I'm currently running P3D and X-Plane. My desktop is an I7-2600K@ 4.6GHZ, EVGA GTX770 4 GB, and 8 GB ram. I'm really interested in what might help for P3D. I'm going to be retiring soon (fixed income and all) so I don't want to spend a boatload of money by upgrading the CPU and motherboard. Would I get more bang for my buck by going from the GTX770 to the GTX970, or might I see a better performance jump by putting P3D on a SSD drive. It's currently running on a 7200 rpm mechanical drive. Any help would be appreciated.

I haven't used P3D and have limited use of X-Plane, however:

1) I believe an SSD will mainly speed up loading times rather than contribute towards your frame rate.

2) If you're running lots of big scenery then perhaps in P3D and X-Plane you'll see benefits with 16GB RAM, although IMHO I'd save the memory upgrade to when you build a new system.

3) I don't think you'll see much improvement going from a GTX770 to GTX970 on a single display, maybe for multiple displays.

Q1) Are you running a single monitor?

Q2) What 7200 drive are you running? I'll be using an SSD and WD Caviar Black drives in my new build.

Q3) What sort of frame rates are you getting?

Q4) What kind of planes do you fly?

Django,

             Thanks for the response. I am running a single monitor. My hard drive is just a standard WD 7200 1TB drive. I'm getting low 20's to mid teens at Aerosoft's London Heathrow. EGLL is notorious for low performance no matter who's scenery you're using. I fly with all of PMDG offerings and Aerosoft's Airbus.

From what I hear around the campfire, for decent frames and performance, a 770 is a minimum.  As for the 970, you should see a lot better performance without breaking the bank.  You also have to consider with respect to EGLL, and any other heavily populated airport, that in-sim settings can affect performance.  Keeping the sliders at a reasonable level can only help the cause.

 

-Jim

 

 

As for the 970, you should see a lot better performance without breaking the bank.

 

Come to think of it I did chose a 3GB GTX780Ti over a 4GB GTX770... ??? By the way, the frame rate in Aerosoft Mega Airport Heathrow Xtended is supposed to be better than the previous version, and there's also a version for X-Plane).

Q1) What sort of graphics, autogen, AI, and weather settings are you running (please don't say "maxed out"!)

Q2) What frame rate are you getting at higher altitude?

Q3) Do you clean boot for a flightsim session?

Q4) What sort of frame rates are you getting with X-Plane?

Well, I went ahead and got the GTX 970. I used Aerosoft's EGLL as a testbed since it is probably the most graphic intensive scenery I have and I have it for all three platforms, FSX,P3D, and X-Plane 10. In both FSX and P3D I saw no improvement in framerates. Mid to upper teens with the sliders about 3/4 of the way to the right. In XPX I picked up about 15FPS. From 30 to 45 FPS and that was with a lot of static aircraft and AI traffic. Before I send the card back, I'm going to do a reinstall of P3D without Global Vector to see if that makes a difference.

Good plan for the reinstall, before doing that did you dump the shader cache? Always a good idea when you change cards/ reinstall new gpu drivers. Might save yourself some trouble. And use ddu when you install the drivers.

Rhys,

          Thanks for the tip about the shader cache. I deleted it and it helped. I may still do a complete reinstall though. 

Did you remove and reinstall the Nvidia driver? I don't use P3D but I imagine there will still be a reference for the graphics card in the cfg file (???), so check the correct reference is there. Whenever I install a new graphics card I always remove the current Nvidia driver and then reinstall it for the new card. In FSX I also delete my cfg file and let the sim create a new one and then manually add all my tweaks.