just upgraded from a geforce 660 to 970 and the result is....

[sanh 823]

...disappointing. I had a 2gb Geforce 660ti and just spent £280 on a new 4gb Geforce 970 since I hear so much about P3D being more GC dependant.

 

Before the upgrade I had just bought the Aerosoft A320 and taking off out of default Heathrow on my I5 running at 4.4ghz with sliders medium-high I was seeing 15-20fps and it was choppy at times. I therefore decided to buy a new GC card but the result is not very different. 16-22fps and still choppy (stutters) at times.

 

I did the same flight above before installing the new card and after and struggled to notice any difference at all. Maybe i just wasted money on the new card or maybe the new card just means i can crank the AA up with less of a hit. I currently have 2x AA. Shadows are low.

 

I tried deleting shaders and I have the latest drivers. I am only running Ut2 with fairly low settings. Anyone else made an upgrade like this? What did you find?

 

Edit: done some more testing and I think I see some small differences or improvements but overall i regret the upgrade. In my view if you have a 500 or 600 card its good enough and you wont see enough of an inprovement to justify an expensive new card. Just my view though.

[Patriot3810 182]

something isn't right then, when i went from a gtx 780 to a 970 i had about a 15% improvement and now i am running 2 970's in sli at 16x and 8x pcie lanes.in sli i have a 50% or more improvement in loading times

[Dave_YVR 968]

 I agree with Brett, while the differences in P3d aren't going to be earth shattering they should be substantial. It's not all about frame rates, the differences in smoothness, texture loading, image quality, AA, not to mention how the two cards will differ in IMC weather conditions is just the tip of comparing them.

[ryanbatc 12,770]

I did a 570 to a 970 with almost no difference in P3D. In FSX I literally observed no difference with similar settings

 

In xp10 changes were huge

 

What it should allow you to do is run higher AA or driver level AA

[tremor595 20]

I just upgraded from a 580 to a 970 and the results are amazing! I'm running a 2700k CPU at 5GHz btw. 

Before i was flying most of the time with viewing distance limited in ASN to about 12 to 24 miles. This looked most realistic for me.

Now i fly with about 60 miles and around 100 miles upper visibility, shadows and lighting nearly all in, i even tried maximum of 20 cloud layers in ASN and high reso clouds in REX4 with no big impact on fps to my surprise. Cloud drawing distance kept at around 60 to 70 miles. 

Maybe in certain situations or locations i will have to turn back some notches. Don't know if i really need 4096 clouds...

But on a flight from ORBXs 7s3 to s45 i had no impact. FPS limited to 30, half refresh of 60 in NI, never went below 20FPS. I fly A2A GA. No tubes.

Most of the settings i took from a thread from the ORBX forum. If you like do a search for "ultimate p3d setting" or so, you will find it. It was very useful as a base.

At least here.

But as always... different machines - different results.

So keep tweaking. 

[WR269 367]

Interesting, I have just ditched my GTX660ti and bought a GTX970. My system is still in pieces but I should have it all rebuilt in the next 24 hours or so. I plan on formatting my drives and reinstall Windows, make a fresh start with new case and GPU.

My old 660 struggled with texture and clouds, and shadows were an impossibility, and my expectations are definitely high.

[Fi5kuS 57]

Strange. Went from a 760 to the 970 and I think the difference was quite noticeable. 

[MikeT707 1,181]

When I went from a 660ti 2g to a 770 4g, the difference was very noticeable. There is likely something on the op's end that might need some adjusting. Does not make sense otherwise. 

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

If you didn't do all this:

 

1. Clean install of the most recent video driver from nVidia.

2.Rename Prepar3d.cfg and let the sim rebuild the file. Edit your settings from the default as needed.

3. Delete the P3d shader binary files.

 

Try it. I upgraded from a GTX 680 to a GTX 980 Ti and saw massive improvements.

[Appliance 51]

 

 

I was seeing 15-20fps and it was choppy at times.

 

I came from an MSI Hawk GTX560Ti 1GB card which was allowing 30fps (locked,) sliders at 75% with all shadows on but 100% utilised.  My GTX970 allows higher AA etc. at 65% utilisation. I deduce therefore your system is not harmonised and actions as described by Jay immediately above should be your starting point.

[rickdeckard 1]

did you delete your shaders folders? it might help..

 

you can find it under:

 

     C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Lockheed Martin\Prepar3D v2\ 

 

I you don't see appdata folder need to enable hidden files and folder. 

 

Are your display drivers updated?

[sanh 823]

Hi all, thanks for the comments. I did some more investigation and found my UT2 settings were much higher than I thought. This meant the AI aircraft were killing the system at Heathrow and negated the effect of the video card change.

 

I dropped the UT2 settings down and I am seeing good results. Around 30fps with the Aerosoft Airbus X at Heathrow with reasonable traffic. Its hard to compare before/after because I always vary my UT2 settings depending on where I am flying (into major airports I drop the settings and increase when flying to more isolated smaller airports) so I don't know what framerate I would have seen before hand but I suspect around 20-25fps so I think its a definite improvement. I also notice the shadows look better and the FPS fluctuations (i have frame rate set to unlimited) are much lower leading to smoother flying.

 

I guess I am happy but without having done the same situation before the upgrade its hard to tell how much better it is.