I just upgraded the GFX card (last weekend actually, it was on sale at my local MicroCenter). I have a 3770k OCed to 4.8. See my PC spec on the left for more info. 

 

I was reading a few of the new NickN guides on SimForums and based on my experience with the 670 and a lot of his info I feel like the system was bottlenecking at the GPU due to the high OC. Also, in my case, the added video memory and overall card design on the 780 is very beneficial for the high resolution I run at. When I initially purchased this rig last July I had a 1600x900 monitor and the 670 was fine in most situations. 

 

Interesting how replacing the gfx card can have such a big impact since everyone always said the GPU isn't that important in FSX compared to the CPU but of course it's like NickN says that all components in your computer play an important role and that they all need to work good together. You won't get a good experience if you have a super CPU but a crappy GPU and vice versa.

 

What I forgot to mention in my last post was...

 

- that I do all my flying online in the NGX

- that I do all my flying into payware airports

- that I'm running at 1920x1080 using a single screen

 

Maybe I forgot something else as well of importance, if so just ask and you can also find out pretty much everything about my current computer and FSX environment by clicking the My Computer and My Simulator links on the left hand side.

 

 

.if performing this kind of upgrade would give me less stuttering

 

Well, it's kind of the same question.  What are you really looking for in terms of 'less stuttering'?  10% improvement in what you see now, 20%?  Would 10-20% improvement in 'total performance', where total performance = IQ + FPS + Smoothness, warrant the upgrade?  I tend to think each of these factors can be weighted differently by type of component involved.  For example for hexacore users w/ fast SSDs I think smoothness & IQ (texture update rate for example) can improve significantly w/ the high end GPU & the hexacore processor.  I have very smooth performance right on down to under 20 fps then it begins to feel the stress a little, but just a little.  I opted to build a system that might not be highest end for FSX SP2, but maybe will outperform Haswell 4-core when P3D v2 or XPlane 64 is involved.  But it's truly excellent now even in FSX SP2.  I REALLY like that SB-E runs cool, stable and fast at low voltage, albeit a wee bit less fast than Haswell or IB.  I also like the idea of fluxless solder and felt fortunate to still be able to get an SB-E chip.  Best Wishes in your decision--I can relate to blowing dough on parts for  FS though--I love it and have for ... decades!  I spent just under $3K on my current machine which is strong but way underutilized because of FSX's archaic exploitation of modern hardware.  We look to a better simulator sometime in the hopefully near future.

Have to agree with the sentiments above. My system is similar to yours.

 

The processor change is just not worth it. The risk of getting a poor 4770K is significant.

 

The GPU change may be worth it for high resolutions. I might just try it and see how it goes.

I can't really answer your question since I find it very hard to translate what percentage of improvement I would need to achieve what I've described I'm looking for in my previous posts...a smooth experience. However if this kind of upgrade will only give me 10-15% better performance that would mean where I today see 15 FPS I would instead have 16.5 FPS and of course that wouldn't justify the cost of the upgrade. If I however after doing this upgrade would have 22-23 FPS where I with my current setup have 15 FPS now that would be better. But then again...not everything in FSX is about FPS but the most important thing is...again...smoothness and I'm not sure how you would measure smoothness in percentage.

 

A question regarding memory...it has been suggested that with a 4770K CPU I should get 2400MHz CL9 memory but it appears to be quite hard to find this kind of memory so my question is will all those 2400MHz be used in a 4770K setup or could I go for a lower MHz memory module but still with low timings such as CL9? As I recall what speed the memory will run and if it will run at full speed is dependant on how I o/c the CPU?

 

Boy do I wish we have a new FS soon that will utilize our hardware in a more efficient way where you won't need trying to force a better sim experience by constantly upgrading to more powerful hardware spending lots of $ hoping it just might give you some extra smoothness... Who ever will first come up with a new FS that will have all it takes to really be able to replace FSX that person will become filthy rich and I would be at the front of the line throwing my money in that direction rather than constantly investing my money in new hardware trying to shake some new life into FSX...!!!

A 10% improvement may be just what you need to get past the point where you no longer notice stutters...However most of the time, it's pointless:

 

-If your FPS is already low, say 16 FPS, another 10% will not even allow you to break 18 FPS. FPS will be higher, but not enough to make a difference in practice.

-At 60 FPS, it would be a 6 FPS improvement - but if you're already getting 60 FPS, what does it matter?

 

4.8 GHz is a very good overclock even for Sandy Bridge. You may get lucky and get a really good 4770K, but you must also consider the very real possibility that you get a "dog" - something that only does 4.2 GHz with any stability. I'd say there's at least a 30% chance of getting such a chip, which would perform about the same as your Sandy Bridge.

 

As for the GPU, I personally noticed absolutely no difference when upgrading from a GTX 460 1GB to the GTX 670 2GB. I play at 1920x1080, single-screen, 16xS AA, using REX, OrbX etc. The *minimum* FPS remained exactly the same. It's possible I would have gotten 95 FPS instead of 70 FPS over some barren mountains in the middle of nowhere, with the frame rate at Unlimited, but what really matters is the minimum frame rate.

And to further add something to my question regarding memory...what brand would be recommended? Up until now I've pretty much always used Corsair memory and I've been very happy with that. For my current rig I first bought G.Skill memory but I had very strange issues with that memory with BSODs etc. I then had it replaced with a new pair of memory modules but still same problem and I then replaced them with my current Corsair memory and all was good.

 

So for this reason I would very much like to continue use Corsair memory if I decide to go for this upgrade but I haven't been able to find an 8GB 2400MHz CL9 memory kit from Corsair.

 

Not sure if it's me being blind or if Corsair actaully don't have that kind of memory in that size...

A 10% improvement may be just what you need to get past the point where you no longer notice stutters...However most of the time, it's pointless:

 

-If your FPS is already low, say 16 FPS, another 10% will not even allow you to break 18 FPS. FPS will be higher, but not enough to make a difference in practice.

-At 60 FPS, it would be a 6 FPS improvement - but if you're already getting 60 FPS, what does it matter?

 

4.8 GHz is a very good overclock even for Sandy Bridge. You may get lucky and get a really good 4770K, but you must also consider the very real possibility that you get a "dog" - something that only does 4.2 GHz with any stability. I'd say there's at least a 30% chance of getting such a chip, which would perform about the same as your Sandy Bridge.

 

As for the GPU, I personally noticed absolutely no difference when upgrading from a GTX 460 1GB to the GTX 670 2GB. I play at 1920x1080, single-screen, 16xS AA, using REX, OrbX etc. The *minimum* FPS remained exactly the same. It's possible I would have gotten 95 FPS instead of 70 FPS over some barren mountains in the middle of nowhere, with the frame rate at Unlimited, but what really matters is the minimum frame rate.

Thanks (tack :wink:) a lot Jimmi, what you say...unfortunately...makes perfect sense and although I'm very tempted to try an upgrade like this I'm getting more and more convinced the risk is huge I will end up realizing I pretty much wasted my money.

 

What is always very confusing when you discuss these kind of things is all the mixed messages you get. Some people say you will probably not notice much if any difference at all while others tell you their upgrade did wonders. Check post #10 in this thread from Jordan for example, he went from a 670->780 and after this the smoothness panning around in the cockpit using TIR was much improved for him. And that was after "only" upgrading the GPU and not a major upgrade like from a 480 to a 780 but from a 670.

 

I say it once again...please, please someone...give us a new FS so we can start investing more of our time actually enjoy flying rather than constantly trying to get a few more FPS and some less stuttering...

 

 

What is always very confusing when you discuss these kind of things is all the mixed messages you get. Some people say you will probably not notice much if any difference at all while others tell you their upgrade did wonders

 

It probably has to do with the conditions people test their new parts in. One simply needs to know what to expect and where to expect to see an impact.

So if you upgrade your GPU and expect to see a major improvement in big payware airports with the NGX & loads of traffic at 8xS AA. you're setting yourself up for disappointment (you'll be CPU limited there anyway)

OTOH, if you are one of those who like to run 32xS + 8xSGSS and wonder why their rig struggles in clouds while running a GTX580, upgrading to a GTX780 will definitely make a difference, but you'll still need to lower your IQ settings to something a 780 can handle, and then you may wonder if you should have done just that with the 580 and save some money.

 

Truth is it's not the best choice of cards for my example, cause these 780/Titans are truly beasts and for the first time we have these cards that can run 2xGSSS without braking a sweat and maybe even 4xSGSS, unlike it's precessors

 

 

It probably has to do with the conditions people test their new parts in.

 

No truer words have been spoken.  Evaluating FSX 'performance' has so many variables to consider it's very hard to make concrete statements.  My recent upgrade was big:  went from Core2 Quad at 3.7Gz, 7200 rpm SATA drives, GTX280, 4gb of RAM at 1644Mhz on to SB-E at 4.4Ghz, Titan, 32Gb of 2400Mhz, and SATA III SSD.  The difference was quite substantial, yet truly, I had good enough performance previously to use the bloomin' thing for 6 years!  I coped w/ performance by being careful where I flew and in what.  Now, I find myself doing what many of us do when we upgrade:  fly in more complex places & in more complex aircraft in high end add on scenery and all of a sudden frame rate ends up...about the same!  Knowing this, I swore I would avoid this trap, but alas i've fallen in!  No, it's not bad I'm amazed at the total performance improvement but it's true--no matter what you're using you still have to compromise a little here or there, though much less so now for me.

Of course if you are not picky what scenery you want to use or what aircraft you want to fly then you can use those "parameters" to tune your FSX performance but if you like me only use heavy scenery and do all your flying online with lots of other traffic in an aircraft such as the NGX that approach won't work and you're left with 2 things...

 

• tune FSX as smart as possible using the well-known tricks such as BP=0 etc
• get the most powerful hardware you can afford

 

Still haven't decided for sure if I will go with this upgrade or not since it's lots of money for maybe little in return when it comes to performance and IQ but being a real FSX nerd I sure am tempted :wink:

 

 

tune FSX as smart as possible using the well-known tricks such as BP=0 etc
get the most powerful hardware you can afford

 

Nowadays, tuning is very simple--there's almost nothing you need to do that isn't common knowledge by now and it takes only a moment to set up.  The most powerful hardware nowadays is only marginally more powerful than what you are currently using, this discussion we've already had.  The reality is that one has to make a few adjustments here and there else performance still suffers even w/ the most powerful hardware.  I don't see this as a bad thing at all--to me it just points to the built-in capacity to keep pushing the hardware.  Unfortunately though a big problem comes from the fact the core simulator engine isn't as good as it could be, hence hardware upgrades can only offer a portion of their potency to FSX which is stuck w/ regard to poor offloading to the GPU, 32-bit memory limitations, multithreading, and so forth.  I appreciate what you're saying but 10 to even 15% isn't going to take care of turning everything up to the max then expecting Nirvana to ensue!   The inevitable appearance of greater and greater complexity from the 3PD community is always a step ahead of where the hardware is, though some do much better than others in this regard.  I have FTXG installed and have become summarily addicted to 3D night lighting.  That is a performance whacker, so I'm sitting in the NGX in FTX PNW scenery (hybrid mode) w/ heavy weather.  I have LOD at 5.5, autogen at Very Dense.  And 3D lights ON.  It's pre-dawn.  I look out the left side of the plane and frames are 16!  Out the right side, 26.  I dial back LOD to 4.5 & autogen to Normal.  Now I'm at 22 out the left, 30 locked on the right.  OK, good enough!  Back on 08R now ready for TO and frames are down to 22 again--it's the 3D night lights, something I never turned on previously as it as an FPS-stopper in the Core2 Quad machine.  In short order though after TO I'm back to 30.  I must say it's very smooth--VERY smooth, though this is hard to be certain on when in the pre-dawn time period since it's a little harder to perceive smoothness then.  Anyway, it's a hard call for you WebM as you already have quite a strong workhorse.   Perhaps a better cooling solution might get your SB up to 5.1 or so?  That will get you another 6% and if you fry it you can then have your decision made for you!  Oh, and don't forget the mouse-pointer penalty in the NGX: use your Alt key to bring up the topdown menu bar then park your pointer there--this gets you another 15-20% over what you will get when the pointer is visible for 5 seconds until it shuts it self off, which is nothing to scoff at.  I'm praying that P3D addresses some of these issues when version 2 comes along.

That's a very nice written summary of our current situation being in the land of FSX which surely isn't near Nirvana but as you say and like I also said I do hope we will have something so much better when it comes to HW utilization than FSX in a not too distant future.

 

Looking at my current situation if I try to be completely honest to myself I think this summerize it

 

50% of me would like to do this upgrade where 25% is just because it would be fun and 25% hoping for better performance

50% of me says "Save those money for the future and enjoy what you already have instead"

 

Guess I'll need to think this over for a while...sure isn't easy being a FS nerd :wink:

Guess I'll need to think this over for a while...sure isn't easy being a FS nerd

 

Boy I hear ya!  I guess an important question for you might be this:  will I be happy after I've done the upgrade w/ the improvement that I see ... for the money spent?  I think this is the crux of people's indecision in many ways--we don't really want that buyer's remorse.  I have to think your particular real gains in total performance are going to be pretty meager.  I say this as someone who did a much bigger upgrade than you are proposing.   I'm also just a fan of SB--it was the last of the great overclockers not requiring delidding and so forth.  Oh I held out for IB and decided that wasn't for me.  Then it was Haswell.  I could have put together a Haswell box but frankly the idea of the poor temperature management, the fact that Haswell dedicates such a big chunk of it's single-core potential to the onboard graphics processor, and the final undoing that was really, how marginally you could count on it overclocking real well.  It could be that Intel decided to let IB & H heat up in order to discourage overvolting in the age of 3D transistors--they may be fundamentally more prone to voltage leak.  Probably not so though since cooler parts need less voltage, but as I'm thinking this could cause people to give up on overclocking sooner since temps go up dramatically w/ more volts when the cooling solution is not the best.  In any case, after seeing what Haswell would do I decided to go SB-E hexacore and I'm glad I did.  I have horse power for a better simulator and it's good 'nuf for good old FSX.  Plus bonus--easy overclocking, cool, low-moderate overvolting.  I could go for more but I'm loathe to shorten lts lifespan!  I'm waiting for the final jury to come in on IB-E.  Preliminary reports make it look like not as good of an overclocker as SB-E, but it may still be fine for my needs.  If IB-E looks like a suitable replacement I'll feel better about getting a little more brave and go for the high overclock on this SB-E.  But even that, is hardly worth it.  It's just another 6% and that is just ... hardly worth it!

 

Another possible plan for you might be to go crazy cool and aim for the higher overclock on your SB chip.  This way maybe you could hit 5.3Ghz for less total cost and not have to reinstall anything!   What are you using now?

 

Now that I have FTXG installed--what's a good flight plan for Sweden and environs?

Yeah, what you say is of course the main question here...should I decide to go for this kind of upgrade would I be happy with the perfomance gain vs the quite steep cost? Unfortunately I guess the only way to know for sure is to go for it and then if I end up not being as happy as I would have hoped it's already too late and my money is already spent...

 

Looking at my current system I already tried in the past to really max it out. I have tried running @ 5 GHz and although it was stable I didn't notice any real performance gain in FSX but on the other hand my temps increased quite a bit. Now @ 4.8 GHz my CPU rarely goes above 70C when running FSX but @ 5 GHz it went up to 80-85C if my memory recalls. So with this said I don't think I'm able to do much more with my current setup without investing into some really hardcore cooling solution and considering what the cost for that would be then I think I rather spend those money on new hardware. At the moment I'm using a Corsair H100i.

 

From HW to actual flying and flight plans in Sweden, how refreshing :wink:

 

I don't do that much flying in Sweden myself actually but only depart from ESSA and then arrive at ESSA, I base all my flying on the destinations for the real Scandinavian LN-RRH a/c which means ESSA to various destinations mostly around Europe and then back to ESSA again. However depending on what kind of flying you prefer I guess you will find the most beautiful scenery in the northern part of Sweden and then of course Sweden's neighbour Norway has an extremely beautiful landscape and you'll also be able to find lots of good scenery both freeware and payware.

 

 

Unfortunately I guess the only way to know for sure is to go for it and then if I end up not being as happy as I would have hoped it's already too late and my money is already spent...

 

Yes, that will do it!   In defense of opting to upgrade you can take stock in the fact that 10% of already strong performance is arguably significant.  Put another way, 10% of the computing power of your current machine is in itself a pretty strong piece of computing power!  Not earth-shattering, but arguably significant.  I think the main annoyance you have to deal with is getting a poor overclocker which by most accounts is a real possibility.  I would be very bummed if that happened to me, especially after unplugging a very nice performing SB chip like you have now.  

 

Here's a thought to help you decide:  create a poll here and ask others who've already done exactly what you are thinking about:  for those who started w/ SB at ~4.8Ghz and moved to Haswell--have them rate their post-buyer sentiment accordingly:   'The difference in total performance (and define 'total performance'!) post upgrade was':
 

a.  Very noticeable

b.  Marginally noticeable

c.  Not noticeable

 

A caveat though is to make sure you've outline ALL the things you're changing.  For example, I went to a fast SSD from a slow HDD, so this I really like but has nothing to do w/ my CPU upgrade.  Without defining each part is kind of hard to get an accurate picture.  The other thing too is I think people generally want to feel good about their decision so I would take the positive answer with a tiny grain of salt!

 

Good luck Web.  The other thing you can do is wait for Broadwell or the next offering.  I remained patient w/ my upgrade because I really wanted to appreciate a big difference and I certainly have.