GTX 1070 or GTX 1080 Upgrade

[RJC68 820]

Good Morning Gents,

I have a buyer lined up for my Asus GTX 980 TI STRIX and have been pondering about which card to upgrade too. I was looking at the MSI 1070, I have done a fair bit of research and performance wise both cards are pretty similar but the 1070 has an extra 2GB VRAM which would give me some more headroom when using photoreal scenery (Ortho4XP). The 980 TI can handle X-Plane but I find I get very close to consuming all the onboard 6GB VRAM. 

I would love to hear from any 1070 owners that have a similar setup to mine, is this a good choice or is it worth spending a little more on a 1080? I would love a 1080 TI but price wise it is pretty expensive and I was planning on also getting a 4TB WD Black for my Ortho scenery.

Decisions decisions lol

Would love to hear your thoughts

Richard

[CarlosF 1,234]

If your budget allows it, go for the 1080.

[soaring_penguin 428]

as you said, except for the 2GB extra VRAM, there is not much win. I would leave it for now as is and see what Laminar comes up with.

For what it is worth, I have a 1070 and usually keep it 1 notch below for texture, so I stay within the 6GB range like you. I can go max, but then it is very easy to go outside 8GB of VRAM ending up with a slideshow. I have the feeling that no matter what you give it, be it in terms of memory, cpu or video, X-Plane can take it and will then ask for more.

[RJC68 820]

5 hours ago, jh71 said:

as you said, except for the 2GB extra VRAM, there is not much win. I would leave it for now as is and see what Laminar comes up with.

For what it is worth, I have a 1070 and usually keep it 1 notch below for texture, so I stay within the 6GB range like you. I can go max, but then it is very easy to go outside 8GB of VRAM ending up with a slideshow. I have the feeling that no matter what you give it, be it in terms of memory, cpu or video, X-Plane can take it and will then ask for more.

Thanks for the reply,

I think you are definitely right when you say X-Plane will take whatever you have and then want more. I have seen posts where people that have cards with 11 or 12 GB VRAM are able to use pretty much all of it. Maybe it isn't worth upgrading at the moment. There is supposed to be some serious optimizing in the pipeline.  One thing I have found is that disabling the extended DSF in the settings file does make the VRAM usage with Ortho4XP scenery way more manageable. I was also recently forced to perform a clean install of X-Plane due to random CTD's that I couldn't track down. I have re installed all my plugins (latest versions) with the exception of SkyMaxx Pro 4. I have to say I was really surprised and impressed by the default clouds now. In the flights I have completed i would say they seem to be less strain on the CPU/GPU than SMP 4.

 

[dvlourie 19]

For what it's worth, I went with the 1070 this summer and been very satisfied. I have 32gb Ram with the I7-7700k. XP will always ask for "all you got", so I went for balance and I am seeing excellent fps and also recently clear my resources folders and for me at least, it eliminated any and all micro-stutters. XP is an on-going challenge to find that "elusive" sweet-spot.

[tonywob 4,768]

I'd say get the one with more RAM. I have a 1070 with 8GB of VRAM and it allows me to run textures on max (compressed) and I can use nice quality orthos and textures without stuttering issues. I found that X-Plane doesn't use 100% of my GPU anyway and is very much bottlenecked by my CPU. but it does use the video RAM.

Anyway, I thought the 1080 came with 12GB of VRAM?

[AccusedChip 31]

1080ti if going vr. Worth every fps. Smooth as butter. pricy.

[Oscar Pilote 22]

15 hours ago, Richdem said:

There is supposed to be some serious optimizing in the pipeline.  One thing I have found is that disabling the extended DSF in the settings file does make the VRAM usage with Ortho4XP scenery way more manageable.

I think I have singled out the guilty guys. If you look into the textures directory of any tile you will see the .dds orthophotos but also the .png masks (if sea is present on the tile or if you use use_masks_for_inland). It turns out the BORDER_TEX textures (i.e. the masks) are never mipmapped by X-Plane, and therefore they cost 16Mb of VRAM each (4k * 4k * one 8bits channel) even when they are 150nm away. If you are NOT using use_masks_for_inland (which I recommend) their number is limited enough in general and even with extended_dsf the additional VRAM need is of the order of 1Gb at most. With use_masks_for_inland you''ll have something like 15-20 of them for each of the 12 tiles, and therefore a burden of an additional 3-4 Gb in the worst case.

In the "stock" X-Plane BORDER_TEX is used with small generic png files like texture gradients or similar; this is the reason why they did not implement the mipmapping for them. Ortho4XP is using individual 4K textures so the issue is very different. I have e-mailed Ben a few days ago, he and Sidney will try to make it for 11.10 (BORDER_TEX will have a LOAD_CENTER directive as BASE_TEX already has). This alone should cut the VRAM need of masks to one or two hundreds of Mb (be it extended dsf or not).  [on the other hand they will get much heavier on disk size (22Mb dds dxt5 each vs xxx Kb png), but still "negligible" compared to the orthophotos].  

Also (this is already the case), because orthophotos are mipmapped you shouldn't see a big impact of texture zoomlevel on VRAM usage (only the closest ones need full resolution), you may check it in the sim but I would say that the NET impact of dds orthophotos on VRAM is
of the order of 2Gb at most (at highest quality with compression - by NET I mean excluding masks, e.g. with water_option=1,  and excluding X-Plane's base need, almost 1Gb in my case as seen in the middle of nowhere).

Hopefully my GTX 970 4Gb will be good for service an additional couple of years.

[RJC68 820]

1 hour ago, Oscar Pilote said:

I think I have singled out the guilty guys. If you look into the textures directory of any tile you will see the .dds orthophotos but also the .png masks (if sea is present on the tile or if you use use_masks_for_inland). It turns out the BORDER_TEX textures (i.e. the masks) are never mipmapped by X-Plane, and therefore they cost 16Mb of VRAM each (4k * 4k * one 8bits channel) even when they are 150nm away. If you are NOT using use_masks_for_inland (which I recommend) their number is limited enough in general and even with extended_dsf the additional VRAM need is of the order of 1Gb at most. With use_masks_for_inland you''ll have something like 15-20 of them for each of the 12 tiles, and therefore a burden of an additional 3-4 Gb in the worst case.

In the "stock" X-Plane BORDER_TEX is used with small generic png files like texture gradients or similar; this is the reason why they did not implement the mipmapping for them. Ortho4XP is using individual 4K textures so the issue is very different. I have e-mailed Ben a few days ago, he and Sidney will try to make it for 11.10 (BORDER_TEX will have a LOAD_CENTER directive as BASE_TEX already has). This alone should cut the VRAM need of masks to one or two hundreds of Mb (be it extended dsf or not).  [on the other hand they will get much heavier on disk size (22Mb dds dxt5 each vs xxx Kb png), but still "negligible" compared to the orthophotos].  

Also (this is already the case), because orthophotos are mipmapped you shouldn't see a big impact of texture zoomlevel on VRAM usage (only the closest ones need full resolution), you may check it in the sim but I would say that the NET impact of dds orthophotos on VRAM is
of the order of 2Gb at most (at highest quality with compression - by NET I mean excluding masks, e.g. with water_option=1,  and excluding X-Plane's base need, almost 1Gb in my case as seen in the middle of nowhere).

Hopefully my GTX 970 4Gb will be good for service an additional couple of years.

This is great news Oscar,

I am still very much learning how to create scenery that looks good but won't bring my system to it's knees

[RJC68 820]

12 hours ago, dvlourie said:

For what it's worth, I went with the 1070 this summer and been very satisfied. I have 32gb Ram with the I7-7700k. XP will always ask for "all you got", so I went for balance and I am seeing excellent fps and also recently clear my resources folders and for me at least, it eliminated any and all micro-stutters. XP is an on-going challenge to find that "elusive" sweet-spot.

How do you clear your resources folder ?