I'm planning the components for my next PC which will finally see me move from FS9 to FSX.

 

One of the critical components is the graphics card and as I live in England and do most of my flying in Europe I'm seriously considering the Titan 6Gb card over the GTX780 3Gb purely on the basis it can cope with heavy cloud much better.

 

The other consideration is if I buy the 780 and then find it's disappointing in cloud upgrading to a Titan will be the more expensive route. The price difference from my chosen supplier between a 780 and Titan is around 240UKP (372USD).

 

I'll be running FSX on a single 32" 1920x1080 display. Interested to hear others opinions on this. I plan on keeping this PC for the foreseeable future so want to get things right.

Waste of money, don't even think about it unless you are running a wall of monitors in surround mode, lol. My EVGA GTX780 copes with lots of clouds at 1920X1200 with no problem at all, saying that though so did my previous card the GTX580 in my previous two year old PC. I've got a CDU2 from VRinsight and a second monitor with Aivlasoft EFB connected to the 780 too and it still doesn't complain in the slightest.

 

Make sure you get a Haswell 4770K CPU to go along with that card though, you want to be overclocking it to 4.5Ghz as well to get the best out of the card. You will need some quick 2400Mhz RAM as well.

 

By the way I'm in Cheshire too, Macclesfield to be precise.

Ray Proudfoot, on 31 Aug 2013 - 07:10 AM, said:

One of the critical components is the graphics card and as I live in England and do most of my flying in Europe I'm seriously considering the Titan 6Gb card over the GTX780 3Gb purely on the basis it can cope with heavy cloud much better.

I'm guessing Andy's comment is spot on however I can attest Titan doesn't blink at maximally dense clouds of any kind and any bit depth out to 110m. I'm guessing GTX780 won't either though. I installed Titan in the hopes that another simulator yet to come will benefit from it, such as P3D v2 or XP64 v10.x. Plus, I upgrade only about every 5-6y as I tend to buy high end and keep it.

Waste of money, don't even think about it unless you are running a wall of monitors in surround mode, lol. My EVGA GTX780 copes with lots of clouds at 1920X1200 with no problem at all, saying that though so did my previous card the GTX580 in my previous two year old PC. I've got a CDU2 from VRinsight and a second monitor with Aivlasoft EFB connected to the 780 too and it still doesn't complain in the slightest.

 

Make sure you get a Haswell 4770K CPU to go along with that card though, you want to be overclocking it to 4.5Ghz as well to get the best out of the card. You will need some quick 2400Mhz RAM as well.

 

By the way I'm in Cheshire too, Macclesfield to be precise.

 

Thanks for your views Andy. I'm open-minded about this but after reading Word Not Allowed's test results it did make me think. www.#####.wordpress.com/fsxp3d-gpu-comparison-aka-gtx-titan-for-fsx-test/

 

Pity he couldn't have included a 780 in those tests but they do seem to prove the Titan does much better than a 580 and 680 in heavy cloud. What he didn't say was how many monitors he was running. I will just be running a single one so I take your point a Titan may be overkill.

 

As you're so close any chance of a visit? A visit with a few tests is worth far more than reading various test results. I note that Nick N advised that FSX doesn't need more than 1.5Gb of memory.

 

It's likely I'll get the PC from Scan and intend to get all the other components you recommend. :smile:

I'm guessing Andy's comment is spot on however I can attest Titan doesn't blink at maximally dense clouds of any kind and any bit depth out to 110m. I'm guessing GTX780 won't either though. I installed Titan in the hopes that another simulator yet to come will benefit from it, such as P3D v2 or XP64 v10.x. Plus, I upgrade only about every 5-6y as I tend to buy high end and keep it.

 

I'm wondering how a 780 might cope with multiple cloud layers rather than just one or two. As you have a Titan could you set up 5 layers of stratus 2000ft depth each from 3000ft to 15000ft and advise how much the frame rate varies with each layer added. Base should be 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000 and 15000.

 

Andy, any chance you could do the same please. And to ensure ground scenery doesn't come into play position your aircraft at Lat 0, Long 0 at 10,000ft with a full-forward view (no panel) at 12:00 Zulu. Hope you don't mind me asking.

 

Thanks!

Out of curiosity, I checked out the price of a Titan card.....

 

800 quid!!!

 

I could almost buy an entire FSX PC for that.

Is it really necessary to spend soooooooooooo much money.

I have a Geforce 9600 GSO 512 in fs9 with all sliders maxed. Max cloud cover flying into Heathrow over London at a mere 58fps.

Not a decent one Chris.

 

@ Ray I try it at some point over the next few days, I'll be flying most of this evening, it will probably be tomorrow evening at the earliest before I'm free . As for coming and having a look at my setup, I'd love to let you do that but it's not a option at the moment unfortunately, too busy and I'm under NDA as well for the next few months at least.

 

The Titan is about 5% faster than a 780, but you can overclock a 780 to be as least as fast as the Titan if you have good cooling in your case, that's not something I'm prepared to do though, its not even worth overclocking a GPU for a game that will fully take advantage of the power, the increase in frame rate (maybe 1 frame) is not worth the risk to the hardware. As it is my 780 rarely shows a GPU usage higher than 60%, even with 3 screens plugged in. If money is no object then go for it, but its definitely not worth the extra £250, the 780 is extortionately expensive as it is to be honest, for the Titan its getting into selling your Kidney territory and I've only got one partially functional one as it is, lol.

At those resolutions you listed (1920 x 1080) a 780 or a Titan isn't going to make much of a difference.  I have seen as much as 1.8GB used in VRAM so just make sure the video card has 2GB minimum.

I purchased my current PC nearly two years ago for £900, and it is still a powerful system today.

I'm wondering how a 780 might cope with multiple cloud layers rather than just one or two. As you have a Titan could you set up 5 layers of stratus 2000ft depth each from 3000ft to 15000ft and advise how much the frame rate varies with each layer added. Base should be 3000, 6000, 9000, 12000 and 15000.

 

Ray, how about defining exactly where and in what since total impact with all other realtime processing demands has to be considered I would think.  How about TO north out of PHKO towards open ocean in the default 172 or something like that and everything else must be specified else it's apple n oranges, I think even relatively speaking.  Here are my inspector settings:  AF 16x, AA_MODE_METHOD_SUPERVCAA_64X...., and 8x Supersampling.

 

Set frame lock to UNLIMITED in FSX, vertical sync off for this test perhaps.  And cloud bit depth 2048.  

Out of curiosity, I checked out the price of a Titan card.....

 

800 quid!!!

 

I could almost buy an entire FSX PC for that.

 

I checked my records and back in 2002 I bought a state of the art GeForce 128Mb Ti4600. Cost? Around £400. The most powerful cards have always been expensive.

Is it really necessary to spend soooooooooooo much money.

I have a Geforce 9600 GSO 512 in fs9 with all sliders maxed. Max cloud cover flying into Heathrow over London at a mere 58fps.

 

FS9 is now looking dated to me. I visit a friend who runs FSX and the differences are marked. Far more airport detail, clouds are more realistic and default FSX terrain has more detail than FS9 with FS Global.

 

Additionally, there are some programs that interest me which are only available for FSX. Electronic Flight Bag being one example. Ultimate Traffic for FS9 will never be updated with current liveries and looks dated.

 

I also have ConcordeX which I am unable to fly with my present E8400 processor. In short, after 5 years with my current system it's time to enjoy what FSX can deliver.

Not a decent one Chris.

 

@ Ray I try it at some point over the next few days, I'll be flying most of this evening, it will probably be tomorrow evening at the earliest before I'm free . As for coming and having a look at my setup, I'd love to let you do that but it's not a option at the moment unfortunately, too busy and I'm under NDA as well for the next few months at least.

 

The Titan is about 5% faster than a 780, but you can overclock a 780 to be as least as fast as the Titan if you have good cooling in your case, that's not something I'm prepared to do though, its not even worth overclocking a GPU for a game that will fully take advantage of the power, the increase in frame rate (maybe 1 frame) is not worth the risk to the hardware. As it is my 780 rarely shows a GPU usage higher than 60%, even with 3 screens plugged in. If money is no object then go for it, but its definitely not worth the extra £250, the 780 is extortionately expensive as it is to be honest, for the Titan its getting into selling your Kidney territory and I've only got one partially functional one as it is, lol.

 

Thanks Andy. Fully understand you don't have time at present. It's likely by the time you are free I'll have the system but I still appreciate your views and advice. Would still be nice to meet you sometime as you're so close.

 

The 780 seems the better choice given the price difference will pay for a lot of FS addons. If it's only 5% slower then the extra cost is down to the extra 3Gb of memory which FSX can't use anyway. I don't intend overclocking a 780 but I'll discuss my options with Scan when I visit them prior to placing an order.

 

It is silly money for the Titan but as you'll see from an earlier reply we were being charged kidney money over 10 years ago for a card with a 'massive' 128Mb - 1/48th of the Titan memory. :shok:

At those resolutions you listed (1920 x 1080) a 780 or a Titan isn't going to make much of a difference.  I have seen as much as 1.8GB used in VRAM so just make sure the video card has 2GB minimum.

 

Thanks robains. I'll probably opt for the 3Gb version.

Ray, how about defining exactly where and in what since total impact with all other realtime processing demands has to be considered I would think.  How about TO north out of PHKO towards open ocean in the default 172 or something like that and everything else must be specified else it's apple n oranges, I think even relatively speaking.  Here are my inspector settings:  AF 16x, AA_MODE_METHOD_SUPERVCAA_64X...., and 8x Supersampling.

 

Set frame lock to UNLIMITED in FSX, vertical sync off for this test perhaps.  And cloud bit depth 2048.  

 

Noel, having given this more thought it would be difficult for two users with different systems to set-up their FSX flights with exactly the same parameters. Asking them to make so many changes to their configs isn't really fair.

 

I've had enough opinions to suggest the Titan is overkill for a single display. The 780 probably is too but this system has to last me a long time. I will get plenty of use out of it having retired. I'm frequently told by my friends shrouds don't have pockets! :biggrin:

" I've only got one partially functional one as it is, lol"

 

 

Good one Andy   :clapping:

 

 

I've had enough opinions to suggest the Titan is overkill for a single display.

 

No doubt!  When I picked out the parts for this build I opted for a system less designed for FSX than for a different simulator yet to come or currently in the making.  That could be XPlane 64 or P3D 2.x or something else--a simulator that might exploit parallel processing better, plenty of ram, 64 bit code, DX11 optimized, multicore/multithread optimized. Since I upgrade infrequently I have to plan for more than just one outcome.   I am extremely pleased w/ how FSX runs on this rig so I definitely met one goal of the build.   I'm quite surprised a bigger company, heck even someone like Orbx, hasn't embraced this whole concept-i.e., of developing the next simulator engine & content SDK.  That's it.  They don't need to develop the weather, the scenery, the aircraft or utilities.  I would focus on the ideal multithreaded simulator engine and user GUI, SDKs, and would also include a killer ATC component.  When you think about how much depth and scope is in the 3rd party development for FSX, now 7 years old, it's mind boggling and only speaks of what future potential there is in this.  Think about now only how many sites & vendors are out there on the software side, but heck even the hardware side is there:  home cockpit components, yokes, etc.  Name another 'entertainment' genre that can boast this sort of 3rd party support.   PMDG, ORBX, zillions of utilities for flight planning, weather, it's just amazing.  With that infrastructure in place there is a gaping hole in the new simulator engine department, one that is better aligned w/ modern hardware evolution.   I think, were it done right, the market would be MUCH greater than for what FSX garners currently.  You practically have a degree in computer science to get the blithering thing to run well!  Well, it used to be that way, not so much now as the hardware as caught up...and indeed blew right past what FSX can do with it.

You might hit the OOM wall before you even see the clouds when paired with payware heathrow and FTX ENG......I only use non hd textures for my clouds even with my GTX780