Is this old build capable of supporting p3d

[falcon7xx]

I was planning on doing a new build before i started flying with p3dv4, but due to the current intel chip fiasco I have been advised to hold of on doing the build until we know furthermore about the performance drop. On that note I wanted to make sure this build could still support p3d v4. I do not want to go through the aggravation of installing windows 10 and p3d just to find out the build is going to have a hard time with it.

 

Intel Core i5-3570K Quad-Core Processor 3.4 GHz 4 Core LGA 1155 - BX80637I53570K

AS Rock LGA1155 DDR3 SATA3 USB3.0 Quad CrossFireX and Quad SLI A GbE ATX Motherboard Z77 EXTREME4

1 x G.SKILL Ares Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-1600C9D-8GAB

1 x GIGABYTE Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition DirectX 11 GV-R797TO-3GD 3GB 384-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready ...

1 x PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk II 750W High Performance 80PLUS Silver SLI CrossFire Intel Haswell Ready Power ...

 

 

Thanks for all the help!

[mole_man]

At minimum you need a 4gb graphic card. Most scenes you load will show over 3gb of Vram use, so your sim will probably freeze

[Chock]

46 minutes ago, mole_man said:

At minimum you need a 4gb graphic card. Most scenes you load will show over 3gb of Vram use, so your sim will probably freeze

Not true at all. It will run just fine on a card with way less than 4Gb of Video memory. Even Lockheed Martin put this on their own minimum specs page for P3D, and we know how conservative such spec lists usually are and in fact they only upped the minimum requirement for P3D to 2Gb on the latest 64Bit version of P3D, prior to that, the previous two 32Bit versions were listed as only requiring 1Gb of video memory, and the first iteration of P3D actually only required 256Mb of video memory as a minimum spec.

P3D V4 is not Call of Duty, it's a tarted up version of FSX and it will run just fine on a computer which can run FSX. Thus Lockheed Martin's minimum specs requirement for P3D V4.1 is listed as 2Gb of video memory and 4Gb of main board RAM with a 2.2Ghz processor. Which means the OP's computer is well within the specs required to run the latest version of P3D, that being 4.1.

I can confirm this is true too, because I have run P3D V4 on an ATI Radeon HD6950 (I just looked on ebay, and one of those is for sale for 37 quid it's so old). That HD6950 only had 2Gb of VRAM and was not even DDR5 (it's DDR3), which the OP does have, so the OP's GPU is far more capable than my old card was, having 50 percent more memory and faster at that too. The only reason I swapped that HD6950 out recently was not because of P3D (it actually ran P3D okay), but rather because of FSW when it had trueSKY implemented and started to run choppily on that older ATI card, so now I have one with a lot more memory, but it's not as if that makes much difference in P3D since the old card was handling it just fine.

So, yes, it absolutely will run P3D V4.1 okay.

Now of course okay might mean you cannot swing all those sliders over to the right for all the fancy graphics options, because LM recommend a GPU with 8Gb of video memory (which I have, but I can't see it makes much difference compared to what my old 2Gb card did as far as handling it is concerned to be honest), so if your GPU was running FSX okay, then it will sure as hell run P3D okay because P3D is a bit better optimised. There is nothing stopping you running P3D v4 on that machine, trust me, it will run okay.

[Bert Pieke]

The moment you activate Detailed Terrain Textures (texture_size_exp=9) , your 2 GB card will not suffice..

[mole_man]

So if you can resist turning up the goodies it will cope it seems.

It's still worth it over FSX. If you reduce details to FSX equivelent, then P3dV4 will be much smoother I think you will find. IT uses all the cores so much more efficiently.

Or go for the rebuild. I fired up my monster rebuild on the very day this story came to light. Only a little experience with it before patches applied, but can not really see a difference pre and post. Laboratory condition benchmarks will reveal a slowdown, but not gadding around in flightsim really, so far. There may be more patches to come.

Some less hysterical info here.

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/windows-vulnerability-cpu-meltdown-patch-benchmarked,1.html

[Mace]

I think he has 3 GB on his card, Bert

I just upgraded a few weeks ago, and I haven't noticed any problems.  What surprised me the most with P3D?  The FSX microstutters are completely gone.  It's really smooth on this 8700K / 32 GB mem / 1080ti setup.   If you knock down the things that eat video memory, you should be ok with conservative settings.

Edit:  I might add -- I would overclock your cpu!  That's what a K cpu is for!  Might help you run a tiny bit of AI, or give you a few much-needed frames on final.

[ryanbatc]

I still run P3D v4 on my 2500K 4GHz.  My gtx 970 basically has 3.5GB ram and P3D works fine for me.  Note I am at 1080P though.  I think 4K would be a no no

[scottb613]

Hi Folks,

I'm with Ryan - I have a [email protected]  and GTX970 - and it handles v4 pretty nicely loaded with the usual suspects - better than v3 I think... With reasonable settings you should be fine... I am building a new 7700K box now but the real reason for the new box is I want either a 21:9 or 4K view of the world...

Regards,
Scott

[Adrian123]

Just went to a 7700K/1070 build from a 2600K build. P3DV4, XP11. I believe the old 2600K performed equally as well, sometimes better.

[scottb613]

15 minutes ago, Adrian123 said:

Just went to a 7700K/1070 build from a 2600K build. P3DV4, XP11. I believe the old 2600K performed equally as well, sometimes better.

LOL - that doesn't bode well for my expectations...

Regards,
Scott

[ryanbatc]

9 hours ago, Adrian123 said:

Just went to a 7700K/1070 build from a 2600K build. P3DV4, XP11. I believe the old 2600K performed equally as well, sometimes better.

Wait what?  You're 7700K is performing equally to the old 2600K?  Or am I misreading this?  Doesn't make any sense.

[Adrian123]

37 minutes ago, ryanbatcund said:

Wait what?  You're 7700K is performing equally to the old 2600K?  Or am I misreading this?  Doesn't make any sense.

That,s what I said. Iv'e found very little if any performance differences. The 7700k at 4.9ghz works well as did the 2600K at 4.5 ghz. Not really complaining. The 2600 build was 4 yrs old. But it was a 650.00$ upgrade/ rebuild cost. I will sell the 2600K MB, CPU and Memory for 200.00 (maybe). Make someone a darned good FS build by adding a 1070 GPU.

[ckyliu]

I was on an even older setup:
i5 Sandybridge 2500K [email protected] GHz
ATI Radeon HD6870 1GB
8GB DDR3-1600

When I moved to P3D I added another 8GB of RAM and swapped the HD6870 for a used GTX980 (I think it's 3GB, I don't even know for sure!) and P3Dv4.1 runs just fine at 1080p with quite high settings. I'm not even sure the extra RAM was necessary since P3D seems so much better at managing it's memory usage it rarely needs much over 4 (although if I hack texture exp 10 in to the cfg, I get microstutters and memory usage shoots up to about 8 GB)

I'm not surprised the 7700k didn't show that much improvement since the advantage of an i7 is mainly hyperthreading that P3D can't really utilise that much anyway, it's more about single core performance and clock which an i5 is just as good for. Also P3D leans on the GPU a lot more than FSX ever did.

[ryanbatc]

Should be able to crank the settings higher with the newer CPU for same performance- not to mention addons should run better and you should be able to combine lots of addons

id be upset if I got an 8700k and there was little improvement 

[simmerhead]

Works ok on moderate settings on my ancient PC, so don't worry. Just prevent those sliders going to far to the right.