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FSX: Are Multi-Core processors worth it?

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FSX: Are Multi-Core processors worth it?

Seems like there is some confusion as to whether or now Flight Simulator will take advantage of multi-core processors. Here is a comment I received from one of our users:

"There are so many conflicting stories as to wether Fsim benefits from dual core, If you can could you comment on this technology as i am considering building a new PC and would opt for the AMD venice over the dual core unless you say that FSim would benefit.For what its worth I run Fsim over a 100mbyte network with all the other addons running on clients and just Fsim on the Main PC,so i dont expect much from a dual core"

To clearly answer this question, we first have to take a look at what really is a multi-core processor. The easiest way to think of a multi-core processor is as if it were a multi-processor machine where the processors are packaged on the same chip. This means that applications can run more tasks simultaneously, while sharing the other resources of the system.

Now, applications rarely take advantage of this directly as the actual management of a multi-core processor is actually done by the operating system. The operating system will essentially try to balance the workload of a machine by distributing various execution units (also known as Threads) onto the various cores (or processors) available on a machine.

So for an application to "take advantage" of a multi-core scenario, it essentially needs to use multiple execution units (or threads) and the operating system will automatically try to load balance these threads amongst the various processors.

But what about Flight Sim?

Compared to most games, we do a lot of work. We need to generate terrain geometry, composite textures, load and prepare scenery,... Many of these "background" tasks are actually done on separate threads. Meaning that although our main rendering is done on a single thread, all the other background tasks can potentially be offloaded to a different processor or core (of course, the decision is up to the operating system). That being said, I would not expect a 2x performance increase on a dual-core machine but because we take advantage of threading within Flight Sim there should be a measurable benefit to using a multi-core or multi-processor machine.

So to answer the question, yes there will be some performance gain from running Flight Simulator X on a Dual code machine. How much of a gain, we it is still a little too early to give numbers as we are still working hard on performance tuning the product. We'll make sure to post an update once we have a better idea.

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