Graphics card upgrade question

[williambuxton 8]

I have been very pleased with the performance improvement with V3 of P3D generally and particularly with payware aircraft. My current system,(see below) still struggles with payware scenery and weather. I plan to move to Skylake in the future and wonder if a better GPU would be a good investment for the short term. I like the price point of the GTX 970 but would consider a GTX 980 or 990. 

 

Thanks for your help.

 

CPU: i7 2600K OC 4.4

GPU: Geforce 580

[TheFamilyMan 280]

Use a tool such as MSI Afterburner, which works fine with any make of gcard, to determine if your GPU is running at 100% utilization when you are experiencing "struggling" performance. If it's not, your system is being CPU limited and a better gcard will do little or nothing to improve performance.  Read this thread for an interesting gcard upgrade for P3D V3 case study: http://www.avsim.com/topic/476042-i-must-be-losing-my-mind-help/

[LittlePaulio 3]

I have been very pleased with the performance improvement with V3 of P3D generally and particularly with payware aircraft. My current system,(see below) still struggles with payware scenery and weather. I plan to move to Skylake in the future and wonder if a better GPU would be a good investment for the short term. I like the price point of the GTX 970 but would consider a GTX 980 or 990. 

 

Thanks for your help.

 

CPU: i7 2600K OC 4.4

GPU: Geforce 580

I have a GTX980 and I can guarantee you that I've never monitored it even being slightly stressed. I use REX 4 and pretty high scenery settings, so I really have my doubts about any tweak to your fsx.cfg that can shift some of the texture processing over to the graphics card. However I have never done any in-depth testing to qualify that statement, and there those who are far more knowledgeable that attest it does. So, imho, I would get the GTX 970 and put the money towards a better processor.

 

Not that you asked for advice on cpus, but from what research I've done, you'd be better off going with the I7 4970K, as FSX isn't really going to take advantage of the architecture changes to the Skylake cpus to justify the extra cash. If you do any graphically intensive work or video rendering then you'd see the benefit. 

 

I have a I7 4770K overclocked to 4.5Ghz without any manual voltage changes and it's as stable as they get, and that's on what was the cheapest Asus Z97 board available! I'm going to wait for the next gen of Intel's processors and hopefully by then we'll know more about Dovetail's plan for a 'sequel' to FSX. I assume they'll make the obvious fixes, but we don't know yet how compatible it will be with FSX add-ons....

 

Hope this was of some help.

[williambuxton 8]

Thank you so much for your response.

 

I followed your suggestion by starting up P3Dv3 with MSI Afterburner and watched it jump to 99 and stay there. So a better GPU would upgrade my system?

 

I don't think I'm alone in this situation. Many of us who bought i7 2600K CPUs and the GPUs of the day are looking at Skylake and Z170MBs and are planning our future purchases. Should I get a GTX 970 to hold me over or invest in a GTX 980 ti or something more exotic to future proof?  Would a 980 ti even run on a Z68 MB?

 

If I had the money I would do a whole new build; but I promised "SHE WHO MUST BE OBEYED"  that I would only build every five years.

 

V3 ROCKS

[LittlePaulio 3]

Wow, I'm surprised to hear that (your graphics card running at 100%). Maybe P3dV3 shifts more of the graphic processing to the GC. Also, if I'm not mistaken, it supports DirectX 11, although I doubt your board supports it, that's no big deal though, I play FSX and it just abut supports DX 10 which still looks great!

 

To tell you if you will get full support for the GTX 980 TI, I'll need to know the model number and revision. Apparently only revision 3 boards support all 16 PCI-E lanes (meaning the full processing speed of the 980TI. You can download a freeware tool called CPU-Z, just run that and it will give you all the relevant info. If you could take a screenshot of it using the snipping tool and attach it to your reply, I could tell you exactly what your board supports. Sorry, if this is starting to sound like hard work...

[TheFamilyMan 280]

A GPU upgrade should help your situation, though by how much is not certain.  Definately a gtx 970 is the starting place, though beware of its vram's 3.5GB full bandwidth limitation.  As to what upgrade is appropriate can only be determined by your needs: mainly display resolution, enabled P3D visuals, AA levels desired, and computer upgrade plans.  Note that a 2600K will, as would any sandy bridge cpu, choke some of the pci-e bandwidth from such 900 series cards since those CPUs don't support pci-e 3.0, though those gcards will work with your system.  Posting your specific gcard upgrade concerns in the P3D general forum will get you better info on what card will be best for your situation.

 

BTW, a 580 is a DX11 card, though one that's nearly 5 years old.  Nice that you've gotten so many years out of it.

[Luke 782]

Wow, I'm surprised to hear that (your graphics card running at 100%). Maybe P3dV3 shifts more of the graphic processing to the GC. Also, if I'm not mistaken, it supports DirectX 11, although I doubt your board supports it, that's no big deal though, I play FSX and it just abut supports DX 10 which still looks great!

 

To tell you if you will get full support for the GTX 980 TI, I'll need to know the model number and revision. Apparently only revision 3 boards support all 16 PCI-E lanes (meaning the full processing speed of the 980TI. You can download a freeware tool called CPU-Z, just run that and it will give you all the relevant info. If you could take a screenshot of it using the snipping tool and attach it to your reply, I could tell you exactly what your board supports. Sorry, if this is starting to sound like hard work...

 

The GTX 580 is a DirectX 11 card.

 

Additionally, PCI-E lanes do not restrict the "full processing speed of a GPU" - they restrict the speed at which textures can get transferred to the GPU. You can see here how much difference it makes (none).

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/

 

Cheers!

Luke

[LittlePaulio 3]

The GTX 580 is a DirectX 11 card.

 

Additionally, PCI-E lanes do not restrict the "full processing speed of a GPU" - they restrict the speed at which textures can get transferred to the GPU. You can see here how much difference it makes (none).

 

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

I never said his GTX 580 wasn't a dx11 card, I just didn't know if his MB supported it.

Also your comment about pci-lanes is just semantics. I wasn't discussing the finer points of PC architecture with him. I was just trying to help the guy.

And your main goal was.......it's OK, I understand, it's nice to feel smart and make other ppl look dumb isn't it? Let's not go into the reasons you feel the need to do that...

 

Cheers!

[Poppet 709]

So, imho, I would get the GTX 970 and put the money towards a better processor.

 

Cracking card for the money  http://www.amazon.co.uk/EVGA-GeForce-Superclocked-Cooling-Graphics/dp/B00NSXYEQW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1444858006&sr=8-1&keywords=evga+gtx+970

[Luke 782]

I never said his GTX 580 wasn't a dx11 card, I just didn't know if his MB supported it.

Also your comment about pci-lanes is just semantics. I wasn't discussing the finer points of PC architecture with him. I was just trying to help the guy.

And your main goal was.......it's OK, I understand, it's nice to feel smart and make other ppl look dumb isn't it? Let's not go into the reasons you feel the need to do that...

 

Cheers!

 

There's no such thing as motherboard DirectX support - all that matters is whether the GPU supports the specified functions in hardware, and whether the Windows version supports it. The motherboard is not involved.

 

I'm not interested in making either of us feel smart or dumb. I just don't want him or others worrying in the future about PCIe lanes making a difference or in a futile search for whether their motherboard supports a particular DirectX version, that's all.

 

Cheers!

Luke

[williambuxton 8]

I had CPUZ and used the snipping tool to capture the image and with time will figure out how to paste it to this forum. In the meantime I think I know what you want to see.

 

Model: P8Z68-V-PRO

Chipset: Intel SB   Rev. 1.xx

Southbridge: Intel Id1C44  Rev. 05

LPCIO Nuvoton  NCT6776

 

Graphic Interface:

                              Version: PCI-Excpress

                         Link Width: x8     Max Supported  x16

 

To be clear, the improved performance with P3Dv3 by shifting more of the load to the GPU is my motivation to upgrade my graphics card.

 

Because I'm looking to upgrade to a Skylake i7 6700 CPU and Z170 MB next year I would prefer to jump to the GTX 980 ti if my MB can support it. If not, a GTX 970 might be a good interim solution.

 

Thank you so much for your feedback. Knowledge is a wonderful thing to share.

[LittlePaulio 3]

There's no such thing as motherboard DirectX support - all that matters is whether the GPU supports the specified functions in hardware, and whether the Windows version supports it. The motherboard is not involved.

 

I'm not interested in making either of us feel smart or dumb. I just don't want him or others worrying in the future about PCIe lanes making a difference or in a futile search for whether their motherboard supports a particular DirectX version, that's all.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[LittlePaulio 3]

So you're saying that a MB with a PCI-E 2 lane wouldn't throttle the performance and bandwidth of say, an sli config. Are PCI-E lames and the various standards not an integral part of a motherboard. To someone with only basic knowledge of PC hardware, what you're saying could be very misleading. Of course it's the Graphics Card that actually supports the features but the PCI-E bus can have a huge impact on how the card would perform.

You didn't come in here to help this guy, you just wanted to try and knock someone down a peg or two with your patronising attitude and your interpretation of what exactly is involved in supporting a technology like DX12. 'The motherboard is not involved' - that's simply not true, you're just confusing the issue. I fully grasp tnat a PCI-E 1 SLOT could run a 980ti, they were designed to ne backwardsly compatible. But it wouldnt give the card anything like the throughput it was capable of and therefore crippling it's performance. I think thats pretty elementary. But feel free to devote your time to pointing out my less than technically perfect and in-depth knowledge of PC architecture. Seems to be what you want to achieve here.

 

I was doing my best to research his board and what revision it was. And now's hes provided me with the info I needed to let him know that he's good to go with either.

 

Sorry about this irrelevant sidebar William, I would personally recommend going for the 970, by a fairly common consensus, it's gives you the best bang for yoir buck. You'll probably be glad when you upgrade to a Skylake, prices will have dropped on the 980tis and Nvidia will probably have plenty of new goodies to tempt you with. If you're impatient like me and crave those glorious 4096 REX and Carendao HD VC textures you might be better off with the 980TI. That's just an uniformed opinion though, there's still so much conflicting opinions on graphics card necessities in FSX I went for a GTX 980 about 6 months ago, but only because I knew I'd get ultra quality visuals in the other PC games I occasionally play.

So, you're more informed, but I've likely left you just as conflicted- OK my final word on it is get the 970 and you won't regret it. Let me know how you get on William, I'd be interested in following your progress.

 

Take care,

[Luke 782]

So you're saying that a MB with a PCI-E 2 lane wouldn't throttle the performance and bandwidth of say, an sli config. Are PCI-E lames and the various standards not an integral part of a motherboard. To someone with only basic knowledge of PC hardware, what you're saying could be very misleading. Of course it's the Graphics Card that actually supports the features but the PCI-E bus can have a huge impact on how the card would perform.

 

Read my link again. It's not the only article to demonstrate this. If you have the card running on a PCIe 2.0 4x slot or greater (that means a PCIe 3.0 2x or greater - they have the same bandwidth) you're not going to notice the difference. By the way - the article was explicitly testing SLI setups. It still didn't make a difference.

 

FSX is especially so - it has the same variety of textures getting rendered over and over again. What matters far more is the actual bandwidth inside the card between the GPU and VRAM and its ability to texture and do AA and AF. There's very little work being done sending textures to the video card, which is the only area where PCIe bandwidth matters.

 

Please, read the articles. Educate yourself.

 

You didn't come in here to help this guy, you just wanted to try and knock someone down a peg or two with your patronising attitude and your interpretation of what exactly is involved in supporting a technology like DX12. 'The motherboard is not involved' - that's simply not true, you're just confusing the issue. I fully grasp tnat a PCI-E 1 SLOT could run a 980ti, they were designed to ne backwardsly compatible. But it wouldnt give the card anything like the throughput it was capable of and therefore crippling it's performance. I think thats pretty elementary. But feel free to devote your time to pointing out my less than technically perfect and in-depth knowledge of PC architecture. Seems to be what you want to achieve here.

 

Again, I don't understand why you're being so defensive or why you're attributing malice to me. That's not my intention, I assure you.

 

The motherboard is not involved in DirectX compatibility. End of story. If you have a video card that supports DirectX 11, and an operating system that supports DirectX 11, that's all you need. Every motherboard is compatible. And if you put the card in a PCIe x1 slot, it would still have the same rendering performance. It would be limited in texture loading, but I've yet to see a single game that requires any meaningful amount of PCIe bandwidth for texture loading. If you find one, please share the benchmarks when they reduce the PCIe link lanes and performance tanks. I'll be happy to learn something - I don't mind being proven wrong.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[LittlePaulio 3]

Luke, you provided me with one article, which you say focused on SLI anyway. I've never been a proponent of that setup anyway. And obviously not in FSX. I could easily find you one which claims the opposite- why is your research the ' definitive' research into the subject. Even without doing the research, it's common knowledge that a graphic card upgrade is the one the average PC gamer will get most benefit from. Information bandwidth increases are one of the fundamental reasons why PC's have improved so much in the last 5- 10 years, I honestly don't know how you can believe that graphic subsystems are the exception to the rule? Anecdotally,I've seen games like The Witcher benefit from a faster GC, not a feature set that usually isn't taken advantage of til later in the cards lifetime. Whether it's more ROPS, wider, more efficient address buses, it all boils down to more information being processed simultaneously. It allows for more detailed textures, draw distances, stunning emergent gameplay that wouldn't be possible without more information travelling faster to be processed faster.I'm not denying that more efficient architecture, with support for some amazing effects, along with more on board Ram has helped, but I will never get on board with speed and bandwidth not being a factor.

I'm going to leave it there, thank you for giving me an interesting perspective on the GPU process and I will definitely read the article, whose link you posted. But, I'm not going to reply with tests that counter everything that yours does, claims it was biased, tested the games that needed the extra bandwidth, etc, etc.

We'll just agree to have differing opinions, unless of course that article leads me down a road to where black is white! And I apologise for being snarky in my earlier replies, as we all know, tone can be very easily misinterpreted with text, and I was guilty of that.

Take care mate,

I'll probably bump into you again in the hardware forums here. You'll notice that I often reply only to be corrected by someone later. I just like to help the less tech-savvy (but probably far superior pilots to me) and I often just jump in without doing any research. I'll watch that in future......though probably not