Hi all,

 

Just moved from Prepar3D to X-Plane 10 and enjoying the ride immensely. No stuttering, steady 30 fps at any circumstance and location, everything is fine and dandy and then... of course, I want more.

Though the simming experience has exceeded my wildest dreams I was wondering if I could get some more objects to my screen through GPU upgrade. My current rig is:

 

Asus z77 Sabretooth

i7 3770K @ 4,6 Mhz

8 GB RAM

GTX 570

Win 8 64 bit

Everthing on SSD

 

My current rendering settings can be seen in the attachment. With these settings and with OSM Europe + OSM Finland (both osm only, no osm autogen) and UrbanMaxx2 installed, I get the aformentioned 30 fps (locked from Nvidia drivers) on any situation  (my "stress test" consists of flying at night, in thunderstorm over central Berlin). I know I could tweak settings much higher when flying over rural areas or smaller cities and still stay within my framerate limit, but my goal is to find settings that give me steady performance, no matter the situation.

 

Now I have found those, but I want just a little more objects... maybe just "mega tons" or even "too many". 

 

Do you think I could achive this goal by getting a GPU with 4GB VRAM (I´ve been thinking GTX 770), or am I still CPU-limited with objects? 

 

 

   

This shouldn't be a problem, but you should upgrade your normal RAM at the same time (RAM is extremly cheap anyway so I would say upgrade to 16 GB, then you should be able to upgrade several settings like texture resolution, HDR Antialising and objects. But I would think about downgrading trees a bit and instead dowload the dense trees settings from alpilotx.

http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-10-hd-scenery-mesh/

Yes I believe you could achieve what you are trying an probably a bit more with a more powerful GPU.  However; with that said, looking at your settings I would try lowering that "Number of Cars" option down first (unless you have to have it).  Of the autogen options it's the most FPS intensive! Setting it back down to Kansas Residential will still give you some vehicle traffic and give you some headroom to turn up a few other options.

 

If you do opt for a new card a 3-4GB card is a smart choice

Hi Synti.

 

I notice you are not compressing textures to save vram. Any reason for not doing so? This setting would free up some of your vram.

Wish I could get that. If I turn my objects down I can but then LA looks like suburbia.

 

I don't know how you can stand to run at "default" for objects... Ick

Yes, some of your settings are quite low so I'm not surprised you have good frames.

 

I recently upgraded to 16GB of ram from 8 and also have a 580. I run textures at very high, trees at overgrown, clouds at about 50%, and objects at tons. With osm addons I can stay at or around 30fps in most situations apart from multiple heavy cloud layers. I think I need to go for 4gb VRAM card next but I'll wait for the next round of price reductions before doing that.

 

Btw, anyone know when video cards typically come down in price?

belimi, on 03 Jul 2013 - 5:52 PM, said:

 

Hi Synti.

 

I notice you are not compressing textures to save vram. Any reason for not doing so? This setting would free up some of your vram.

Might be because he's only using 330megs of his 1.3GB's of vram. Unless you have to,I wouldn't recommend compressing textures; at least that is what I have read and come to understand. I think it was on one of the XSimsreview blog or perhaps somewhere else that they did a pretty comprehensive comparison and concluded it was better not to check that option unless you have to. Then again if the OP cranks up the settings he will surely cap his GPU and then your right checking that option would be necessary.

 

 

scotchegg, on 03 Jul 2013 - 8:46 PM, said:

Btw, anyone know when video cards typically come down in price?

Usually a week after I pay full retail for the card I want! :He He:

 

Seriously though they tend to hold their prices until the next gen card has become fairly mainstream. I would suspect some good deals coming up for the 670/680's now that the 700's are fairly common.

 

I just went to a Haswell at 4.5GHz with 16GB of 2400hz Mushkin and a new 3GB 780 and have seen a noticeable improvement over my slightly faster clocked SB that was at 4.8Ghz 8GB 1600HZ ram and a 2GB 670GTX. So was it worth the cost, "No Way" but my boys wanted a gaming system for the bonus room in our house so I used it as an excuse to build a new platform for my sim room :wink:

Unless you have to,I wouldn't recommend compressing textures; at least that is what I have read and come to understand. I think it was on one of the XSimsreview blog or perhaps somewhere else that they did a pretty comprehensive comparison and concluded it was better not to check that option unless you have to.

Thanks for clarifying that Blaze. I knew there was an upside to compressing textures, but I didn't know there was a downside. Do you happen to remember what the downside is?

Thanks for clarifying that Blaze. I knew there was an upside to compressing textures, but I didn't know there was a downside. Do you happen to remember what the downside is?

Simple loss of high texture quality I believe, most noticeable on newer add ons.

 

 

Simple loss of high texture quality I believe, most noticeable on newer add ons.

 

Ben Supnik wrote an article on the subject http://developer.x-plane.com/2012/01/dds-revisited-in-x-plane-10/  it's worth a read.

Thank you for your opinions. ryanbatcund asked how I can live with "default" objects, well... I can´t :lol: . UrbanMaxx2 makes cities bearable, but smaller towns might have only one 3D building, which is pretty horrible. Texture compression on "high" made no difference on performance and "very high", even with compression, lowered frames which is strange ´cause only 650 MB of VRAM got used. Otherwise, only setting that seems to affect performance is number of objects and that only on big cities. More than "default" buildings on Berlin or Helsinki and FPS plummets. Cars made no difference and even effect of clouds seemed marginal. Also, if I have roads on tons and more than "tons" of objects, big cities won´t even load, program just crashes. Could insufficent VRAM cause this?

 

Damn, I don´t know what to do. Judging by your opinions, it seems that gains from new GPU could be pretty marginal.

 

Mister Nvidia, please convince me! (and my wife...)

Thank you for your opinions. ryanbatcund asked how I can live with "default" objects, well... I can´t :lol: . UrbanMaxx2 makes cities bearable, but smaller towns might have only one 3D building, which is pretty horrible. Texture compression on "high" made no difference on performance and "very high", even with compression, lowered frames which is strange ´cause only 650 MB of VRAM got used. Otherwise, only setting that seems to affect performance is number of objects and that only on big cities. More than "default" buildings on Berlin or Helsinki and FPS plummets. Cars made no difference and even effect of clouds seemed marginal. Also, if I have roads on tons and more than "tons" of objects, big cities won´t even load, program just crashes. Could insufficent VRAM cause this?

 

Damn, I don´t know what to do. Judging by your opinions, it seems that gains from new GPU could be pretty marginal.

 

Mister Nvidia, please convince me! (and my wife...)

Your experience has been a bit different than mine. Over the past year on a couple of different builds I have found that resolution settings, HDR/AF/AA options, and clouds had the biggest impact on performance. Like FSX there is no free lunch if you crank up the options it's going to affect FPS there's just no way around that but, unlike FSX the GPU plays a much bigger role; I think you'd see a nice boost with a more powerful GPU  but that's only my opinion.

 

Last thing to keep in mind when testing is that location and conditions obviously play a huge factor.  If you can get good performance in the Seattle area with weather then you should be fairly safe in other "demanding " environments too. It does no good to crank up the clouds, traffic, objects options if your testing in a place with few roads, no buildings and clear weather, you'll only be let down when your FPS plummet when you encounter them in numbers.

Thank you for your opinions. ryanbatcund asked how I can live with "default" objects, well... I can´t :lol: . UrbanMaxx2 makes cities bearable, but smaller towns might have only one 3D building, which is pretty horrible. Texture compression on "high" made no difference on performance and "very high", even with compression, lowered frames which is strange ´cause only 650 MB of VRAM got used. Otherwise, only setting that seems to affect performance is number of objects and that only on big cities. More than "default" buildings on Berlin or Helsinki and FPS plummets. Cars made no difference and even effect of clouds seemed marginal. Also, if I have roads on tons and more than "tons" of objects, big cities won´t even load, program just crashes. Could insufficent VRAM cause this?

 

Damn, I don´t know what to do. Judging by your opinions, it seems that gains from new GPU could be pretty marginal.

 

Mister Nvidia, please convince me! (and my wife...)

 

 

What ryan meant was default is a low amount of objects..  I have mine on the highest setting and now I have really dense cities and still getting good frames

 

What ryan meant was default is a low amount of objects..  I have mine on the highest setting and now I have really dense cities and still getting good frames

Yes, I understood that (maybe my answer was a little confusing).

 

Anyway, I´m very interested in your settings (and of course the rig that runs those settings :lol: ). Are you able to get solid frames (30 fps) over big cities with object settings higher than "default"? I´m suspecting there must be something wrong with my scenery installation. In bigger cities (when I´m even able to get them to load without program crashing) framerate drops from solid 30 to jerky 17 when I raise object density from "default" to "a lot". It could be that OSM scenery (even without OSM autogen) raises the object count too high (I think OSM has a lot more roads too).

 

I even made a little update to my rig today, it now has 16 GB of RAM. Didn´t make any difference  :lol:.