4GB or 8GB?

[Jimmy RFR 406]

Just a follow up on my comment about using 4 1/2 GB VRAM...

 

I kept a seperate usage monitor open on my flight last night from KPDX to KSFO, and saw the VRAM usage hit about 5 1/4 GB.  This is with HD mesh and most setting to mid/max on 10.36, using HDR and 4x AA.  So a 6 GB card is definitely of use.  I'm sure the sim scales to what you have, but it seems a case of 'more is better'.

 

It's also worth noting that I run XP at 2560x1440.

 

Of interest is that even at that resolution, with mid to high settings, GPU usage generally hovers around 25 - 35%, with frames locked at 30.

[tonywob 4,768]

 

 

I kept a seperate usage monitor open on my flight last night from KPDX to KSFO, and saw the VRAM usage hit about 5 1/4 GB

 

Out of curiosity, do you have texture compression enabled? That seems awfully high, especially when you say everything isn't maxed out

[trevg 21]

Have a Nvid card 4gb and it uses every bit of it plus some untill I scale back some rendering options.

Plus I have 32gb ram to play with. Flying computer runing at 4.6 so plenty to play with.

I do use texture compression.

FPS at KSEA with heavy usage aircraft = 19 to 21

[Jimmy RFR 406]

 

 

Out of curiosity, do you have texture compression enabled? That seems awfully high, especially when you say everything isn't maxed out

 

I don't use texture compression.

 

It's higher than my usual flights around Alberta/Saskatchewan/NWT.  The few times I checked before, it only ever maxed out at around 4-1/2 GB. I assumed it was the HD mesh + weather.  I was flying at 14,000 ft over very rugged terrain in broken clouds.

 

I don't know if it's worth mentioning, but I found the first part of this flight (around KPDX) to be far more taxing on the system than the rest of the journey, even around KSFO, where my rig barely even broke a sweat.

[mdavis 10]

Yes, I just flew a fairly short flight out of KPDX and noticed the framerate hit from a huge scenery load coming from something in that area. I have to keep my sliders pulled back a bit to stay within the 4GB limit of my GTX980 or I pay with low frames - still flyable but low.

[ryanbatc 12,775]

What are the goods and bads of texture compression?

[tonywob 4,768]

Good sides:

 

- It uses less video memory. I've seen usage drop from 1.5GB to about 700MB with it enabled.

- Less stuttering because more video RAM is available.

 

 

Bad sides:

- It increases loading times if the textures haven't been pre-compressed into DDS files because the images are compressed on the fly (often badly) by X-Plane during loading

- The textures do lose some quality, but not too noticable.

 

If you're short on video RAM, then enabling compression is definitely a good move.