X-Plane 11 VR and GTX 1080

[mrchrsrider 66]

Hey just curious, is anyone running X-plane 11 with a GTX 1080.... and on top of that does anyone run FlyInside XP with a 1080 and can let me know how it handles it. I just bought one and am upgrading from a 780Ti any input is appreciated. 

Happy flying V-pilots. 

[Colonel X 1,428]

I tested this extensively with a 1080ti. Do not even bother. On top of eating the GPU, FlyInside bites a big chunk out of your CPU time as well. Unless you are willing to deal with very low settings, avoid this. Native VR support should arrive within weeks, be patient.

[mrchrsrider 66]

2 minutes ago, Colonel X said:

I tested this extensively with a 1080ti. Do not even bother. On top of eating the GPU, FlyInside bites a big chunk out of your CPU time as well. Unless you are willing to deal with very low settings, avoid this. Native VR support should arrive within weeks, be patient.

Ok so it's an issue with the program itself and not the graphics card. How is the card itself? do you like it? 

Thanks for the reply by the way. 

[Susu986 76]

My GTX 780 died about 3 weeks ago and since then I have a 1080. I've expected somewhat better framerates. To my amazement, barely anything changed, average framerates stayed the same. There are some improvements, I can use full anti aliasing for example without penalty and Reshade is also less taxing now, only loosing about 1-2 fps now instead of 5-6. But overall, I'd say, don't expect miracles. X-plane (and P3D too) taxes both the CPU and GPU. You can actually check which one bottlenecks you (I'm clearly bottlenecked by my I7 4770K) with the built in fps counter in X-plane, just at look at response times for both the CPU and GPU, and whicever is higher, is likely the culprit for the average fps. I'm not sure how this will relate to VR. Since newer NVidia cards are geared towards VR, you might see improvements in VR performance, but as for normal framerates, probably not much. And since the Colonel says that Flyinside will byte into your CPU... well, I wouldn't want to loose any percentage out of my CPU performance.

I don't really run anything else apart from X-plane, but I've tested a bit of Train Simulator, and I could definetely feel the framerate improvements. If you discount flight simulators and focus on games, you will definetely benefit from better framerates. X-plane is different territory however.

[Colonel X 1,428]

A 1080 or 1080ti will essentially enable you to run in higher resolutions and / or higher AA. I personally opted for running in a pretty low resolution and instead apply custom (dataref defined) AA. It's won't help with scenery detail however, as that is entirely run by the CPU. In other words, compared to say a 980, you can improve image quality - image detail, not so much.

One thing to keep in mind though is that with XP11, clouds got a MUCH better performance compared to earlier versions. So while in XP10, a better GPU enabled you to run with "more" weather, in XP11, weather is so light on FPS that you can't really benefit much from a better GPU. That is a good thing of course though.

[Colonel X 1,428]

9 hours ago, mrchrsrider said:

Ok so it's an issue with the program itself and not the graphics card. How is the card itself? do you like it? 

Thanks for the reply by the way. 

Well, I don't maintain an emotional relationship with my GPU. I bought it because it was the fastest one available. As Susu mentioned, most of the time, GPU upgrades will disappoint (I came from a 980ti and I really had to look for improvements) in XP11. I primarily bought it to be ready for VR. While it's still the fastest card out there I believe, and I expect native VR to be very doable on it, I also learned that in VR you need excessive performance to get a good image (high res AND high AA), so in the mid-term, the next generation of GPU's will be the ones to look for when trying to build a classy VR setup for X-Plane.

[tonywob 4,768]

I have a 1070 and for me my bottleneck is definitely the CPU. My system had a bug where the CPU would throttle down to 700mhz for no reason and it would drop my framerate in X-Plane down to single digits. Even when the CPU is running at full speed, I can see that my GPU isn't being utilised but is waiting for the CPU to catch up.

 

[CFIJose 5,485]

My GTX 970 does well with a texture setting at medium. I'm going to assume that a GTX 1070 or 1080 will allow me to run with a high texture setting without dropping my fps too low for smooth simulation. Am I wrong?

[Susu986 76]

17 minutes ago, DJJose said:

My GTX 970 does well with a texture setting at medium. I'm going to assume that a GTX 1070 or 1080 will allow me to run with a high texture setting without dropping my fps too low for smooth simulation. Am I wrong?

You are probably right, but of course it's always different. My observations: with the GTX 780, that I couldn't really use 'Maximum' texture resolution - my 3GB RAM was not enough, but even then, there was a noticeable fps drop compared to 'High', even when I didn't fill my VRAM completely. With the 1080, I can enable 'Maximum' texture quality without any fps drop, - of course now I also have the VRAM to do so. However, overall framerates stayed the same - and they are no longer affected by anti-aliasing and texture quality level. At least on my PC.

[steve310002 1,198]

On 11/29/2017 at 3:01 AM, Colonel X said:

I tested this extensively with a 1080ti. Do not even bother. On top of eating the GPU, FlyInside bites a big chunk out of your CPU time as well. Unless you are willing to deal with very low settings, avoid this. Native VR support should arrive within weeks, be patient.

I have a gtx1080 and run Flyinside with high settings pretty good. I average between 24 and 40 fps in VR depending on the scenario and it is smooth even at 24 fps. I can't recall the exact Flyinside resolution I am running at but recently I lowered from the highest to the second highest resolution setting and it made a huge difference to performance and aliasing. Frankly at the highest resolution it looked pretty ugly with a lot of jaggies when HDR is turned on. Now at the 2nd highest resolution it gives me better aliasing and better performance. Of course there is a slight trade off in sharpness due to the slightly reduced resolution but this is marginal in terms of reading dials at least for me (and my eagle eye vision ) . I have my anti-aliasing set at x4 both in X-Plane and in Flyinside (with FXAA turned off).

I would have imagined with a 1080ti, it would be even better. I run with scenery set to high and HDR on. Reflections are set to minimum. I have my 6700K CPU overclocked to 4.5ghz and 32 GB of DDR4 RAM. Not sure if the amount of RAM makes much difference but overall I am relatively happy. I would certainly much prefer at least another 10 fps especially in heavy weather to make it that bit smoother but I generally don't get many stutters. Mostly I fly in clear conditions to save on fps. I momentarily got xEnviro to work well with VR but started getting issues so uninstalled it. I was able to fly with very little impact in fps with heavy weather using xEnvrio and at times it looked amazing (when it worked properly). I hope they make it compatible soon as it saves on a lot of processing power compared with default clouds. Hopefully the native Laminar VR solution will be a lot better in that regard.

It all depends on your expectations. VR is incredible for me but I started using it knowing that it is not going to be anywhere near perfect. Therefore I was actually impressed with just how good it is and how 'well' it ran on my desktop. If you have huge expectations you may well be disappointed. If you are like me, I think you will be impressed. I can't however compare to a 780ti and how much extra performance you would gain other than tell you my settings and average fps.

My recommendation is to go for it if you have the cash (probably a 1080ti would be better) (and especially if you use other 'games' and want to play in 4K) or wait until Laminar release the beta with native VR hopefully in the coming weeks. That way we can report back to you our findings and if it is indeed any better than Flyinside.

[Colonel X 1,428]

21 hours ago, DJJose said:

My GTX 970 does well with a texture setting at medium. I'm going to assume that a GTX 1070 or 1080 will allow me to run with a high texture setting without dropping my fps too low for smooth simulation. Am I wrong?

We're talking 2 topics here. One is VRAM - the rule is as long as you don't fill yours up, you're fine. GPU performance is another thing, any better GPU will result in better performance, allowing you to run in higher res and / or better AA, it will also help when running with high cloud coverage. Of course, GPU performance won't help (=result in higher FPS) when your FPS are limited by the CPU (you might be able to run with the same settings BUT higher res. and / or AA with the same FPS).

About VRAM: A 1080 (8GB) is completely fine for texture setting "High". "Very High" will at times exceed 8GB VRAM usage and kill your performance when using the 1080 - for running with "Very High", a 1080ti (12GB) is required. You may get away with 8GB, depending on your texture load (depending on your aircraft and all textures loaded for AI ect.), however - just not in all situations and add-on scenarios.

Just to stress this point once more, GPU performance ("fill rate") is independent of VRAM usage - faster cards just happen to have more VRAM, so it can never be entirely separated.

[Colonel X 1,428]

4 hours ago, steve310002 said:

I have a gtx1080 and run Flyinside with ...

 

I agree that expectation management is a big factor here (or in flight sim in general). Of course, it is possible to find your sweet spot with FlyInside. For me personally, however, turning down scenery complexity even one notch is out of the question. And even though it might be passable, I wouldn't accept XP11 running with less than 45FPS in VR.

[steve310002 1,198]

2 hours ago, Colonel X said:

I agree that expectation management is a big factor here (or in flight sim in general). Of course, it is possible to find your sweet spot with FlyInside. For me personally, however, turning down scenery complexity even one notch is out of the question. And even though it might be passable, I wouldn't accept XP11 running with less than 45FPS in VR.

I think that's an excellent point and example. Its all about what each one of us expects hence the subjectivity and complexity of us flight simming folk  

[JasonHarris 96]

I am using a 1080ti and happy with the performance in flyinside,  cpu is 8700k@5GHz as well.

 

     The demo is free,  if native support is just around the corner so to speak then I would be waiting to see what that is like but the flyinside support is pretty nice.

[Colonel X 1,428]

7 hours ago, JasonHarris said:

I am using a 1080ti and happy with the performance in flyinside,  cpu is 8700k@5GHz as well.

 

     The demo is free,  if native support is just around the corner so to speak then I would be waiting to see what that is like but the flyinside support is pretty nice.

Well that is the fastest CPU/GPU combination available right now, glad you're satisfied!