For those who haven't noticed...

[J0hn]

I'll give it a try - my PC is now in bits. Turned out, when I knocked over a glass of apple juice on the table a couple of weeks ago, it dribbled (more like poured) between a gap in the table middle and end - one of those fold-out ones - and it went straight through the top grid of my PC case and coated the motherboard, graphics card, SATA sockets etc etc.

I just ordered my upgrades early, but because I bought that motorbike, I can't afford what I originally wanted.

Have to settle for a 2GB GTX760 OC and a mid-range new mobo, but I did find a great deal and got 16GB of DDR3 1600 for £30.

Will be interesting to see how P3Dv2 runs on it. No flying until that gets here, though

Then I'll have to ask LM to renew my activation.

[Adrian Petford]

Spotted a very interesting and potentially useful post over at AVSIM, regarding CPU affinity setting and the effect it has on P3Dv2:
http://forum.avsim.net/topic/430353-aff ... -it-works/

Yes, manually setting the affinity mask has had great results for me. I use 84 as I have a quad core with hyperthreading enabled (4 real cores, 4 virtual cores).

Before, P3D was a blurry mess. Ground textures started sharp but once I was flying over an area they would blur and not fully recover. This happened with default, addon and photoscenery.

According to LM, P3D sets its own affinity mask and supports multi-core but allocates the work across all the cores. While this sounds more efficient in theory, real and virtual cores on one processor still have to compete for the same I/O resources in the system which presumably explains the blurries as they are trying to do the same tasks at the same time. AffinityMask=84 leaves the first core free for the operating system, second for P3D and third and fourth dedicated to rendering textures in P3D. The four virtual cores are not used.

I'd recommend everyone to at least try this tweak as it's been a silver bullet for me in terms of performance and smoothness in P3D.

[TSR2]

There seems to be some confusion chaps. The old affinity mask setting is something people used to set in FSX and P3D 1.4. By default P3D2 uses an affinity mask on all quad cores and above which leaves core 0 free. I.e if you have a quad core and an unmodified p3d2, it will only use 3 of the cores.

personally i always found this to be poppycock and in FSX and P3D 1.4 I never used the affinity mask as leaving core 0 free made both Sims blurry.

Now in P3D2 you need to set the affinity mask, BUT ONLY FOR THE OPPOSITE REASONS. I.e. P3D2 will only use 3 of the 4 cores, so now i must set the affinity mask to get it to use all of the cores.

[robcarrich]

Blurred textures are noticeably reduced with Affinity Mask set to 63 on my AMDx6 system.

[TSR2]

Is that using all the cores mate, or leaving core zero free?

[TSR2]

Just checked on the binary converter in the phone and that mask is all 6 of your cores. That certainly ties in with what i found with my Intel CPU, i.e. Using all the cores is better than using n-1. I really don't know who started the idea, but i suspect it may have been somebody using XP back when the multi core CPUs where new ish. Certainly with Win 7 and later, i don't see the point having 1 core running at 5% (which is all a system typically uses for background tasks). Best let the OS manage it.

[robcarrich]

I couldn't find the settings for my particular CPU so I started at 14 and worked my way up but quickly ran out of patience, then saw that the setting for a quad core is 84 so worked my way down from that!

[TSR2]

Hi Rob,

to use all the cores on an i5 the mask is 15. What processor have you got?

[EDIT] Sorry Rob, didn't read your last post properly, just ignore my last comment.

[robcarrich]

I have no idea what the equation is for working this out so in my case it was trial and error, the difference it has made is quite marked though.

[TSR2]

Its basically the binary for the number of cores you want to use. In your case the AMD x6 has 6 cores. If you think of it as a 1 uses the core and a 0 doesn't. As you want all of your cores used, this is 111111. 111111 converted to decimal is 63. Therefore the affinity mask required to use all cores of a 6 core CPU is 63.

similarly, the Intel i5's are a quad core. This means a binary value of 1111, a 1 for each core. The decimal value of binary 1111 is 15. Therefore the affinity mask required to use all 4 cores on a 4 core CPU is 15.