buying new pc, how many cores will edge suport ?

[LarryElder]

Hi,

 

In about a month i'm buying a new pc, that will be mostly for dcs, and now i'm choosing between i7 4790k and the new i7 5820k. The older one has 4 cores but higher clock speed, and the other has 6 cores, but lower clock. As the edge suppose to be relased this year i hope the fact of how many cores will it support was mentioned already ? Can somebody help me out please ?

 

thanks in advance

[GeorgeLKMT]

For games, usually clock speed>number of cores. I would suggest you buying i5 instead (unless your really really need that hyperthreading for something else) and buying better card with money you save on CPU. Or SSD or something... Performance boost then will be much better than with i7, especially if you overclock. HT is not going to make a difference, a little bit more cache that i7 has neither. ;)

[LarryElder]

thank you for your answer! ;) The reason i thought about those processors is becouse i try to take into consideration the future release of oculus rift and i have no clue how important for high resolutions will be the cpu. Another thing that got me thinking is the fact that the 5820k works with ddr4, and i guess ram is used pretty heavily in dcs. Still i think you may be right, and choosing i5 and spending big on gpu insted may be a way to go ;)

[NineLine]

EDGE takes advantage of multi GPUs not multi cores.

[LarryElder]

EDGE takes advantage of multi GPUs not multi cores.

 

so that means that multi cores are supported already right ? but is there a limit of how many the game uses ?

[NineLine]

DCS currently uses a separate core for audio, but thats it.

[Need-To-Know]

EDGE takes advantage of multi GPUs not multi cores.

 

Interesting. I had seen that SLI was going to be supported in an earlier post from Wags but did not see it on the list in the Sept. newsletter.

 

So is SLI still going to make the Edge list- maybe a future thing or something? Figures crossed. :)

[hannibal]

dont buy anything yet till EDGE comes out, and there will be benchmarks and charts..

[NineLine]

Yes, multi GPU will be supported, up to 4 GPUs I think they said.

[LarryElder]

It seems now i definitely don't need that much power in the cpu department. So now it's waiting for nvidia on 19th september and seeing how gtx 900's will compare to 700's, and either gonna pick the new one up if it's worth it or take advantage of the discounts for the 700's

[NineLine]

Good, maybe I can buy some slightly used 700s :)

[LarryElder]

dont buy anything yet till EDGE comes out, and there will be benchmarks and charts..

 

I would really like to wait, but the problem is i currently use my laptop with gt 635m, and as i got really hooked with dcs lately i am really tired of playing on medium with 20+ fps ( on helicopters it gets worse ). I really hope edge comes out soon, but when they say late 2014, they probably mean late november or somewhere in december, and of course i hope i'm wrong :D

[Kayos]

The 700's will come way down in price when the 900's come out. Wait until then.

You shouldn't have to wait long. I think they are shooting for Sept.

[Need-To-Know]

Yes, multi GPU will be supported, up to 4 GPUs I think they said.

 

Veeery nice. Thanks for the info. :clap:

[Thick8]

You could go for both speed and core count. A water cooled 8350 will run at 5Ghz on all 8 cores 24/7.

Edited September 7, 2014 by Thick8
checking sig

[doveman]

If DCS remains single-threaded then that oc'd 8350 will still be worse than an i5-4670k

[LarryElder]

After reading everything in this thread and doing some thinking i will probably go with i5 4690k, it's 3,5Ghz out of the box and can be overclocked a lot, so there's a lot of place for improvement. And frankly i'm not a big fan of amd, maybe i am completely wrong but i don't even cosider it at this point.

[towsim]

It is a campfire tale, that DSC runs on two threads only. There are some devices like the graphics adapter, which can be feed by only by one and the same thread. As soon as aircraft system simulation is discussed, there are a lot of threads running in parallel. To underline this statement, I attached a screenshot from Microsoft Spy++. The right sub window shows the 54 running threads of a DCS mission. The windows operating system takes care, that all threads are spread evenly over all cores. That does not work perfectly, but it is adequate to take all advantage of multiple cores. The other fact to consider is, DCS is not the only application running on the computer. There are many other processes running in the background, each in an own thread. As you can see in the attached performance diagram picture, 1434 threads are running at the same time. The only reason to think on only two cores is the single core performance. Most of the multi core CPUs have a reduced clock frequency for a single core. In this case, it could become a question to take 4 cores at 2.5 GHz or 2 cores at 3.3 GHz. But this counts only, if you run an important high performance application, which consists of one or two threads only. If you observer the attached performance diagram , showing a running DCS, you will see three cores running at about 50%. These cores carry threads, which can obviously not divided into different processes. But there are other cores, which are significantly engaged. In the diagram you see the result of a 3.3 GHz 6 core CPU running hyper threading, which results in 12 logical cores. The running DCS serves a single A10c in takeoff position at Sochi, RWY 24. Therefore, a six core CPU should have a remarkable advantage over a two core CPU. The 6 cores from the diagram , which carry the most load would be spread over two cores only. The context switch between different cores/threads do not impact the performance like some rumors say. We had a ATC tower simulation driving 256 Aircraft at a time. Every aircraft running in an own thread. It worked on a four core CPU at almost 100% load. And this on a CPU from 10 years ago. So my advice would be, more cores = more performance.

[doveman]

Yes windows automatically spreads the load over the cores but that doesn't mean you're getting any real benefit from having more cores, if the total load only amounts to 100% of one core (in your screenshot it's only using 15% of 6 cores, which is less than 1 core fully loaded). I believe that it has been confirmed in a recent statement that EDGE will still only use two cores, although I'm not sure exactly what that means, considering that Windows will automatically schedule the load amongst all available cores, unless you lock it to specific cores using Process Lasso or similar.

 

So if the main part of DCS is single-threaded (and maxes out one core) and it also runs some other threads for audio, etc that don't amount to more than 100% of one core, then probably two good, fast cores would be sufficient. Sure, we have other apps running but they generally don't require much CPU % each, so a quad-core is generally adequate.

 

It's been proven that Intel i5 CPUs work much better for single-threaded processes than AMD ones at the same clock speed, simply because they're designed differently and more efficient for that. Even at 5ghz I don't believe a 6 or 8 core AMD will outperform a 4.5Ghz i5-4670k.

 

X-Plane is similar to DCS in that it runs it's main simulation process on a single-thread but uses other threads for scenery loading, etc and likewise that runs much better on an i5 than AMD and there's little to no benefit from the extra threads with an i7 or more than 4 cores.

 

Anyway, I've just bought myself an i5-4670k and Z97 board, so I'll be able to compare for myself once I get that set up.

[tobaschi]

best advice in that thread is, wait till edge is released, because if you build your pc specialy for DCS, wait till it's worth.

 

****PURE SPECULATIONS****

 

i think DCS World 2.0 will mostly profit from fast GPU^y (SLI/CROSSFIRE)

much RAM

fast SSD's

 

 

the only two questions are how strong it profits from multi gpu's and how AMD/ATI runs compared to NVIDIA

 

****PURE SPECULATIONS****

[towsim]

Please, do not think, that I want to be right in any case. But the experience I made during 25 years software development in ATC, cannot be wrong.The big misunderstand for most of the users is the mix up of calculation speed and process time. Multithreading does not give any advantageif it is running on a single core. All threads are serialized and get their process time one after the other if the priority is not changed intentionally.So if 10 threads are running and every thread needs 100 micro seconds before it shifts the control to the next thread, the entire loop would take 1000 micro seconds before thefirst thread gets control again.If these 10 threads are spread over 2 cores, the loop time would be the half theoretically.There is a certain limit because the memory access must be synchronized between the cores.If you are dealing with frame calculation it makes a difference if you calculate a position update every 1000micro second or every 500 microseconds. The performance manager may still shows below 100% , but the wait for a single thread increases with every new thread in the queue. And no, the thread manager does not take care that all threads get the same process time. Only if a thread needs more than 2 ms process time , then the thread manager interrupts. A good constructed thread pushes the control back to the thread manager, immediately after one calculation loop. To simplify this point of view. Two active cashiers in a supermarket can handle more customer at a time than only one.But the time for the simple procedure, for a single customer with counting items, paying the bill and getting the change, will not be faster.The overall throughput will be better with two cashiers.Since these are only spoken words, and I tend to lie sometimes, I made a test with 6 cores and one with only two cores on the same computer , using the same DCS mission in both tests.

Hardware:

Processor test 1:Intel i7x980, 6 physical cores at 3.33 GHz

Processor test 2:Intel i7x980, 2 physical cores at 3.33 GHz

Memory:12.0 GB

Graphic:Nvidia Geforce GTX 680

Disk:256 GB PCI SSD

 

Test 1 uses 6 cores the picture below shows the load, during runtime with 6 cores (12 virtual cores)

 

 

and the resulting DCS frame indication:

 

Now the test with only two cores during DCS runtime:

 

And the resulting frame indication:

 

 

The frames are decreased from 55 fps to 26 fps. Even, if the average load is far below 100%, a single thread is called less often per second than it would be with 6 cores. And this is the key.

My recommendation is still: as much cores as possible

[doveman]

You obviously understand the technical stuff more than I do. I'm just repeating what other people have told me (and which seems reasonably true) about DCS and X-Plane, as I haven't been able to compare AMD 6-8 core with Intel quad core myself.

 

It would be interesting if you could repeat your test with 4 cores though, to see if there's any advantage with 6 cores. I can see from your two core test that both cores were pretty much maxed out at the same points, so it's understandable that DCS is hitting the buffers in this test, although it's somewhat strange considering that ED have said that EDGE only needs/uses 2 cores (and I presume the same for current DCS) but with 4 cores to spread the load over it might be all it needs. 3.3Ghz is quite low as well, so you might find if you test OC'd to 4.4Ghz (which seems to be quite an easy OC with a i5-4670k and so what most people will use), that those two cores then have sufficient headroom not to limit DCS.

[towsim]

The result seems to be linear in a certain way, if fps are compared to number of cores. But this has an upper limit, where additional cores do not increase the performance anymore. I forgot to mention, that a multi core environment has a small trap door. It can happen, that windows delivers the most power requiring threads to the same core. In this case, the advantage of additional cores is gone. I experienced this in an Windows XT environment with two graphical adapters and two separate CPUs. Both adapters were served by the same CPU, which led into overheating of the stressed CPU. But I never observed this with Windows 7 (never tested Windows 8 ). The two pictures show the same stress test with 4 cores active. The frame rate is any what around 40.

 

[Pilotasso]

have you tested with 3 and 4 cores?

[Gloom Demon]

Yeah - turn off all cores but two, overclock them and run a test. And then turn on all cores and run a test at nominal frequency. I bet the overclocked cores will win :-)

 

It is better to leave three cores though - for all the background processes Windows runs.