X-Plane 10 and i7-4790k performance

[Dave3000]

I right now have an i7-4930k. X-Plane 10 is the game I have installed that I care about most although I play other games. Would switching from a 4930k system to a 4790k system improve performance in this game noticeably? I can probably get $400-420 for my CPU after ebay, paypal, and shipping fees and can drive to Microcenter to pick up the CPU and motherboard bundle for $385 + sales tax. I might use the same cooler, I have an Hyper 212 Evo. Is the Hyper 212 Evo good enough for the 4790k so that it won't throttle out of turbo during Intel Burn Test?

 

[Dave3000]

I just want to add that sometimes I get a 2-second stutter in X-Plane 10 on my current system. It happens about 20 minutes into flight, more like when I fly a certain distance? Would a 4790k get rid of those stutters?

 

[scannall]

The stutter is likely loading from the hard drive. Replace it with an SSD. Your CPU is plenty fast already.

 

[Dave3000]

It is installed on my SSD. I didn't notice the difference in stuttering between having it on my HDD or SSD.

 

[Ken g6]

Would switching from a 4930k system to a 4790k system improve performance in this game noticeably?

Maybe a little. Probably not noticeably. Though I can see where you might be throttling with a Hyper 212 Evo on a 4930k, which might make a difference.

The first thing I'd suggest would be to turn off hyper-threading on that 4930k. Then see what your CPU loading is during the game. Also, what are your CPU temps when gaming? Are you overclocking? (I doubt it, but I should check.) And what video card are you using?

 

[Dave3000]

My 4930k has not ever throttled. However, I used to have a 4770k that throttled out of turbo speeds in Intel Burn Test with the stock cooler. My 4930k reaches in the low 60's during Intel Burn Test and Prime 95. So most likely it's under 60 during gaming which is way below the throttling point for my CPU. If I"m ony going to get around a 10% boost in X-Plane 10 with the 4790k then I won't bother switching. My CPU is running at stock settings (reliability is more important than extra performance for me).

 

[moonbogg]

What GPU do you have?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

What GPU do you have?

EX-ACT-LY!! XPLANE-10 is a flight simulator -- also my type of "gaming" orientation. An Ivy Bridge E should be more processing power than needed, although every little bit helps.

He obviously has a dGPU, because there IS NO iGPU in an E processor. I'd give that a look-see before upgrading a system from the very same processor I was thinking to use in a build for this very year of 2014. I decided to at LEAST wait for the Haswell-E processor, and even now I have second thoughts. Maybe NEXT YEAR -- I'll build a 4790K system with Z97.

My sig-rig is more than enough for XPlane . . . There's something else "afoot" with the stuttering.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Just occurred to me, in conjunction with something I'd read about a more recent and mature motherboard release for the X79 chipset.

You may want to download "Latency Monitor" -- a freeware program that analyzes sources of DPC and Interrupt latency.

Your problems with the "stuttering" may be related to audio in addition to video. Or -- you may have a problem related to driver conflicts.

No expert in this, but I thought I'd throw it out there. Latency Monitor helped me determine the cause of a processor core loading up when a system was basically at idle. And I got rid of the problem.

 

[frozentundra123456]

If you havent already, overclock the 4930k. At stock the 4790k would probably be faster in a lightly threaded game, since it is basically a factory overclocked 4770k. Max turbo on the 4930k is 3.9 I believe while the 4790k is 4.4, or about 13% faster plus a small ipc advantage of haswell over ivy. Overall, not worth the expense and trouble to change though.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

If you havent already, overclock the 4930k. At stock the 4790k would probably be faster in a lightly threaded game, since it is basically a factory overclocked 4770k. Max turbo on the 4930k is 3.9 I believe while the 4790k is 4.4, or about 13% faster plus a small ipc advantage of haswell over ivy. Overall, not worth the expense and trouble to change though.

I got all but the last sentence: " . . . expense and trouble to change . . " What?!

 

[frozentundra123456]

Just meant new cpu and motherboard. Sure the op could sell the current system, but that would be a downgrade for any heavily MT application.

 

[Charlie98]

I guess I'm really in trouble... I just loaded X-plane 10 on my Pentium system...

I'd be curious what GPU the OP had, I'm using my old GTX560Ti and it seems to work pretty well.

 

[Mr Burns]

I use a 3770K overclocked at 4.6 GHZ, and 290X in Crossfire. Crossfire does not work in X-Plane 10 and will probably never work. It's also OpenGL, I'm unsure if Amd's OpenGL implementation is good or bad and if Nvidia's would be any better, but SLI doesn't work either anyway. I also run it on an I7 930 @ 4.0 GHZ with a gtx 680 and it runs worse.

The CPU load is never 100%, with or without Hyperthreading, it's more around 40% on average, and from what I recall not on all cores either. Video card utilization, at least for me, is between 40% and 100% (going up and down every 2-3 seconds), and it is using about 3.6-3.7 GB of video ram with uncompressed textures at 4K resolution.

If I use the cpu at stock speed (3.9 GHZ), and keep video card settings the same, I lose about 7-8 fps, so even though the cpu is not fully loaded, speed seems to make a much bigger difference than cores. It struggles to keep 30 fps with decent graphical settings at 4K (also used triple screen 1080p displays, which was just as bad). This is also with the video card overclocked to 1220 MHZ core and 1550 MHZ ram. Using stock video card settings drops anoter 5-6 fps (1000 MHZ core, 1125 MHZ ram).


Everything maxed out and it literally runs at 1 fps. At 1080p the framerates are obviously better, but cpu utilization is the same, regardless of cpu (I7 930 or 3770K).

My opinion is that cpus and video cards that run as fast as possible give better results than having a million number of cores in the current X-Plane 10 version.

 

[lyssword]

you might be running out of memory or like others said, loading from hard drive, get SSD.

 

[Dave3000]

My video card is a GTX 780Ti. When I had a GTX 680 4GB I also had the same stutters in this game. X-Plane is installed on my Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD. I was just doing a 30 minute flight and had about a 1.5 second stutter about 15 minutes into it the flight, flying at 110 knots. I have 32GB of RAM, so lack of RAM is not the problem here.

 

[Headfoot]

I don't think the stuttering is hardware related. I'd look online concerning X-Plane itself or whether you have some other software issue. It could be the design of the game itself. Fallout New Vegas, for example, would stutter no matter what hardware you had due to how it loaded levels. There was a mod that would preload things and completely removed stuttering, so perhaps there is could be some equivalent for X-Plane?

 

[alyarb]

Get an email dialogue going with the guys at laminar, they are all hopeless geeks and will get into it at length with you. Once they shut up about the new Mac Pros, that is. They are a small company. If you're getting bad performance and don't know why they will take it personally and help you.

With the little information you have provided, I would still say you are i/o limited unless you can provide the model # of your SSD. You know it has to call up new ENV files once you start covering ground, right? It sounds like your computer has arms like a hulk and legs like a flamingo.

edit: i see the 840 Pro and 32 GB RAM. Are you using stock scenery? I would get in touch with Laminar.

also I haven't used x-plane since v5.66 so I assume they have only added features, not subtracted. It's just a beast of a program.

 

[Mouse McCoy]

Try turning off RAPID mode on your SSD and see if that helps.