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Hyper Threading and Flight Simulator

On some systems with an Hyper Threading CPU (Pentium 4 for example), the Flight Simulator performance, with or without the Flight Line 430XP/530XP may be affected. This issue is most noticeably exhibited when running Flight Simulator with the Flight Line 430XP/530XP.

The Windows operating system is not designed to benefit from HT when running 16 bits applications, like the background helper application the Flight Line 430XP/530XP uses (the Garmin Ltd. Garmin Trainer).

This workaround is recommended:

when Flight Simulator is started, with an aircraft not including the Flight Line 530 XP Garmin, launch the Windows Task Manager (press CTRL+ALT+DEL, or right click the clock display on the Windows Taskbar and select Task Manager)
select the process tab
locate and right-click on the Flight Simulator process
select the set affinity option from the popup menu
uncheck CPU 1 and validate with OK.
you can go back to Flight Simulator and load any aircraft with the Flight Line 530XP Garmin with no significant FPS loss.

It is essential to change this affinity setting before loading an aircraft retrofitted with the Flight Line 430XP/530XP.

Another workaround is to completely disable Hyper Threading from your motherboard BIOS settings. Make sure to consult your motherboard user's manual to change its settings.

For the most advanced users, another workaround (which in many cases is documented as beneficial for FS2004 performance) is to alter the FS9.exe file to instruct flight simulator to run on a single virtual CPU:

download the imagecfg.exe tool from here
unzip the tool in your FS9 folder
after making a backup copy of your fs9.exe executable somewhere else on your hard drive, open a command prompt and go to your FS9 folder
type: imagecfg -a 0x1 fs9.exe
close the commend prompt window.
Flight Simulator is now "patched" to run on the virtual CPU 0 only when started.

Please note that these workarounds will make little if no difference with normal operation of Flight Simulator. It has been also reported that some users, regardless of the Flight Line 430XP/530XP, are getting up to 100% frame rate increase with Hyper Threading disabled.