PC Upgrade for v4 - Thoughts?

[eXpress48 20]

Hey guys

My PC, on which I use Prepar3D v3, has the following Specs:

i7 4790K (OC: 4.6 GHz)
4x8 GB RAM (DDR3 / 2400 MHz)
MSI GTX 970 (GDDR5 4GB)
256 GB SSD Samsung 840 Pro (Windows)
1 TB SSD Samsung 850 EVO (Data + P3D)

I'm currently getting a good Performance out of it, but I have most of the sliders in the Lower to Medium Section, due to the beloved VAS Limit. This finally changes with v4 as we all know. I'm currently holding off on v4, until all my core addons are fully compatible

In the meantime, I wanted to identify the Parts of my Setup, which I could improve to get a superb Experience with v4. From my Point of View the Processor + RAM should be enough, or in other words the Upgrade to Kaby Lake + DDR4 won't really make that much of a difference. The SSD should also do its job.

I think the Graphic Card would be the bottleneck in my setup and I'm currently thinking about upgrading to a 1080 or even a 1080 Ti.

Do you guys have any other suggestion or has anyone made the jump from a 970 to a 1080/1080 Ti?

Thanks :)

[niyoko 7]

I can grab a 1080 from work this weekend and see how things improve. I have a similar CPU and GPU with 16GB of RAM. Right now I'd like to get a 1070 for the 8GB of VRAM. 

[Richard McDonald Woods 168]

At present, I am gradually loading the P3Dv4 softwares as they becomre available to see what performance I get. This before I decide on the eventual configuration that I run with (I expect a GTX 1080Ti! as part of a largely new PC).

Currently, I have an i7-2600K @ 3.40GHz and twin GTX590's (ancient equipment!).

Slowly, slowly, catchee monkey!

[Sartanius 399]

I believe you will discover that P3D is far more CPU bound than GPU bound.  You will likely get far more bang for your buck with a CPU + RAM upgrade that with a more powerful GPU, all things considered.  I have a i7-5930K O/C 4.3 with a GTX-980 and am getting 25-35 FPS at all FSDT/FlightBeam/FlyTampa airports with PMDG 747/777 aircraft.  And this is on the west coast with all the FTX goodies loaded.  I don't think you'll be as satisfied with just a GPU upgrade, but there are a lot of opinions out there :)  But, the CPU upgrade probably brings with it a need for a new motherboard depending on what you have now.  Choices!

[MikeT707 1,181]

14 minutes ago, dmiannay said:

I believe you will discover that P3D is far more CPU bound than GPU bound.

From what I have heard, v4 requires a lot of VRAM, so my advice, if I could only upgrade one component, would be to definitely upgrade the GPU to one that has at least 8GB or VRAM.

[eXpress48 20]

Thanks for your replies so far.

@niyoko If you could let me know about your results, I would really much appreciate it. Thank you!

[rlashier 93]

I also am running v4 on the 4790K processor with DDR3 2400 memory. I recently additional RAM, and added a 1070 video card for the 8GB of VRAM and its so far excellent performance. The 4790K runs at 4.3 by default, and is easily overclocked to 4.5 or even 4.7 - plenty fast enough to run v4, at least for the time.

You are right to focus on the GPU. A 1070 or 1080 should do the trick, and if you can spare the change, it probably would make your system a little more future proof to go with the 1080Ti. Avoid the 1060 GPUs, since the cards of this type that I have seen are limited to a 128 bit memory pipe, rather than the more robust 256 bit, and are limited to 6 Gb VRAM.

Rich

[AlphaInfinity 13]

I am running a 5820k at 4.2 with 2 1080 STRIX cards in SLI. The problem is not the GPU for me, its the CPU utilization. Running at 90% and spikes a LOT to 100. Honestly, its clock speed/CPU that is the bottleneck. 

[Patriot3810 182]

i am using a 7700k as my main pc, i bought a ryzen 7 1700 because i was curious on how it would perform, clocked at 3.8ghz i get the same performance from the ryzen 7 at 3.8ghz as the 7700k at 5ghz, the ryzen even loads p3d 4 faster than the intel cpu, something to think about for budget minded people that need a good cpu for both flight simming and heavy multi tasking, i noticed there hasn't been much talk about ryzen because of the low clock speeds, but i was pretty impressed.

[laserit 93]

11 minutes ago, Patriot3810 said:

i am using a 7700k as my main pc, i bought a ryzen 7 1700 because i was curious on how it would perform, clocked at 3.8ghz i get the same performance from the ryzen 7 at 3.8ghz as the 7700k at 5ghz, the ryzen even loads p3d 4 faster than the intel cpu, something to think about for budget minded people that need a good cpu for both flight simming and heavy multi tasking, i noticed there hasn't been much talk about ryzen because of the low clock speeds, but i was pretty impressed.

I'll definitely be keeping an eye on Threadripper

[Patriot3810 182]

i am sure the 1080ti has something to do with it, whats strange with the ryzen 1700, not only does core 0 sit around 98% load in p3d, but core/thread 15 does the same, so it's using 2 core almost maxed out instead of just one on my 7700k.when i put affinity mask it doesn't make much of a change like it use too.now that p3d is 64 bit, i hope to see developers spreading the workload across all those cores.

[niyoko 7]

@eXpress48
OK. I sat down and did some testing. I ran a test at night with the GTX 970 and 1080 since most have been saying that the dynamic lighting is an impact on their FPS. I also included a day/night test with 4xSSAA and 8xSSAA on the 1080.

Mods
PMDG 777-200 Base, FsDreamteam KCLT, FlightBeam KSFO-HD, ORBX Global, ORBX Northern California, ORBX Trees.

(All runs used Prepar3D's Fair Weather preset.)

Averages (2xSSAA)

GPU Usage: 64.47
Framerate: 29.46

Averages (2xSSAA)

GPU Usage: 39.79
Framerate: 30.43

Averages (2xSSAA)

GPU Usage: 39.75
Framerate: 31.38

[niyoko 7]

Here are the simulator settings that I used (Please note that I took the screen shots while the GTX1080 was installed, but the same settings were used for the GTX970 run.):

Display Settings

World Settings

Lighting Settings

Weather Settings

[Lenny777 299]

Niyoko what app are you using to test?

 

 

[niyoko 7]

I all charted the GPU memory and RAM usage for the runs that I did. The mods and settings used are the same as in the previous post.

Averages (2xSSAA)

GPU Memory Usage: 2018.43
Ram Usage: 6212.31

Averages (2xSSAA)

GPU Memory Usage: 1948.44
Ram Usage: 5669.54

Averages (2xSSAA)

GPU Memory Usage: 1926.73
Ram Usage: 5647.51