17 minutes ago, CaptainNick said:

That 2600 has served you well but it is probably time for an upgrade. Modern CPU’s will run circles around it especially in newer titles. You should be able to pick some more ram fairly cheap especially on the used market but the best advice anyone here could give is to put money beyond the ram upgrade towards a new system all around. 

Your profile pic looks like a Skywest EMB-120 at the old KSGU. I remember seeing those daily over my house as a kid. 🙂

Edited July 15, 20205 yr by reignman40

2 minutes ago, reignman40 said:

Your profile pic looks like a Skywest EMB-120 at the old KSGU. I remember seeing those daily over my house as a kid. 🙂

It’s been my profile pic for so long I don’t remember where it was. I used to watch them fly into KCRQ when I worked at an fbo there 20 years ago. Skywest flew them in and America West had Dash 8’s.....the Brasilias were my favorite to watch land and take off, especially in the polished dirty metal look.

4 minutes ago, goates said:

Coincidentally, Crysis suffered from the same limitation FSX did. Both were designed around fast single core systems that never materialized. This is one of the big fixes/changes in the upcoming Crysis Remastered.

As for SLI/Crossfire, they were never great solutions in the first place. Well, other than they were good for selling more cards for Nvidia and AMD.

The funny thing is, on startup it had an ad/splash screen video for a Core2Extreme. If I remember right..

16 minutes ago, reignman40 said:

The funny thing is, on startup it had an ad/splash screen video for a Core2Extreme. If I remember right..

Much like FSX, they didn't have much choice but to try and make the best of a bad situation. Was still fun to play though!

3 hours ago, gunif said:

I will still put my money with intel/nvidia with pci e v4 with ddr 5.   I tend to try and buy top stuff so that my ROI is fantastic.  Looks like the goodies slated for next year are going to provide some astounding performance boosts over current gen.  PCIe v4 + DDR5 + nvidia 3000 series 🙂

DDR5 comes with Zen 4 and Alder Lake, so that would be late 2021 or early 2022. And if it's anything like the previous generations, kits will be too expensive and not fast enough in its first year or so, making DDR4 the preferred choice for the next two years at least.

2 hours ago, reignman40 said:

The funny thing is, on startup it had an ad/splash screen video for a Core2Extreme. If I remember right..

So did Flight Simulator X (along with NVIDIA's TWIMTBP logo), albeit not in the splash screen. It's on the rear side of my boxed copy, and it was quite prominent in the old official website as well.

Edited July 15, 20205 yr by ChaoticBeauty

2 hours ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

DDR5 comes with Zen 4 and Alder Lake, so that would be late 2021 or early 2022. And if it's anything like the previous generations, kits will be too expensive and not fast enough in its first year or so, making DDR4 the preferred choice for the next two years at least.

So did Flight Simulator X (along with NVIDIA's TWIMTBP logo), albeit not in the splash screen. It's on the rear side of my boxed copy, and it was quite prominent in the old official website as well.

Just pulled my copy of FSX and Acceleration off the shelf... Sure enough, I had forgotten all about that. At least we got some kind of multi-core support with the service packs later on. 

Edited July 16, 20205 yr by reignman40

Both SLI and Crossfire always seemed to be a solution in search of a problem to solve.

SLI worked well in P3D V3 run sli with 980,1080 and last 1080ti it scaled quite well had problems with some addons , performance with 2 1080TI SLI is little faster then the 2080ti single card in p3d. 1080ti vs 2080ti in dx11 is closer then with dx12

shall do a test in MSFS with 2x1080ti and 2x2080ti if it scale its ok to the new top card arrives.

the 2 1080ti cards i dont use the 2080ti i use in my sim and second pc.

Edited August 4, 20205 yr by westman

As someone in the MSFS testing group, for those looking to upgrade before the release, I recommend 32GB and not 16GB or RAM. Don't believe the hype on extra super fast RAM, it's basically a non-factor in modern system architecture in that the performance difference between basic and super fast RAM is negligible.

Avoid SLI. It is unsupported in general by nVidia and AMD and any modern game will not be devoting dev time to making it work.

Edited August 4, 20205 yr by MattNischan

9 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Don't believe the hype on extra super fast RAM, it's basically a non-factor in modern system architecture in that the performance difference between basic and super fast RAM is negligible.

Faster RAM can make a noticeable difference in CPU-limited scenarios, especially in Ryzen platforms where the speed of the Infinity Fabric is tied to the RAM speed. If with basic you mean a RAM kit without an XMP profile, then it would reduce CPU performance considerably. 3200Mhz CL16 is a good baseline nowadays, with 3600MHz CL16 being the sweet spot.

SLI would be useless in MSFS 2020.

 

@ChaoticBeauty about 2 fps. It's not huge. There is tons of benchmark video that RAM speed and gaming is mostly unaffected by RAM speed.

3 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Faster RAM can make a noticeable difference in CPU-limited scenarios, especially in Ryzen platforms where the speed of the Infinity Fabric is tied to the RAM speed. If with basic you mean a RAM kit without an XMP profile, then it would reduce CPU performance considerably. 3200Mhz CL16 is a good baseline nowadays, with 3600MHz CL16 being the sweet spot.

It's pretty easy for these things to degrade into anecdotal tales, but as a developer, I haven't found higher speed RAM to make much difference until you become bandwidth limited, which is nearly impossible to do in a game environment. You spend far too much frame time budget rendering to saturate the bus.

High core count video rendering or encoding? Now that can saturate the bus for sure, and you'll see a minute or two improvement over a 60 minute render between RAM speeds. But it's definitely last on the list of things to address.

8 minutes ago, fogboundturtle said:

about 2 fps. It's not huge. There is tons of benchmark video that RAM speed and gaming is mostly unaffected by RAM speed.

Depends on the configuration, the game and whether you are CPU- or GPU-limited, but the difference is very noticeable in CPU-limited scenarios, especially in the lowest frame rate, and it's definitely not just 2 FPS. I didn't say it was a huge difference though.

1 minute ago, MattNischan said:

It's pretty easy for these things to degrade into anecdotal tales, but as a developer, I haven't found higher speed RAM to make much difference until you become bandwidth limited, which is nearly impossible to do in a game environment.

Benchmarks say otherwise though.

Edited August 4, 20205 yr by ChaoticBeauty

20 minutes ago, ChaoticBeauty said:

Benchmarks say otherwise though.

Do they? I've looked at a couple big Ryzen memory reviews and there's a bit of a difference at the super low end, but most kits are within 1-2 fps of each other (at 100+ fps for most of these tests that show anything at all, which is not where this sim lives).

This one in particular looks pretty exhaustive: https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3508-ryzen-3000-memory-benchmark-best-ram-fclk-uclock-mclock

14 minutes ago, MattNischan said:

Do they? I've looked at a couple big Ryzen memory reviews and there's a bit of a difference at the super low end, but most kits are within 1-2 fps of each other (at 100+ fps for most of these tests that show anything at all, which is not where this sim lives).

Those differences do not look insignificant at all to me. The difference between a 2400MHz CL15 kit (which I'm assuming you mean is basic) and a 3600MHz CL16 kit exhibits a much larger difference than 1-2 FPS in most of those games, and not just the low but also the average results. Here are some more articles that also showcase some significant differences with faster RAM speeds on Ryzen platforms.

https://www.techspot.com/review/1891-ryzen-memory-performance-scaling/

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-ryzen-ram-scaling-effect-in-games,1.html

As we can see, the difference becomes much smaller when GPU-limited, but it is not entirely gone. And regarding the importance of all of this in the new simulator, some people are reporting that they can be CPU-limited even at higher resolutions, which means that a higher RAM speed will make a difference in those cases. But this isn't something that should be discussed further before release.

In response to your original post, of course I'm not suggesting that someone goes for an expensive B-Die kit, but considering the potential performance benefits, it wouldn't be a good idea to skimp on RAM speed when there are frequent sales on very decent Rev. E and CJR/DJR kits which can hit 3200/3600 MHz CL16 speeds with ease. On an Intel platform the difference will be much smaller indeed, and I'm not sure how much because I haven't done enough research, but some users report that there is still a difference. Whether that would be negligible or not though, that would be up to the user. There are cases where you need all the frames you can get, and if you're aiming for a smooth frame rate without judder, going from 28 to 30 FPS can make a world of difference for example. Considering the performance limitations of the current popular simulators, I think this is something most of us can relate to.