!

Paul.... ...!

That CPU is at best a 40% increase from your old one.
Clearly it's not enough to show a performance boost in FS9.
MS's Flight Sims have never been very well optimised, meaning you need pretty decent hardware to warrant a boost in performance from older systems.
If you replaced your CPU with one a few years old or newer, you'd notice a big difference. (Your first Athlon is from 2006, newer one is from 2008).

Edit: While these games are very CPU dependent, they still rely a lot on graphics cards, getting a more powerful card would make a big difference also.

rm_123 wrote:That CPU is at best a 40% increase from your old one.

??
A boost from 2.2gig to 3.0 gig is a 70% increase.

rm_123 wrote:MS's Flight Sims have never been very well optimised, meaning you need pretty decent hardware to warrant a boost in performance from older systems.
If you replaced your CPU with one a few years old or newer, you'd notice a big difference. (Your first Athlon is from 2006, newer one is from 2008).

Best my mobo will support is a 64x2 3.2gig. System is six years old.

rm_123 wrote:Edit: While these games are very CPU dependent, they still rely a lot on graphics cards, getting a more powerful card would make a big difference also.

Recently I read numerous articles regarding FS9 from the era of my system, recommendations were a 2.6gig or better cpu and a 512meg vid card.

My system, with the original cpu, could maintain 25-30fps in most areas, dropping to 12-15 in congested areas like Heathrow; I capped the fps at 25. With the 3.0 cpu my frame rates in FS9 are exactly the same (I removed the fps limit for testing).

Of course a new vid card would be an improvement. So would a new mobo with 16gig RAM and a quad core 4.5 gig cpu. And all this would require a new PS. If I could afford a new system I wouldn't have posted this question.

jgf wrote:??
A boost from 2.2gig to 3.0 gig is a 70% increase.

You can't compare processors by clock speed unless they're exactly the same otherwise.
These CPUs are 2 years apart (and running on different architectures), meaning a comparison on clock speed won't give an accurate performance figure between them.

jgf wrote:If I could afford a new system I wouldn't have posted this question.

Obviously I'm not saying you should go out and buy a new system, just trying to explain when you should expect a performance boost (from FS9/FSX).
The recommended specifications for a game generally state the hardware required to run the game at medium-ish settings with a smooth frame rate (25-30+ fps).
Like I said before, it's obvious that the slight increase in CPU performance isn't enough to boost the fps, that's just the way the FS series is made.

rm_123 wrote:...

You can't compare processors by clock speed unless they're exactly the same otherwise.
These CPUs are 2 years apart (and running on different architectures), meaning a comparison on clock speed won't give an accurate performance figure between them.
....

Both are Athlon 64x2 series, so we're not talking a different family of cpu. Best my mobo will support is a 3.2 - harder to find and costs twice as much for that extra 0.2. But I can't complain too much, performance of almost everything else is improved.

I wasn't looking for higher maximum fps but for less loss under load; 25fps in FS9 is fine for me, it would just be nice to maintain that. FWIW, two of my race sims show a decided improvement, one went from around 80fps to 120fps, same car, same track, solo testing; gets about a third of that in a race. (Then there is Thief 3, which has obstinately refused to load or run any faster on any system I've had in ten years.)

I hate throwing my 2 cents into this mix, because I know next to nothing about either FS9 or the Athlon series.


Perhaps your lack of improvement may lie here -




or with registered / non-registered memory here (Wiki)-



I know that either of the above should affect ALL programs (which you say is not the case), but different programs may be using memory differently.

That was a minor problem back in the 386/386SX days.

Thanks for the input. According to that performance index I went from 120 to 163, a 73% increase. Just seems FS9 doesn't want to acknowledge that.

Since everything I've read stated FS9 was more cpu than gpu dependent, and since I'd replaced the vid card about four years ago, it made sense to go with the fastest cpu this mobo would support. The 3.0 6000+ with a Hyper 212 cooler was less than $70; an appreciable improvement in the vid card would have been twice that, plus would likely have required a larger PS. So this system will soldier on til, if i live long enough, I replace the entire thing.