Why do I have so terrible performance on X-Plane 10.42?

Question

I'm with X-Plane 10.42 64-bit bought via Steam, and my performance is terrible. Even with the lowest preset, I can't get more than 40 FPS, whereas I can play GTA V and Crysis 3 (and a lot of other games and 3D engineering applications) with 60 FPS or more in the medium/high settings. With the medium preset, performance drops sharply to just 23 FPS or lower, depending on the scenery.

Also interesting, the anti-aliasing processing seems not to be occurring, regardless of which level is set on the Rendering Options of the simulator.

This testing is being done with the Cessna 172, and the default airport on a clear weather setting. The resolution is 1920x1080x32-bit fullscreen. I´m on Windows 10, with a GTX 570 GPU (which has 1280MB of VRAM) on a 16x PCI-e bus (effective, not degraded to 8x), running the latest NVidia drivers (361.43). The system has 8GB of DDR3 RAM running at 1333MHz on two channels, however X-Plane hardly uses more than 3GB - paging is definitely not occurring. The CPU (which is an AMD Phenom II x4 965) load is evenly spread between the four cores, but they spent most of the time idling (CPU usage doesn't reach 50% while in the simulation). The testing was also obviously done without other applications running. No mods, add-in aircraft or scenery are installed.

Here's the Log.txt file:

Download file

From the in-game counter, I get just 0.044 of CPU time usage, and 0.037 of GPU time usage.

Is there something wrong, or this kind of low performance is expected? What should I try?

Answer 1

I don't have a perfect answer for you and X-plane staff can answer better, but I just wanted to give you my two cents experience with the sim and performance.

I also had AMD Phenom quad core and it did NOT work very well with X-Plane.  I was benchmarking it at almost 4 Ghz.  However, I scrapped that computer and got one with an I7 processor.  I can tell you for sure (100%) that intel processors work MUCH better at delivering high performance (with everything, but especially X-Plane) than AMD.  I went from AMD delivering 25-30 FPS on moderate settings to an I7 delivering 30+ settings on VERY high settings, including HDR.  The difference was like night and day!  At first I thought it was strange since both CPUs were clocking close to the same numbers (~4Ghz) but then a computer guy told me that something in the Intel processor's architecture is what makes it perform so well.  

I'm not an expert, but I did want to share my experience with you.  I will ALWAYS have an Intel processor from here on out, regardless of the price.  It's amazing the difference...that I can tell you.

Comments

Thanks for your input, however I don´t think that´s the issue here.

The CPUs are most of the time idling, without anything to work on. As I said, the CPU usage doesn't reach 50%.