8GB VRAM

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

Anyone try one of these 8GB on XPX yet? Or am I better waiting for the geforce 980GTX 8GB?

 

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/8gb-msi-radeon-r9-290x-gaming-8g-28nm-5500mhz-gddr5-gpu-1000mhz-boost-1040mhz-2816-streams-displaypo

 

Ian

[Humpty 751]

Mouth is watering and pocket is empty.

 

That would blast XPx.

 

The R9 series is excellent , but I would guess the GTX 9xx series to be better as they are new. And AMD drivers are the most horrible.

[uwespeed 497]

Until around 1 year ago I had only 8 GB VRAM ...  :rolleyes:  Now I have 16 and after all 4 GB VRAM ...

[alexcolka 183]

WOW! I would love that in my flying toaster!

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

Think I may buy it.....

[mtaxp 666]

IMO if you are really eager buying a new GPU now and not wait a bit , get the GTX 780TI 6GB.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

IMO if you are really eager buying a new GPU now and not wait a bit , get the GTX 780TI 6GB.

 

That has 2GB less Vram, and is £100 more expensive. will the 2GB affect me as I plan on a 4k monitor too....

[strider1 575]

That has 2GB less Vram, and is £100 more expensive. will the 2GB affect me as I plan on a 4k monitor too....

You are going to need a 8gb card if you are looking at a 4k monitor.

[mdavis 10]

I just built a new machine and fired it up yesterday. I use a 24" 1920x1200 display and find it just about perfect. My son-in-law uses a big 4K monitor with 2 GTX 970 boards in SLI which gives him a lot of potential detail and horsepower along with a combined 8GB of VRAM. But after looking at X-Plane and FSX on the 4K, I don't see any advantage in detail since the scenery and aircraft are limited to the pixel resolution of the image files/tiles. In addition, asking your video card to push that many pixels around while maxing out AA is wasting power for little or no gain in image resolution.

 

What I've done is concentrate on CPU horsepower with an Intel 4790K Devils Canyon CPU, a Corsair H110 liquid cooler, 32GB of Corsair Vengenace 1866 RAM and a single GTX 970 4GB Superclocked video card. Boot is from a Samsung 850 Pro SSHD 512GB, but X-Plane runs on one of a pair of fast 4TB Seagate HDs with 64GB SSHD cache.

 

The system is running as of yesterday. What I found is that the CPU and GPU are very evenly balanced and just loafing. The 4790K has a native clock speed of 4.0GHz and turbo mode of 4.4GHz and will be overclocked in a few days. (I did run it up to 4.8GHz and found it cool and stable but backed it down during my setup). So for now, it's stock, running at 26°C and 4.0GB in all 4 cores (I've left hyperthreading on but it doesn't matter). On the ground at KSEA (supposedly the most dense X-Plane 10 scenery area) with the default C172SP, my framerate is low 50's during taxi. I have texture resolution at Extreme, objects at extreme, roads at Tons, cars at Siberian Winter, world detail at Very High, airport detail at Extreme, shadow detail Global, water reflection at Complete, all special effects On including HDR, 4xSSAA+FXAA, cloud detail 50%, real weather, no other add-ons (yet). VRAM used is 1454GB on a 4GB card. CPU and GPU both run around 0.19 load. These were just the settings I had at the time I was monitoring the sim. They will obviously change as I tune it. And at one point, airborne in the C90B over northern Australia, my framerates were over 105fps (over water, no scenery).

 

What I take from this is that framerates are CPU-bound and dependent on the raw CPU speed. A 4GB video card is nowhere near its capacity at 1920x1200 with a single monitor. As I play with it this weekend. I will see how much of the VRAM I can load up, but I doubt I can fill 4GB with everything maxed out. Video card speed does not seem to impact the framerates, so a Superclocked card such as I have is a bit of overkill, and I think a 4K monitor is probably overkill because the image resolution is dependent on the graphics detail of the application. I don't know of any software programs that provide 4K worth of resolution, nor do any streaming videos. You might justify it for BluRay DVDs, but I'll save my money for a faster CPU.

[Longranger 148]

I j I will see how much of the VRAM I can load up, but I doubt I can fill 4GB with everything maxed out. Video card speed does not seem to impact the framerates,

You are wrong. While you can't fill the VRAM with Default Scenery: World 2 X-Plane, HD-Mesh or Photoscenery, complex airports and Sky MAXX Pro will show you that even 4 GB RAM are not unlimited.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

You are wrong. While you can't fill the VRAM with Default Scenery: World 2 X-Plane, HD-Mesh or Photoscenery, complex airports and Sky MAXX Pro will show you that even 4 GB RAM are not unlimited.

 

Exactly what I was going to say, I use 3800 of my 4GB on my GTX 7704GB and thats compressing textures.....need more VRAM!

[JimmiG 244]

Max I've seen is about 1800MB with photo scenery and HD-Mesh v2.

 

X-Plane 10 still seems to primarily need high single-core CPU performance, though it's definitely more VRAM hungry than FSX/P3D due to a less sophisticated LOD system.

[mdavis 10]

I'm not saying you CAN'T fill up 4GB of VRAM but it would take a lot of high density add-ons to do it. I am working on setting XP10 up from scratch on a new system. Ultimately, it's not the VRAM that is the limitation, it's the CPU speed. The video card is faster than the CPU, so even if the VRAM is saturated and ready, it will always wait on the CPU to determine the fps speed the sim is capable of, and the speed at which the video information can be passed to the CPU.

 

What you need to watch is the CPU and GPU saturation percentages. If you get to a point where the CPU approaches 100% then any additional VRAM is not going to help and you'll likely see the GPU "resting" while the CPU struggles to keep up.

[Dan8 5]

AMD's drivers for the R9 290 are not horrible.

 

The following is from a review I made of the Carenado PA34 Seneca V in September 2014:

 

"... I took off from KLAX, did a few fly-byes of the tower and center terminal and when VERY close got between 28 and 34 fps [while looking at them], a little further away [than VERY close] and my frame rates jumped from the mid 30s to 40s.

 

At low altitude, over the city East of KLAX frame rates were upper 40s to over 60 fps ...

 

Other than aircraft, the only add-ons I have are GEX and UTX.

 

I reset fps to unlimited, took off from KMHK, real world weather, there were quite a few clouds.  Between 800 and 1200 feet AGL frame rates were between 45 to mid 60s in the trees and buildings Northeast of the airport and, SW of the airport fps was a little higher in the buildings at about 300 AGL ...

 

[At high altitude frame rates are between 90 and over 120 fps]

 

Computer specs include:

AMD R9 290 [reference] video card, with 5% overclock

Intel i5 3570K CPU overclocked to 4.2GHz

16GB of 1866 G.Skill system RAM

Gigabyte Z77X-D3H motherboard

240GB intel 335 SSD [FSX is on this]

1TB Western Digital Black hard drive

[40 inch 1920x1080 screen - 2 feet from my face

TrackIR 5 by NaturalPoint]

- And some other goodies, including a very good CPU air cooler.

 

Some FSX settings:

Graphics tab:

Target frame rate [normally] 30

Full screen resolution 1920x1080x32

Filtering = Anisotropic

Anti-aliasing = on

Global texture resolution = very high

Advanced animations

 

Aircraft tab:

Global settings = Ultra High

 

Scenery tab:

LOD radius = Large

Mesh complexity = 85

Mesh resolution = 5m

Texture resolution = 15cm

Water effects = High 1.x

Land detail textures = checked [yes]

Scenery complexity: Extremely dense

Autogen density: Dense

special effects detail: Medium

 

Weather tab:

Cloud draw distance: 70 miles

Thermal Visualization: None

Simulation Settings: Rate at which weather changes: Medium

Cloud detail: Cloud coverage density: Maximum

 

Traffic tab:

Airline: 70%

General aviation:92%

Airprot Vehicle density: Low

Land/Sea traffic: Road 49%, Ships 50%, Leisure boats 48%

Aircraft labels" Show aircraft labels, Manufacturer, Model [Red, cycle 2 seconds] ..."

 

I am sorry, I just realized this is the X-Plane section in the forum... please accept my apology for giving FSX comments.

[mdavis 10]

Most of us use both. No problem.