nVidia FX Quadro upgraded but bad performance

[ti_dabbelju 6]

Hi,

I have used NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800. The performance was good with fairly high settings and no stutters.

 

My friend gave me a GeForce 9800 GT. Thinking it would be better I uninstalled the Quadro and used Driver Sweeper before changing the cards. I have applied the same settings as before in the nVidia Inspector. I had fsx create the [Display] section in the fsx.cfg and deleted the old entry. I applied all tweaks as before.

 

Now fps dropped from 25 to 7! Playing with detail settings and tweaks did not get the performance up.

 

For space reasons I had to install the card in the second PCI-E slot. Could that be a problem? Maybe I should not use the latest driver (341.44) but an older one? Or is the card just not that good?

 

Tweaks:

[GRAPHICS]

HIGHMEMFIX=1

TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD=4096

[Main]

FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.1

[bUFFERPOOLS]

UsePools=0

[Display]

UPPER_FRAMERATE_LIMIT=0

[JOBSCHEDULER]

AffinityMask=14

[TERRAIN]

LOD_RADIUS=4.500000

WATER_EFFECTS=6

[DISPLAY.Device.NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT  .0]

Mode=1280x1024x32

TriLinear=1

 

[PieEater 10]

The 9800GT is theoretically a better card but it is also 7 years old so the hardware may be past it's prime. Have you run some benchmarks with both cards such as Unigene Valley to confirm that the 9800GT has better scores, if not you know it's potentially a hardware issue if you do get better scores you know it's potentially a FSX configuration issue. This should at least point you in the right direction.

[stans 702]

Back when PCI-Express was new, many of the early motherboards with dual PCI-E slots had a full 16x as the first slot, but the second slot had 1/2 the data throughput capabilities, effectively making it a PCI-E 8x slot.  If you have one of these motherboards, plugging that 9800 into the second slot cuts its performance in half.

[PieEater 10]

Back when PCI-Express was new, many of the early motherboards with dual PCI-E slots had a full 16x as the first slot, but the second slot had 1/2 the data throughput capabilities, effectively making it a PCI-E 8x slot.

True.

 

If you have one of these motherboards, plugging that 9800 into the second slot cuts its performance in half.

False - PCI-E 8x can still cope with the data throughput of most graphics cards, with a 7 year old 9800 there will be no noticeable difference in performance.

 

"Even enthusiast-class graphics cards are not particularly bandwidth-hungry from a PCIe bus standpoint. Whether you use a PCIe 2.0, PCIe 3.0, a x8 link, or a x16 connection, for a single card, it essentially doesn’t matter to performance"

[NZ255 309]

Just note the Quadro series cards aren't designed for gaming so if you're going to upgrade look at the geforce range of cards.

[stans 702]

 

False - PCI-E 8x can still cope with the data throughput of most graphics cards, with a 7 year old 9800 there will be no noticeable difference in performance.

 

"Even enthusiast-class graphics cards are not particularly bandwidth-hungry from a PCIe bus standpoint. Whether you use a PCIe 2.0, PCIe 3.0, a x8 link, or a x16 connection, for a single card, it essentially doesn’t matter to performance"

 

It was just a thought, from a very old, dusty, cobweb filled corner of my memory.

 

 

 

Just note the Quadro series cards aren't designed for gaming so if you're going to upgrade look at the geforce range of cards.

 

The OP did upgrade from a Quadro to a GeForce 9800, but in doing so resulted in a 70% decrease in performance.

 

One more thing to consider is the FSX cfg file.  I upgraded my video card from a 8800GT to a GTX-760 SOC.  My performance improved, but allowing FSX to build a whole new cfg file seemed to help even more.

[ti_dabbelju 6]

Thanks for the discussion. I did not get any better results in slot1 (had to remove part of the computer case). And like I said in my first post I did delete the fsx.cfg with no improvement.

 

I ended up putting the Quadro back in because it did run quite well. Want to stop experimenting and go flying! I'll go for a better GPU some other time.

[stans 702]

What does the rest of the system look like?  CPU and RAM are very important to MicroSoft's flightsims.

[ti_dabbelju 6]

Specs:

i5 750 @2.67GHz

ASUSTeK P7P55D Mainboard

8GB RAM DDR3

nVidia Quadro 1800 FX

Windows 7 64bit

[stans 702]

You might try replacing or at least overclocking the CPU.  FSX prefers multi-core CPU's close to or over 4 GHz.  You would need to replace the stock CPU cooler for overclocking.

[ti_dabbelju 6]

Thanks, I'll look into it.