Hello,

 

I am looking to purchase a computer built only for P3D. I am a freak about getting it as smooth as possible without sacrificing scenery (although I will in order to maintain a smooth picture). Anyways I was wondering if anyone could give me some advice. What I am thinking about is running the PMDG 737 NGX in P3D, at an airport like FlyTampa Tampa Rebooted, or FlyTampa Midway with REX Essentials at 30fps. I realize that I won't be able to run maxed sliders, and I'm fine with that. What I am looking at now is the i5 2500K, OC'd to 5.0-5.2GHz water cooled, however I'm stuck on the GPU. Does anyone know of a GPU that really makes P3D sing? If so let me know please. I would also like to overclock it. Also one more thing, is it possible to run the NGX at a complex add-on airport with REX, and AI traffic, at 30fps on today's computer hardware, or is that only in my dreams?

GTX680 or 670 is the best choice, latter is bit cheaper with pretty small performance difference. Though I must say that I just changed to GTX670 from GTX480 and I hardly notice any improvement running 30 fps locked. With single 1080p display, today's best high end GPUs bring very little compared to 480/570/580 cards.

 

For me, those parts of the scenery where FPS dropped below 20 with 480 more or less do the same with 670. I expected some of the FPS hit occur with hig polygon count and suspected that GPU upgrade might help to fix those, but I was wrong: 99% of the cases it still is CPU bound, a thing which I don't always understand. You would think that adding lot's of addons with mostly just static polygons, houses etc. causes mainly load on the GPU. But apparently this is not the case with FSX/ESP/P3D. I think that this just relates to how the engine was coded. Rendering engine uses one single thread in CPU and it is running on the loaded 1st core and that is after some point GPU really doesn't matter as you struggle with this heavily loaded CPU core.

 

Good thing with this is that you probably have some headroom with high-end cards when you use 2 or more displays. When I get a bigger desk, I'll probably go with dual or triple monitor setup and with those resolutions GPU really starts to matter.

I think that once Prepar3d or FSX is overloaded no amount of hardware is going to compensate for that. The only real hope for a solution to that is Prepar3d 2.0. A hardware upgrade will mostly benefit situations that already have reasonable performance. I have found moving scenery onto SSD can also make a big difference.

I use dual 580's and that make P3D fly! I see no reason to go with a higher end card at this time other than the fact it is hard to find a 580 on a retail shelf these days. I picked up a factory sealed one on eBay for $350. I don't think the 680's will come into play until v2.0 is released.

I use dual 580's and that make P3D fly! I see no reason to go with a higher end card at this time other than the fact it is hard to find a 580 on a retail shelf these days. I picked up a factory sealed one on eBay for $350. I don't think the 680's will come into play until v2.0 is released.

You need GPU crunch, if you are going to use multimonitor setup and with 670/680 you can stick up to four monitors to one card. I'd leave 580 alone today as you can grab GTX670 for about the same price.