P3D v4 - GPU vs CPU

[Dane Watson 38]

I have not yet purchased the new 64Bit P3D v4 but was just curious whether it is using more of the GPU as opposed to mainly CPU usage? 

[Jiri Kocman 20]

I do not know what is your settings, but my P3D was always able load my GTX1080 to 99%, when I was sitting on FHD resolution, I had 4xSGSS and cant go higher and I had some GPU intensive stuff still reduced from max (some shadows, shadow quality... AA)

When I switch to 4k I was able to disable SGSS, so my switch from FHD to 4k saves me some performance, but I add some MSAA, some shadows and voila, still 99%.

With v4 my GPU not just sits at 99% all day long, but crying... 8GB VRAM - not enough for texture size exp, perfromance is low as there is possible to set better shadows, more drawn autogen and possible SSAA, I seriously looking for GTX1080Ti and I'm 100% sure that I can use full potential of that card.

[downscc 1,327]

My GTX980Ti rarely exceeds 70% GPU loading according to Process Explorer, a slight increase from its loading with P3Dv3.  It drives a 4K monitor with frame rate locked at 20, 4xMSAA 16xAnsiotropic texture filtering.  I'm not sure how one would go about driving it to 99%. Interesting.

[Dane Watson 38]

Interesting comments so far. My reason for originally asking was because as we all know FSX-SE, which I currently use, only seems to use a very minimal amount of the GPU, and before purchasing P3D v4 I was curious about P3D's access of the GPU.

[westman 257]

4 hours ago, Jiri Kocman said:

I do not know what is your settings, but my P3D was always able load my GTX1080 to 99%, when I was sitting on FHD resolution, I had 4xSGSS and cant go higher and I had some GPU intensive stuff still reduced from max (some shadows, shadow quality... AA)

When I switch to 4k I was able to disable SGSS, so my switch from FHD to 4k saves me some performance, but I add some MSAA, some shadows and voila, still 99%.

With v4 my GPU not just sits at 99% all day long, but crying... 8GB VRAM - not enough for texture size exp, perfromance is low as there is possible to set better shadows, more drawn autogen and possible SSAA, I seriously looking for GTX1080Ti and I'm 100% sure that I can use full potential of that card.

Unlimited my 1080ti sit at 99% 9-10.5 gb , vsync 30hz 70-99% 

CPU 5.1ghz ht on mem 4133 c16

[curt1 79]

Dane, my system is only a couple years old, which is a Skylake 6700k and a GTX 970 GPU.  When using FSX the GPU didn't have to work hard at all.  P3Dv4 on the other hand utilizes the GPU way more and the fan is almost always audible, and when at Flightbeam or any other high end airport, the fans run at nearly 50% to keep the GPU within it's operating parameters.  I'm not a computer guy, but what I'm trying to say is you'll need to get used to the extra noise from your GPU (fan cooled).  I personally find the noise a distraction, but it's a necessity when so much is demanded of it.  I now understand why folks go to liquid cooling, and I miss the quiet serenity of FSX despite it's age. 

[Dane Watson 38]

1 hour ago, curt1 said:

Dane, my system is only a couple years old, which is a Skylake 6700k and a GTX 970 GPU.  When using FSX the GPU didn't have to work hard at all.  P3Dv4 on the other hand utilizes the GPU way more and the fan is almost always audible, and when at Flightbeam or any other high end airport, the fans run at nearly 50% to keep the GPU within it's operating parameters.  I'm not a computer guy, but what I'm trying to say is you'll need to get used to the extra noise from your GPU (fan cooled).  I personally find the noise a distraction, but it's a necessity when so much is demanded of it.  I now understand why folks go to liquid cooling, and I miss the quiet serenity of FSX despite it's age. 

Thanks for your reply.

I was hoping for this answer as that indicates that P3D v4 is in fact using the GPU as opposed to the FSX 32Bit system.

Yes, I understand the noise is part of this improvement.

 

Thanks again.

[MikeT707 1,181]

The GPU is definitely being used. There are settings in the sim that you can set higher to take advantage of your GPU and keep it quite occupied. v4 also Requires a good amount of VRAM so if you get a new GPU I would recommend at least 8G of VRAM. I have a GTX970 with 4G VRAM and will be upgrading to a GTX 1070 with 8G VRAM as soon as I can.

[Jiri Kocman 20]

 

FSX cant utilize GPU even 8xMSAA+8xSGSSAA and heavy clouds - ok my GTX1080 can go to 60-80% at this scenario, but P3D is different story even v2. Just many shadows, volumetric fog and Tesselation make GPU more utilized, current v4 dynamic lighting, autogen draw distance push GPU harder, I have to disable some shadows to keep it managable :)

 

With texture_size_exp=10 we can see very high CPU utilization too, becouse texture/scenery loading workers running outside core 0 (or first core) have much more to do. This is what I can see (have 35FPS lock, so sometimes GPU is not fully utilized) . CPU utilization is over 60% avg, but threads go often to 100% I need more cores!

 

3 hours ago, Dane Watson said:

I was hoping for this answer as that indicates that P3D v4 is in fact using the GPU as opposed to the FSX 32Bit system.

 

64bit do nothig to performance and/or utilization of anything. For flight sims it just means that you can use more memory. But use of more memory can be relevant to performance. We can push it hard, more addons and so.. so performance will be worse. Devs can go crazy with memory = worse performance, devs can go smart, use more memory = better performance. 

32bit sims have many compromises for quality and permoramnce due to memory limits. Without memory limit you can make better optimalizations, but it is not automatic.

 

3 hours ago, Dane Watson said:

Yes, I understand the noise is part of this improvement.

 

Noise? No, heat, yes. YOu can control noise very well with proper HW, but heat stays no matter hou loud your system is.