I have a 4770k running 4.5 GHz stable (not quite a low temperature, but some 20 degrees away from throttling at the worst), 4 cores, without HT, in an ASUS motherboard. Also a 1080 FTW from EVGA connected to a 4k screen. I managed to set the screen to 30 Hz and together with the internal VSync & Triple Buffering of P3D v4 the result is pretty smooth provided that the frame rate does not go below the 20ies (pretty much perfect whenever it reaches and stays at 30).

Using a hardware diagnosis program I noticed that the 1080 is the bottleneck within my system, whilst the 4770k will run with an average of 2 cores at 100% load the 1080 will run most of the time during the flight at 100% load, that seems to be the most true whenever I get some scattered to overcast weather, moments in which the frame rate drop a lot to as low as 10, killing much of the immersion. Now, I noticed that reducing the AA from 8x to 4x improves things noticeably, one more reason why I think the 1080 is holding down the system. Other things like shadows (distance/quality) and water quality don't make a difference and thus I set them to the most right position.

I know that the 1080 FTW from EVGA is considered a good card, even after almost a year that I bought I, so I would like to ask you guys whether or not a new video card would improve my overall experience within P3D v4. I just checked NVidia website and found a TITAN Xp card and was wondering how better it could be over the other.

At first my wish was to get a new system *except* for the video card, which I presumed was good enough even for 4k, but it seems to be somewhat wrong.

Next month I will be able to visit some hardware stores and wonder if should get something new, or keep the 4x AA (makes shimmering a little more bothering) and all the stuff, until sometime in the future, next year maybe, when newer releases might be more interesting. That's not to mention the so called version 4.1 of P3D which seems to be arriving soon, who knows the level of performance optimization it will bring, or not.

1 hour ago, Wanthuyr Filho said:

whilst the 4770k will run with an average of 2 cores at 100% load

If even one core is running at 100%, the CPU will be limiting your performance. As good as P3D v4 is, it still doesn't fully utilise all the cores and, like FSX before it, tends to do much of the work on one core. I'd say that you need to try to reduce the CPU load before you consider buying a new graphics card.

You didn't mention what you're using to monitor your system but I'd recommend MSI Afterburner (you don't need an MSI card). Although it's notionally an overclocking app for graphics cards, it also allows you to monitor a lot of system data. It's advantage is that you can look at individual CPU cores (temperature and usage) and it gives you a performance graph for each monitored parameter which covers about a 10-minute period. Another useful feature is that you can use it to select a custom fan curve for your graphics card.

10 hours ago, vortex681 said:

If even one core is running at 100%, the CPU will be limiting your performance. As good as P3D v4 is, it still doesn't fully utilise all the cores and, like FSX before it, tends to do much of the work on one core. I'd say that you need to try to reduce the CPU load before you consider buying a new graphics card.

You didn't mention what you're using to monitor your system but I'd recommend MSI Afterburner (you don't need an MSI card). Although it's notionally an overclocking app for graphics cards, it also allows you to monitor a lot of system data. It's advantage is that you can look at individual CPU cores (temperature and usage) and it gives you a performance graph for each monitored parameter which covers about a 10-minute period. Another useful feature is that you can use it to select a custom fan curve for your graphics card.

That's basically the approach that I adopted, the software I use is the HWiNFO64, which was a suggestion by one of the moderators here, such a great software. Before that I used to check with AIDA64, which gives the same information, but the other's interface I liked better.

I'm aware that even v4 is a clock hungry software, especially when the FPS is locked internally, core zero will never leave the 100% mark, the thing is how would it improve if I changed the CPU part (+MoBo/RAM) and (versus) the GPU part...