4k on a budget?

[SteveW 1,792]

...mere games work to a facet count as required for the consoles, no matter what area you goto it's the same pace more or less and you are confined within small areas.  What happens is the GPU has many shader cores to fill in those facets. Simplifying somewhat, a GPU can output to the screen at a certain speed and keep that up, how fast it can do that - that's just one metric. The GPU also rotates the geometry and projects the textures onto the facets and a load of other techniques to draw the scene.

In P3D there's no limit on the facets, so in a game a new GPU might update the screen more often, but not actually accelerate the drawing of the scene and not look so exciting.

As we approach more complex scenery in P3D, and we chose settings that the texture count exceeds the ability of the system and the CPU can't feed the GPU we see 100% on core 0 or the first LP.

Incidentlay: HT On and no AM? You could be losing maybe 15% throughput on your main P3D task since the second process of P3D is shared on the first core. They (MS) carefully provided the AM setting and LM have made such improvement over FSX where we would see as much as 20-25% lost with no AM when HT is enabled. So with the AM use 01 on the right end of the binary which represents the top left graph in Task Manager

 

Edited November 28, 2018 by SteveW

[SteveW 1,792]

New GPUs: If we get a new GPU some might say well it doesn't do any more fps. But look at the spec-sheet it's got 1000 more cores than the other, it's likely to accelerate P3D but maybe not ordinary games and yet shows no improvement in framerate. In P3D the processes filling in the scene as it grows from the observer will, however, be filling in faster avoiding 'the blurries'.

 

Edited November 28, 2018 by SteveW

[SteveW 1,792]

...so as I understand it, comparing framerates on different users machines may as well be comparing what filling we got in our sandwiches today. fps isn't a measure of performance in P3D, how fast it grows the scene from the observer is.

Edited November 28, 2018 by SteveW

[fghdgdfdfgfgf 111]

11 hours ago, SteveW said:

That's a problem of which kind of performance we desire for a flight.

If we never fly in places that are very taxing we can dial in our system for that. In P3D we can set another profile dialed in for more taxing places, then choose one thatis suitable for the flight we are planning. Or simply set less sliders, get a more powerful PC, or look at every aspect of performance you can, to extract from the thing as I do, 2% there, 3% there, it adds up. A well tuned system can stay put and not be too low on scenic details.

Thanks Steve!

[fghdgdfdfgfgf 111]

Steve-

One more ? Please.

I seem to be going against the grain around here with the belief that 144Hz + (on a quality monitor) is superior to vsync and or 30Hz.  Are the mechanics there to back me up?

I'm a one setting (p3d4) fits all scenes and scenarios kind of guy.  -I run 30 fps locked at 150Hz

Edited November 29, 2018 by FunknNasty

[Tomaz Drnovsek 440]

I'm still undecided... I have two more questions.

Does the increase of resolution in 4K monitors hit only GPU or does it also have an effect on CPU? 

If it's only GPU, would I see approximately more or would I see less FPS if I go from 1080p and GTX970 to 4K and RTX2080?

[fghdgdfdfgfgf 111]

You will take a hit on the cpu and gpu. Now, I think much of that hit will be offset by the performance optimization that 4.4 brings, vs 4.3. 

Edit: my comment is apples to apples.

Edited November 29, 2018 by FunknNasty

[fghdgdfdfgfgf 111]

Dude, got the 4K itch? Scratch it!  I’m sure everyone that goes the 4K route is blown away by everything it brings. Yeah, the feeling is followed by some regret when they see the performance hit .... but they all make adjustments with settings and never look back.

[Ted Striker 338]

When I went to 4k from a 1024 x 2080 monitor I lost 20% in FPS and my GPU load doubled. My specs are below and I was on a 780 GTX then. After installing my current 1080ti I have not been able to get my GPU usage over 60%. I suspect that it because it is being held back by my current CPU. The 4k is so nice I just lowered my settings a little rather than go back to the smaller lower res monitor.

Ted

[SteveW 1,792]

3 hours ago, FunknNasty said:

Steve-

One more ? Please.

I seem to be going against the grain around here with the belief that 144Hz + (on a quality monitor) is superior to vsync and or 30Hz.  Are the mechanics there to back me up?

I'm a one setting (p3d4) fits all scenes and scenarios kind of guy.  -I run 30 fps locked at 150Hz

Hi Ken,

With the high refresh rate means that there's very little time between. when your frame reaches the monitor to when it comes up for display.

So you have a different effect there because the VSync signal comes in too rapidly for P3D on the ground in a big airport. We can divide that 144/5 = 28.8 or 144/4 = 36 so you could do 28 or 36  locked fps (hard on the CPU) or set NCP to limit at 28 or 36 and VSync to that.

 

Yes the CPU is hit by bigger resolutions with P3D because of the extra environmental effects, FSX is hit less hard by resolution increases.

Yes i's true that the bottlenecking you might see mentioned about CPUs and GPUs gives you the problem of GPU not fully utilised.

[SteveW 1,792]

So now we are all about to purchase 32 core PCs, another problem similar to bottlenecking appears when we use too many cores for P3D.

 

With the typical video rendering or 3D CAD processes these are accelerated no matter how many cores are thrown at them, they keep doing more work because all the work is on the core. Getting data to all those cores slows down but the net effect is the film rendered complete in less time overall.

 

P3D is different and we have to say, how many cores can the system handle with P3D background process and NOT how many cores does P3D need.

 

[SteveW 1,792]

The way to find the number or cores your system can do before bottlenecking could not be simpler.

Since the maximum data flow capability is found during loading the scenario - look at Task Manager graphs see how many hit 100% during that time.

 

Choose a point you can determine as the sim comes to start up, perhaps as soon as you hear ATIS maybe or when the sim un-pauses - so long as it's the same place.

Start a scenario in your fave airport.

Repeat the clean start to 'scenario ready' a few times to remove the caching overhead. 

Time it with a stopwatch.

Add cores until you don't see a significant increase in loading speed - decrease in time taken.

There will always show a smaller and smaller increase in loading speed with each core.

 

What's happening is the supply of data to them is diminishing as the bandwidth is divided between more and more processes.

You decide how many you need and from there then you have the baseline metric - could not be easier. Same with FSX.

 

So you can tune your CPU in around half an hour simply by measuring loading speed because that's the total indication of the maximum hit your PC will get from P3D.

 

Edited November 29, 2018 by SteveW

[fghdgdfdfgfgf 111]

26 minutes ago, SteveW said:

Hi Ken,

With the high refresh rate means that there's very little time between. when your frame reaches the monitor to when it comes up for display.

So you have a different effect there because the VSync signal comes in too rapidly for P3D on the ground in a big airport. We can divide that 144/5 = 28.8 or 144/4 = 36 so you could do 28 or 36  locked fps (hard on the CPU) or set NCP to limit at 28 or 36 and VSync to that.

 

Yes the CPU is hit by bigger resolutions with P3D because of the extra environmental effects, FSX is hit less hard by resolution increases.

Yes i's true that the bottlenecking you might see mentioned about CPUs and GPUs gives you the problem of GPU not fully utilised.

Thanks again, Steve. Very helpful info, thanks again for your time.

[Tomaz Drnovsek 440]

16 hours ago, FunknNasty said:

Dude, got the 4K itch? Scratch it!  I’m sure everyone that goes the 4K route is blown away by everything it brings. Yeah, the feeling is followed by some regret when they see the performance hit .... but they all make adjustments with settings and never look back.

The only reason I'm still skeptical about it is because of my CPU which is getting quite old and if 4K resolution also hits CPU, which is already doing overtime, I'm not sure I'm prepared to take that performance hit which, based on the answers here, would be quite noticeable and everything considered, I would get worse performance (even with RTX2080) than now (with GTX970)... but picture would look much nicer. The thing is, I'd take better performance over a nice picture any time, all the time. I started this topic because I assumed all that would not be the case and the mere fact I'm going from 970 to 2080 would negate the performance hit, not only that, I thought that even with 4K I would get much better performance than now. Apparently, I was wrong big time.

So, my last question on the topic to everybody... are there any 1080p or 1440p monitors that support 30Hz... at all?

[fghdgdfdfgfgf 111]

2 hours ago, 0Artur0 said:

The only reason I'm still skeptical about it is because of my CPU which is getting quite old and if 4K resolution also hits CPU, which is already doing overtime, I'm not sure I'm prepared to take that performance hit which, based on the answers here, would be quite noticeable and everything considered, I would get worse performance (even with RTX2080) than now (with GTX970)... but picture would look much nicer. The thing is, I'd take better performance over a nice picture any time, all the time. I started this topic because I assumed all that would not be the case and the mere fact I'm going from 970 to 2080 would negate the performance hit, not only that, I thought that even with 4K I would get much better performance than now. Apparently, I was wrong big time.

So, my last question on the topic to everybody... are there any 1080p or 1440p monitors that support 30Hz... at all?

that's going to be a tough one, unless someone here has 1st hand knowledge and chimes in  ....that's a feature set usually not  advertised with specifications. Can google it.

I can give you this, I was able to force 30Hz with my previous 1920x1200 monitor (ASUS PA248). Results were horrible though. But as I said previously, 30Hz is not my cup of tea.  There is no 30Hz option with my current monitor and it balks at being forced at 30Hz.