Hey all,

 

I decided to hold off on playing XP10 for a while whilst waiting for an upgrade (I like to turn HDR and AA up), but I'm undecided on whether to upgrade now or to hold off.

 

My system specs at the moment as..

 

Dedicated SSD for gaming

8gb DDR3 RAM @ 1333mhz

Core i5 2500k @ 4.2ghz

GTX 660ti 2gb

 

And I am considering upgrading to..

 

GTX 970 4gb

 

Are my other components lacking too much to see benefits from this upgrade? Or would I see a big increase?

 

Thanks

As far as I can say your CPU is good (had it before also and my i7 3770k is not much faster). Also you can overclock a bit more (I reached 4,6GHz) with better cooling. So no need for a new CPU.

 

You have a small amount of RAM; 16GB should be normal these days but it's also not the lack.

 

As you want to have AA and HDR the new GPU is the best you can do. Also 970 is pretty good.

I'd consider upgrading your ram to 16Gb if at all possible.

Easily running HDR, 4xSSAA+FXAA on the GTX970, I can confirm that this upgrade was well worth it. CPU loads are negligible most of the time and the RAM of 8GB shouldn't prevent you from enjoying the graphical detail. :smile:

I'm about to upgrade ram to 16 gb (ddr3 1333) as well, and want to change my gtx 660 2 gb for a gtx 960 4 gb (I'm on budget), so guys what do you think about this card?

I'd stick with 8GB for now and invest the saved money in the GTX970 which puts out significantly more raw power for X-Plane. The 960 hardly beats the older and not that powerful 760 in rw applications and those cards are no good HDR + Antialiasing performers while the 970 can easily handle that task.

 

Before upgrading twice (because of the, in comparison, weak 960) on the component being most important for XP10, I'd recommend playing safe. RAM is something being ok with 8GB and upgrading later is easy and relatively cheap.

 

If you are ok without heavy HDR plus antialiasing, the 960 of course is a nice and efficient card.

The GTX970 will give you more raw power but don't underestimate the power of more and faster RAM. I just upgraded my PC from 8GB RAM DDR3-1333mhz to 16GB DDR3-1600mhz and I am seeing a difference in x-plane. Even with UHD Mesh V3 I am getting betweem 45fps and 60fps in VC. That's with Extreme resolution and HDR lighting.

Thank you guys for your comments, I'll consider your suggestions.

A somehow recent topic re: RAM vs GPU impact, Alexander.

 

To give some rw examples when it comes to the usage of the graphics card. I'm running on normal HD resolution on a single monitor and cloudy skies at 30 fps with the current HDR+AA settings lead to

 

~98% GPU

~3400MB VRAM

 

 

So you can see that a 960 won't be able to handle the loads while, if I take out half of my RAM, the fps aren't affected at all. At the time of taking the screenshot, my whole system didn't even consume 5GB of RAM.

 

One could even opt for a GTX980 if it wasn't so significantly more expensive for adding another ~15% of raw power. The reason being that the 970 is on the edge and every bit of GPU percentage will add some nice reserves. One can make the same case for the VRAM btw but 4+GB cards are less common so far.

 

Now the GPU and VRAM demands go hand in hand since the weaker GPUs might not run into the limits when avoiding the supersampling antialiasing and HDR settings due to their lack of power.

 

I ran a 670 before and the upgrade to the 970 was most noticeable in the way of enabling that HDR+AA path. Food for thought. :smile:

The 970 would help a lot.

 

I was running a 2500K at 4 ghz, and a gtx 570.

 

Had to run textures at normal with payware, now I can run extreme just fine (I bought a gtx 970)

 

I should note I'm still on 8 GB 1866mhz ram. I recently tried to use 16GB but since the new 4x2 sticks werent identical to the other sticks my PC decided to not bootup after a while

I literally saw no difference between 8 and 16 in xp with HDR, extreme res, and UHD v3 mesh

I see your point guys, hmmm certainly I would love to have a GTX 980 (no money for that), Ben said at the blog that 8 gb could be enough for the new high distant DSF load when 10.40 arrives but he's not sure with more complex aircraft, plugins, etc. So, in my case I need to replace 4 sticks of 2 gb of slow and old 666 mhz ddr3 for more modern ddr3, my mb can handle just 16 gb of max speed 1333 modules, being tight on budget... well let's see if I can afford at least the 970, that's a hundred more over the 960, wife and children may get upset.

 

I will be happy just running at 25-30 frames with hdr with aa at 4x.

 

Thanks again!

Back off on the aa.  I've run with that all the way from 2x to 8x and there isn't enough difference to sweat lower framerates if you don't have the GPU power.

After reading the above, I did a search on 970 vs 770 (I have the 770)

 

According to this tester, while benchmark tests indicate a modest increase in performance with the 970, actual gaming experience was "N/A".

 

http://gpuboss.com/gpus/GeForce-GTX-970-vs-GeForce-GTX-770

 

Just thought I'd muddy the water as I can't justify the upgrade.

 

John

actual gaming experience was "N/A".

Correct me if I'm wrong, John, but "N/A," in the terms the article uses, just means that there isn't enough data to arrive at any conclusion.

 

The ranking of the cards (GTX770 vs 970) roughly comes down to the 970 leading by some 35% in rw applications (read: games) when the 770 isn't limited by it's default 2GB VRAM and higher when it is. The Passmark scores (which somehow relate to the available lets call it "X-Plane power") differ by about 40%.

 

As a side note, the older 770 still beats the new 960 which makes it a better card for X-Plane.

 

And another side note, mdavis correctly stated that the antialiasing is the main fps hog once you are able to run high detail settings. Especially the HDR + SSAA combo (which, as supersampling implies, renders at very high internal resolutions) is very much able to stress the 970/980 lineup in cloudy skies. It also fills the VRAM rather quickly.

 

A great summary as to why this is the case and how 'cheap' AA methods (FXAA) relate to the better SSAA can be read here.

 

Must say that I'm really impressed by how nicely X-Plane scales with the available GPU. No other sim, and I've tried them all most so far, showed those benefits. The reason why this is good is that the GPU branch offers the larger gains with upcoming generations. As opposed to the CPU sector which does go forward but mainly in terms of low power consumption and not so much on the raw power basis.

 

So the person with lets say an older Sandy Bridge CPU should be very ok in X-Plane, if there's a powerful GPU available. And others already pointed out that the GPU plus a lot of VRAM case also makes sense. 4GB being a baseline. Again, this is different in other sims which still run into CPU-limited scenarios on a regular basis.

 

Forgot to add. If I had a 770, maybe even a 4GB variant, I wouldn't consider upgrading even with the 970's lead in mind.

This is what an I5 4670k + 16GB Ram and a GTX970 will get you with UHD Mesh V3. Please take notice on the top corner the frame rate I was getting.