Money waste

[Sara Louise Capon 21]

Hey hey, actually, 8fps may sound bad, but perfectly flyable, when smooth that is.

If for say Heathrow, I switched off Stansted, London City, & Gatwick, then fps would be higher.

I have quiet a long viewing distance set, and details are high,

I fly mainly vfr, If I switch to small aircraft, Cessna's etc, then frames obviously increase.

 

For me, complex aircraft, and too much detail are eating the fps,

I have just been to lazy to turn anything off lol,

but if it was unflyable, I would.

 

Usually I don't use AI, for practice flying,

I care more about me flying than AI

[SolRayz 392]

This is a kind of precaution post to those who are going to upgrade computers for FSX.

 

Today i have got my brand new Gigabyte GTX760OC 2Gb graphic board.

760 is replacement for my old 460.

 

And ... got nothing extra, maybe 1fps, maybe not.

 

 

I mean that was to be expected...unless you want to play the upcoming PC version of GTA5, then you will see minor gains in FSX. I upgraded from the 560Ti to the 680, and will say that running 2xSGGS in dx9 in extreme cloudy conditions has really improved. Other than that, not much difference.

[P50andpilot 7]

Yup.

 

I have 3 X 24" monitors + 4th touchscreen monitor/

 

It matters to me... AA and Clouds and what not, these massgive video card does its thing.

Do you by chance use the touchscreen for pmdg overhead panels? If so how does it do.

 

 

Justin whetstone

[ronski 1]

Just shoving a new video card into a four year old system is simply not going to work as it should.

 

The 7 ( and 6  I think ) series have PCI-3.0  and that made it possible to reduce the number of cores, reduce heat and volt requirements, allow turbo boosting,  etc, etc.etc, bla, bla.   

Fancy colored graphs will show how many points faster it is than it's predecessors.

 

But,  without that extra bandwidth.......all for very little.   If the motherboard does not have PCI-3.0     slots ,   the card will operate much like the old one.

 

These days, with the rapid change, we must match all the components.   Now with the new 4K video format ( Awesome!! ) we're looking at 4 times the resolution of true high definition.       All those that bought anything less than a Titan, running 4K,  are going to be complaining.

 

and on it goes. Oh the fun. :Party:

[dazz 69]

Just shoving a new video card into a four year old system is simply not going to work as it should.

 

The 7 ( and 6  I think ) series have PCI-3.0  and that made it possible to reduce the number of cores, reduce heat and volt requirements, allow turbo boosting,  etc, etc.etc, bla, bla.   

Fancy colored graphs will show how many points faster it is than it's predecessors.

 

But,  without that extra bandwidth.......all for very little.   If the motherboard does not have PCI-3.0     slots ,   the card will operate much like the old one.

 

These days, with the rapid change, we must match all the components.   Now with the new 4K video format ( Awesome!! ) we're looking at 4 times the resolution of true high definition.       All those that bought anything less than a Titan, running 4K,  are going to be complaining.

 

and on it goes. Oh the fun. :Party:

 

Absolutely not true Ron. What does have PCIe to do with turbo, heat an volts? nothing really.

And bandwidth is not a limiting factor, not sure what makes you think it is

[ronski 1]

fair comment, i tried to simplify it.  remember that the card get's it information through the PCI bus on the motherboard. here's the long version.

 

PCIe 3.0 removes the requirement 2.0 has for 8b/10b encoding, and instead uses a technique called "scrambling" that applies a known binary polynomial to a data stream in a feedback topology. Because the scrambling polynomial is known, the data can be recovered by running it through a feedback topology using the inverse polynomial. and also uses a 128b/130b encoding scheme, reducing the overhead to approximately 1.5% ((130-128)/130), as opposed to the 20% overhead of 8b/10b encoding used by PCIe 2.0. PCIe 3.0's 8 GT/s bit rate effectively delivers double PCIe 2.0 bandwidth.

 

:blink:

[ronski 1]

OK,  so I dribbled off topic. :unsure:

 

My point was,  I Agree with the OP.   If we look at all the benchmarking graphs published,  it's easy to think that one thing is 4 times faster than another,  an example here; http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2012/-02-Cinebench-11.5,3143.html

 

The fastest Intel chip appears to be 4 times faster than the AMD phenom 2 @ 3.4gig way down the list.

Same thing happens when comparing an old GTX 9800  with the new GTX 780. The colored fancy graphs show it to be 4-5 times faster,  but in reality,  Not so...Hmmmm.

 

I have FSX on an old phenom2 @ 3.4 with a GTX 9800,  and have just completed a new Intel Haswell system overclocked to 4.2, superfast 2400 memory and a GTX780. Very expensive.

 

If you believe the graphs etc.  we could all be forgiven for thinking it would be at least 4 times faster.

 

No where near it, :huh:  a decent improvement of course, and better scenery settings, but barely 10-15 fps,

  This leads to a lot of frustrated users paying big money for very little gain.   It's the marketing machine to keep us buying the latest ( and not so greatest )  computers.

[cvearl 60]

Sara,

 

There's one way of checking how much resolution affects the performance. Try resizing a windowed FSX down to a quarter of the screen and set fps to unlimited. The smaller you make it the more the fps may increase. You should get 120ps with it at 2cm x 2cm but it's a bit tricky to land. :biggrin:

 

Charles,

 

Back in 2008 I tried a Radeon 3970 and whilst the image quality was excellent it couldn't cope very well with clouds. I swapped it for a nVidia 8800GTX and the performance increase was dramatic albeit with lower image quality. I wouldn't buy another ATI card for FS.

Back in 2008. Um... Ya. That was funny. That was several generations ago. I don't care what you buy actually. I just said its not like it was.

 

C.

[cvearl 60]

You should be pretty okay with that Ray,

 

I run a i7 990X at 4.6,

and get pretty much 20fps (locked) and smooth for most of UK, using UK2000 airports,

Playsims photoscenery, Earth simulations Treescapes, but yes it does drop to around 10fps around London, that's with London City, Stansted, Gatwick and Heathrow going, specially near Heathrow when it drops to 8 near landing,

but smoothness is everything,

so perfectly landable for instrument or VFR aporach.

 

but yes the ATI's do still dislike clouds, in severe thunderstorms, it will do the same as London does,

The good thing is with London and Thunderstorm it is still 8fps at Heathrow as 1 slowdown is GPU, and 1 is CPU lol.

But still smooth.

Your problem must be a crossfire thing? My 6950 a year ago never saw 8 fps. Something is seriously wrong or you have everything maxed and 100% ai traffic enabled?

 

Is photo scenery tough? I have no way to compare this with you as I dont use photo scenery.

 

C.

[Sara Louise Capon 21]

I Only use 1 6990, it is a dual processor card, so no crossfire setup,

and running at 2560x1600.

 

4 very detailed airports around a city when you can see them all, and set at high detail do that,
 

For me, complex aircraft, and too much detail are eating the fps,

I have just been to lazy to turn anything off lol,

but if it was unflyable, I would.

 

 

I know what eats into the fps,

The point is that it is smooth all the way in, no stutters or jerks is what counts.

I think that zero crash landings and flying the PMDG 737 & Coolsky DC9 in to Heathrow makes it okay for me.

[vololiberista 205]

It's amazing what small adjustments in the cfg file can make to eliminating stutters. for example

TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19

Don't set this to 21 unless you do have scenery more detailed than LOD9. The programme spends time looking for higher res scenery even if it doesn't exist hence the stutters. If you do have higher res scenery then proably during the install it has changed that to a higher value if not then you will have to amend your cfg yourself. You see, it also works the other way round. i.e "I'm not looking for high res scenery, but oh, what's this? Oh well I'll have to stop and do something about it!" = more stutters while the sims "thinks what to do".

[dazz 69]

 

 

it is a dual processor card, so no crossfire setup

 

Dual GPU's are internally crossfired / SLI'ed

[Sara Louise Capon 21]

Dual GPU's are internally crossfired / SLI'ed

That maybe true,

But it is plug and play,

No user input required or additional connectors.

It is what it is so to speak.