I think I'm wrong about CPU core affinity (using just one physical core) being the bottleneck. Quick experiment:

- Brought down the graphics settings / resolutions, i.e. try to remove the GPU from the equations and push any bottleneck to the CPU.

- Do a 4 vs 4 dogfight, put the poor Hurricane on Autopilot.

- Start windows perfmon and stare at various value, but for this exercise just processor % per-core

Here's what it looks like:



It looks like each physical core is being used ok after-all.

Here's a video of a perf run I'm glad I don't have to make taken from the banana forum. It looks like a ATI5800 series card with a i5 @ 2.65. Worth a look if you have a tech fetish. Hmmm, is that the disk read I/O now over-flooding, would explain the freezes?



PS Apologies for flight sim fans, not sure if this is appropriate for all but it's what ticks my clock so to speak.

Thanks mate!..

Nice work dude.

SSD needed maybe?

I have an SSD, I get good FPS even with full details, as long as I don't start adding too many other AC.

I just flew for an hour around northern france in a 109, it was butter smooth, but I was on my own.

I'm beginning to suspect it would help. Also, the 'working set' of the Launcher.exe main process is only about 1.4 GB of memory, so it's frustrating to think it's not claiming more (even on a 32 bit with it's various addressing techniques) to help smooth out that I/O.

One fun/weird (delete as applicable) thing I might now try is setting up a RAM disk (it's not as if the rest of the 6GB is being used) and see if that helps a lot. Not sure how the DRM is going to like that though, i.e. me shifting files on to another volume.

Good to know - thanks. It might be two separate problems interacting too (i.e life is never that kind) in that we have a disk I/O bottleneck for the big ol textures/meshes of the landscape plus the geometry of the aircraft as you add more scales poorly for other parts of the system, i.e. AI per thread or GPU just getting a whole bunch of vertexes all at once and panicking.

Of course, I could just fly the Moth around in cycles, but this is kind of fun too

Good research. I hope that the 64Bit launcher exe will bypass the disk I/O and just load all that's needed into memory. From there it can go back and forth between system RAM and graphics RAM.

I played a lot last night from using a RAM disk, as a temporary work around - seemed to help. I put up a post on how to do it (not in real keyboard, cant find it)

Hmm.. as far as I could understand from that video (can't read Russian), the only things getting maxed out seem to be his C: and D: drives (D: much more than C:). Cores are working hard but don't seem taxed beyond their limit. Highest I saw was a very brief spike to 79% on core1. HDD being the bottle-neck would be consistent with the work-around of switching through all planes in a mission in external view to load up textures, wouldn't it?


So does this mean I can safely postpone my CPU-upgrade and should rather get an SSD? What's your recommendation Frog?


S.

If you can wait till 31st then do that, as the first patch may move any bottleneck. If you can't wait (I've been there) then looking at your specs I'd personally go SSD, mainly because all your components are well-balanced but a SSD makes everything more pleasurable to use, not just COD. If you have the RAM then my RAMdisk experiment might be worth a go, i.e. that would answer what would help if you have the time and don't mind fiddling a bit.

frog - dig up the sysinternals diagnostics, i think microsoft bought them out a few years ago, that'll allow you to narrow down cpu utilisation per process rather thanper core which is just too broad.

SysInternal's 'Process Explorer', of course - it's set as my Task Manager. Don't forget that the Performance Graph doesn't show per core, as you'll need instrumental perf counters to help with that.

Here's an enormous screen shot I took last night. It shows the per process, per core and provides some clues. For AI it still doesn't really tax the CPU on a Quad @ 3.6 - so it is 'multi-threaded' but as Oleg said in his tech interviews, not really so much.

Also for bonus points, try to identify the wee enemy planes. Plenty of Mario's on the bottom of the Channel that day my friend.

PS I was running off a 5GB RAMdisk, hence memory used. You can see how little Launcher.exe allocates. For 4 v 4 I get a steady 45 FPS with some judders now and again. Playable.



Link to big image: http://i.imgur.com/HgwJe.jpg

In many cases small judders etc happen when textures are swapped in and out of video memory.
Maybe there is not enough texture memory available on most of peoples video cards.
Some tests should be done with video card memory greater than 1GB.
Anyone have such a monster video card?

Regards Bullfrog(x-sydbod)

It's worth a try for sure. My card in the screenshot above has 1GB of video memory. I'm not sure if that's it though, as the entire memory working set of the whole process for COD was only claiming 887MB (and this was on a 8GB machine).

Maybe you could try running the game with lower texture settings (will decrease the requirement for video memory) and see if that clears up some of the juddering that you experience?

My GPU is over 2gb but cant test it till the 31st :P