...you think the jump up to the 680 is worth it for the higher resolution

 

 

I had a 670 and now I have two 680's. No I do not think it is worth going to 680 over 670.

 

Running 5760x1080 on Unigene Heaven set to extreme, my fps were 18 and my score was 460s. When I switched to the 680, it went to 19 fps and a 490 score. Not worth the extra $150. When I added the second card it went to 31 fps and a score of 790.

 

I would go with two 670's.

 

If you use scenery that has unique textures for each tile. For example high-res photo scenery or in this case TileProxy, you can make good use of the extra texture loading that HyperThreading enables.

 

 

With on disc I take it you mean not TileProxy but stored on a harddrive? Yes AM=249 is good for an i7 950 with HT activated. Your storage do affect texture loading as well. Velociraptors or SSDs are needed to get best texture loading with high res photoscenery.

 

Back to the original post. I guess the 4GB of vRAM only comes to use when you use the very high res scenery so bear that in mind that its probably only needed if you use 35cm scenery. Can you try with 70cm res and see how much the vRAM usage goes down?

 

Thanks Saab,

 

My interest, like some of the others in this thread, is high-resolution photoscenery. The source imagery available is now great quality, and is only going to get better. I no longer want to fly over anything coarser than 0.5m/pixel!

 

Technology has advanced to the point where we can use hi-res photoscenery with jets without any blurries - something that was not considered possible a short time ago.

 

Unlike Efrain, I'm going with scenery stored on a local hard drive rather than streamed on the fly via tile proxy. This is basically a performance call - i live in a remote area with only moderate internet speeds - but even so I can't imagine tile proxy's upper transfer speed can match an on-board HDD. Despite this, I figure a lot of the issues are similar.

 

The photoscenery fans on this thread are using FSX in a relatively uncommon way - most simmers seem happier with landclass-based terrain (default/orbx/gex). Hence I think it's great that we're discussing ways to optimise performance when massive texture transfers are taking place.

 

Based on efrain's reports I was convinced to go with a 4 gig 680EX, and without having tried it yet am swayed that the video card is in fact more important for this application than I had previously been led to believe.

 

I'm convinced that HT on is good by you and the other posters. I actually run my i7 with HT on anyway most of the time, although I've not definitely seen a difference either way (no formal testing).

 

I'm going to try it now with the affinity mask on 249 and see what happens.

 

This thread has also pushed me towards considering an Ivy rebuild, as I'm concerned that memory speed, pci bus speed or processor speed may be the bottleneck with the 680EX in place. (Can anyone comfirm this, btw?). It seems an Ivy with HT on is giving clocks around 0.1Mhz less but with better overall results for photoscenery when set up right (from my reading of this thread).

 

As for your comment about using a SSD - I use both solid state drives (Ozc Vertex 3) and standard (current-model WD Black) HDD for photoscenery.

 

I haven't noticed a difference between them yet. I'm not sure if this is because the bottleneck is elsewhere in the system or because I need to try a SSD with a mobo with great SATA3 performance (my build is 2 years old and SATA 3 from that ere is somewhat suspect).