Is X-Plane 10 the most demanding game ever ??

My friend asked me what is the most CPU intense game and most demanding game this has to be X-Plane 10 ??
i7-4700mq with 880m SLI on high 27.9FPS and on Ultra 22.1FPS (AVERAGE)
i7-4930Mx(1000$ CPU) 880m SLI on high 32.1 and on Ultra 25.2FPS
i7-4800mq with R9 m290X Crossfire on Ultra 16FPS haha
is there any more demanding game ??

 

Try Flight Simulator X on ultra and see for yourself.

 

should of changed the title to x-plane and FSX

 

It's either that or most badly optimized game.

 

Yeah definitely THE most badly optimized game. I mean what kinda game needs a 10+ GHz processor in order to run on max settings?

 

It's normal for flight sims to be extremely taxing on the CPU. They've always been that way. I think commercial flight sims are the only games I've ever seen to actually benefit from multiple CPU's. I'm sure the subpar performance can be attributed in large part to the API overhead of D3D and OpenGL. If there's anything that would benefit greatly from Mantle and DX12 it's simulation games and RTSes.

The good thing is that flight sims aren't FPSes so 20-30 FPS is not as huge of a deal and can still be enjoyable. To this day I still can't run FS X satisfactorily on my modern Core i5 and i7. AKAIK it never got the CPU multi-threading and performance benefits of DX11 either. It only uses two cores of the CPU.

The laggiest game I've ever played was FS '04 back in the day when I was rocking all of an overheating single-core Prescott P4. 1 FPS FTW!

Hmmm this thread is giving me an itch to dig out my joystick and reinstall some M$ FS and Combat FS.

 

Calculating real time physics of an aircraft is no easy task...

 

Probably the draw calls. Flight sims are BIG. Lots of objects in a scene.

 

Actually the key issue with FSX is it was never intended, and thus never properly coded to run on more than a single core. Before SP1 was released, it could only utilize one single core to perform all of its calculations. With SP1 it gained some multi-core functionality, but apparently all it did was utilize the additional cores for loading textures, while the meat of the work aka physics calculations were still only being done on a single core. And that is the crux of the problem.

The story I heard was that when M$ was developing FSX, P4 was in its heyday, and Intel was all about the jiggahertz. Multi-core architecture was still in its infant stage, and wasn't taken too seriously. The development team still thought that the focus would've been on achieving higher clock speeds (and up till P4 that was true), and thus coded around a single core architecture. Their vision of the future was one in which CPUs would be capable of running 6+ GHz. But of course Intel gave up on pushing clock speeds after P4 and instead shifted to a multi-core architecture. And that did not bode well at all for a game that was coded from the ground up to run on a single core, with the implicit assumption that much faster CPUs (clock speed wise) would be released in the future, and thus allowing people to push higher settings.

 

Legacy code holding back performance. Makes sense, but it's not unique to FSX. You could say this about pretty much any game up until the last few years. Even now there are AAA titles like PlanetSide 2 and World of Tanks that are still DX9 and single-threaded. FSX being a simulation-heavy title just has much higher CPU demands than most mainstream games.

I distinctly remember my Pentium 4 sputtering and dying trying to run FS9 back in '03. It's not like Intel's single-core performance at the time was anything to brag about, not when AMD was spanking them with Athlon XP and Athlon 64. Oh yeah and GeForce FX getting p0wned by Radeon 9000 Series was around the same time too. AMD and ATi were on top of the world back then!

 

Yeah the much higher CPU demand is what really aggravates the problem of using only a single core. Had FSX been optimized for multi-core CPUs, I imagine a quad-core running 3 GHz should be enough to run with most settings maxed out. And certainly a hex-core would definitely be able to max out everything.

Athlon64 and the Radeon 9000 series were indeed the highlights back in the day. Seeing the underdogs dishing out heavy punishment made me a very happy person. Unfortunately, Athlon64 was the last good chip that AMD released. ATi did fine with the X1000 cards IMHO, and then started a slow but steady decline from there onwards (which of course, coincided with the AMD acquisition). I know I'm biased, but I still blame AMD for killing the ATi legacy.

 

So any of you tried Prepar3d? I thought about jumping <del>ship</del> plane, but from that I read online, it doesn't sound very god either. Just a bit polished FSX.

 

Haven't tried prepar3d, but have gone pretty much exclusively to Xplane 10 now... don't even have a copy of FSX installed anymore

I'll lean to poorly optimized as opposed to most demanding... Sure, the flight model requires some CPU power, but it runs smoothly on my Surface Pro 2 with it's low end i5 and low/medium graphics at 25-35fps. It's just when you enable the higher end graphics options that are poorly implemented that things chug on all machines. My GT60 by comparison will run it just fine with high settings with 60+fps until you start enabling serious weather/clouds, at which point framerate will drop a bit. Having said that, the game engine is totally smooth around 30fps and not intended to need to run higher.

It's a small development team on a tight budget, and can't imagine they are selling millions of copies.

Aftermarket aircraft have a big effect on performance as well. The FlyJsim Boeing 727 series is fantastically modelled, but it'll drop performance a few frames when in the 3D modelled cockpit where every switch/instrument is modelled. Total blast flying the old iron however :thumbsup:

 

OP, you do realise that X-plane is probably one of the most realistic flight sims out there? I am studying aeronautical engineering and they use X-plane to model planes etc and you cannot imagine how much bloody CPU+GPU power we need... I'm suprised that you can even do 30 fps with an 880M SLI on your rig.. Then again, not everyone has a supercomputer and a realistic flight sim to play with

 

Yep,My question Is X-Plane the most demanding not Why and I've been in a real simulator for training for Pilots and X-plane is not far off the realism actually it's quite close bar actually been in the cockpit and playing the game on medium is perfect as it has stunning physics and design,most realistic sim ever

 

After watching a bunch of X-Plane 10 videos I have to admit - it's the future. FSX is nearing it's 10th anniversary, and I have a great time playing it, but I'm really hoping that by the time I'll be ready to get a new rig I won't have to deal with FSX ever again. Prepar3d looks good, but my problem with it is that underneath it's still a bit polished 10 year old code. I just hope that my favorite planes get developed/ported to X-Plane.
Now on to performance question - I just wonder what kind of performance I would get with X-Plane 10 if I would play it with a bunch of addons (high end 3rd party planes, live weather, clouds/scenery, etc.). Wonder how it would compare to FSX in performance.