60Hz HDMI 2.0 and my Sony 4K monitor and 970 GTX ... impressed!

[drumsonly2002 3]

Fantastic! Using 3gb MSI GTX 580 card with a HDMI cable. Custom resolution of 3840 x 2160. Turned down autogen a bit and have a bit of tweaking to do as the image is so sharp. Frames are the same as when I was running the 24" monitor at 1920 x 1200. The deal in the 970 fell through so staying with the 580 for now. The HDMI cable with the 580 does not allow 60hz so I am running at 30 hz. Not a deal breaker. Apparently a DVI to HDMI 2 dongle will be available later this year so those without 970 / 980 will be able to take advantage of HDMI 2.0. The LG 49" 4k does HDMI 2.0. I sit exactly an arms length to the monitor, no pixels seen, very crisp. My only regret is I did not do this sooner. The 50" is very nice but I a 60" or bigger would be a tad more immersive. Unfortunately the $$$ is an issue, but never imagined getting 50 inches of glory for under a grand. Surprised my trusty 580 can push the graphics around as I fly Orbx with helicopters nap of the earth. I do not fly into large airports. My next upgrade will be P3D. If SLI is made to work with FSX, that would be real progress. I give 4k a 5 out 5 since the real estate went from a humble 24" to a 50" almost life size situation is an entirely new experience. A shout out of thanks to Rob for inspiring me to do this!

[ErichB 3,643]

That's great news.  

[hjsmuc 393]

Very interesting thread, thanks again Rob.

 

What size would you guys recommend for a smaller 4K monitor, 48" on my desk won't really fit. I have one 20" and another 22" at the moment but the smaller one is moved from the desk onto a container. Would I sacrifice a lot of the quality if I go for something around 30". I am also sitting many hours in front of that thing so quality matters.

 

 

[whosyourcaddy 0]

Rob, have you noticed any performance degradation when the sim uses more than 3.5gb of VRAM on the 970?

[Guest]

 

 

Rob, have you noticed any performance degradation when the sim uses more than 3.5gb of VRAM on the 970?

 

I haven't seen it use more than about 3GB ... but I didn't push it.  I have since moved P3D over to my other PC which is Titan based so not in a position to test 970 with P3D right now (i may do later for shared cockpit testing ... thinking the Q400 here).

 

Cheers, Rob.

[rjack1282 316]

I think I'm going to wait for either the Acer or Asus 4k IPS panel with g-sync (hopefully timed perfectly with the P3D nvidia profile).  I really want to upgrade to 4k now but I know the prices will only get better this year.

[Steve Cannell 4]

I continue to be amazed with the performance I'm getting with my very affordable 2 EVGA GTX 970's in SLI.

 

I gathered from the forums that SLI wasn't yet being utilized.

However my results, to me anyways, seem to suggest there might be some benefit ???

Maybe it's simply the 4K resolutions (3840 x 2160  @60hz) allowing me to play at very little AA settings that's making the difference ??

 

Both FSX-SE and P3D 2.5 running at 40 -60 fps and smooth as I have every seen. No heavy airliners yet but the Milviz b407 over Vancouver city, PNW, weather and clouds.

 

Anyone else running 900 series cards in SLI ?

 

Cheers

Steve

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

It's not that SLI doesn't work at all in P3d, it's that P3d is not optimized for SLI . The incremental performance improvements are not worth the cost of a second video card.

 

Further, even if nVidia does release a driver set with an SLI optimized P3d profile, the performance increase may still be bottlenecked by the CPU.

[Guest]

 

 

it's that P3d is not optimized for SLI

 

Hi Jay, not sure exactly what you mean by "optimized" but the LM crew have made specific code adjustments so that SLI will work with P3D ... so obviously LM have been working with nVidia at the code level.  It's probably a back and forth process and my last understanding is that P3D is ready for nVidia to complete their side of the process.

 

How much SLI will impact performance is obviously undetermined at this point ...however, if a driver profile does "eventually" arrive it has the potential for to shift CPU work to GPU work ... what I'm specifically thinking about are AutoGen buildings (trees work very well, buildings not so well) ... this slider does impact performance considerably, does cause the CPU to spike up, and does consume more VAS (this is why I always run Building AutoGen at normal).

 

If working well, a driver profile will "free up the CPU".

 

Cheers, Rob.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

When  a 3D app is optimized for SLI, it scales up properly. Obviously, one doesn't get double the GPU performance with two cards in SLI, but P3d has never been reported to an achieve more than 20-30% improvement using SLI. That's probably not worth another $300-400 for a 2nd GTX 970 ( unless of course if one has a bunch of other games that take full advantage of SLI).

 

As to the autogen issue with buildings, I don't understand your point with SLI, sorry. Has somebody from LM told you that they are working on switching building autogen to be more GPU-weighted? To be honest, I've always wondered if urban areas create some kind of synergistic badness for P3d. First, there is more AI air traffic. Second, even though there are less trees, there are more buildings. Third, urban areas have more roads and streets. Lastly, urban areas have more variability in land class. 

 

I'm not quite sure how the last item impacts performance exactly, but maybe you might have an idea. I can tell you that the product Xtreme Cities, uses a different approach to displaying urban areas than what the default P3d uses and performance is not impacted anywhere near as great in cities.

[hjsmuc 393]

I have been looking around for something smaller fitting on my desk but none of these models would take HDMI 2.0 at 60Hz. What they do however is take display port at that frequency. Does anybody of the experts here know if this would give me the same results with the sim?

 

And would it still be possible to have a second monitor if I run both on 1920X1080 only?

 

Thanks!

[S_D 7]

Sorry to bump this thread again, but Rob, your initial video about 4k and the 970. Is that a 'naked' P3D install, or does that have add-ins etc?

 

I'm at the point of upgrading my monitor and graphics card from a 1600x1200 10 year old TFT along with a 290X to either a 980X or Titan X and either a 1900x1200 or 2560x1440 monitor, hence my question.

 

Thanks!

Simon

[Guest]

 

 

Is that a 'naked' P3D install, or does that have add-ins etc?

 

That was on my older PC (3960X) with full suite of add-ons (Orbx, Vector, REX, etc. etc.) -- it was just a quick test flight to compare how well it did vs. my Titan Black ... don't get the wrong impression, my Titan Black does perform better (it'll lock at 30 FPS in the same situation, the 970 doesn't) and doesn't hickup when textures exceed 4GB VRAM.  

 

But ... wanted to show my pleasant surprise at how well the 970 performed at 4K res for what I consider a mid-range GPU.

 

I hope to have the Titan X next week (fingers crossed) so I can provide info relative to the Titan Black (Apples to Apples)

 

Cheers, Rob.

[S_D 7]

Thanks for the update Rob.

 

 

So in your opinion and experience, do you think an overclocked 980 would be enough for 2560/1440 with:

 

ASN/Orbx (including vector)/REX/Airbus/FS Global? Or would I only get away with a 1920/1200 panel with that?

 

FWIW the rest of my system is 4790k at 4.7 and 16GB 2400Mhz RAM, 1TB SSD, etc.

 

Thanks again

 

Simon

[Guest]

 

 

So in your opinion and experience, do you think an overclocked 980 would be enough for 2560/1440 with:

 

I have no opinion of the 980 since I have no experience with it ... others might want to chime in.  The 980 costs more than the 970 so I would imagine it would bring better performance than a 970 ... how much better I don't know.

 

Display settings and 3rd party options enabled/disabled will impact performance, there is no golden rule, just have to adjust to meet your performance desires - my goal is a locked 30 fps, for some that's not good enough and they want locked 60 fps (or even 75 fps for Occulus).  For example turning off just 2 options in Orbx Vector was the difference between stutters and "almost" no stutters on my other PC.  

 

Going from 2560 x 1600 (my older monitor) to 3840 x 2160 (new monitor) was an immediate 30% FPS hit (apples to apples). 

 

Just too much variation between hardware and software to come to a conclusion to support "980 would be enough" ... sorry, don't want to make false promises.  But I'm jaded, IMHO a Titan Black isn't enough and the new Titan X will probably not be enough either ... but that's just me wanting more than current hardware can handle.

 

I don't want get into SLI driver support ... I wait and hope that happens but even if it does happen there is no guarantee it'll scale performance upwards significantly.

 

Cheers, Rob.