49 minutes ago, Noel said:

No but it will run out of VRAM on an 8Gb card then frames dump into the toilet

I've been doing a little research... ok...watching Gamers Nexus, only because the guy has a cool 1st name and knows what he's talking about...and is the most unbiased reviewer and does the most scientifically sound reviews I've seen thus far...plus I think he just has a pleasant demeanor and easy-to-listen-to voice (important when you listen to a vlog alot) 

Anyway, enough bromance talk. 🤣

What he said in a show I watched about vram is that most games "request" a certain amount of VRAM on execution, but may never actually use all of it during gameplay (when vram usage, not allocation is evaluated properly.

Now...he didn't mention MSFS specifically (but I hope someone here has a site like this that has, specifically for MSFS and can chime in definitively)...but I'm hoping that MSFS kinda' does the same thing...says "GIMME GIMME GIMME" when it launches, but then says...We'll I only really needed 6 GB of the full 8GB I requested.

I know DX12 changes things as we've seen in P3Dv5, but I have to admit I've not been in that sim and in fact didn't even upgrade to V5 as I was waiting for MSFS and have minor depression issues when I think of all the re-installing, tweaking, patching, etc with all my purchased content I'll be doing when you typically move from 1 major point release to another.

OK....so...I hope 8GB will serve us well, and/or hope the price of 12gb+ cards comes down. (well I HAVE a 12GB card, but an ancient Titan Maxwell ..that is holding its own in the sim).

OK...someone give me the good (or not good) news 🙂

 

I appreciate your ideas but in my case, clearly it's a case of 

2 hours ago, Steve Dra said:

What he said in a show I watched about vram is that most games "request" a certain amount of VRAM on execution, but may never actually use all of it during gameplay (when vram usage, not allocation is evaluated properly.

Now...he didn't mention MSFS specifically (but I hope someone here has a site like this that has, specifically for MSFS and can chime in definitively)...but I'm hoping that MSFS kinda' does the same thing...says "GIMME GIMME GIMME" when it launches, but then says...We'll I only really needed 6 GB of the full 8GB I requested. 🙂

I understand the idea but with respect to how MSFS behaves in my install, and being vsync'd to 30Hz screen, as VRAM in use as displayed by MSI Afterburner/RTSS starts to hit 8Gb, you see frame rate start to drop under the critical 30 so stuttering ensues bigtime.  When I first loaded FSDT's KORD VRAM quickly hit ~8Gb and frames which stay solid at 30 (as long as GPU and VRAM stay under 99-100%) but now started down into the teens and with it loss of really stellar performance.  I needed to change several sliders from Ultra down to high, as well as AA setting was turned down, then frames come right back up to 30 w/ very smooth performance.

38 minutes ago, Noel said:

I appreciate your ideas but in my case, clearly it's a case of 

I understand the idea but with respect to how MSFS behaves in my install, and being vsync'd to 30Hz screen, as VRAM in use as displayed by MSI Afterburner/RTSS starts to hit 8Gb, you see frame rate start to drop under the critical 30 so stuttering ensues bigtime.  When I first loaded FSDT's KORD VRAM quickly hit ~8Gb and frames which stay solid at 30 (as long as GPU and VRAM stay under 99-100%) but now started down into the teens and with it loss of really stellar performance.  I needed to change several sliders from Ultra down to high, as well as AA setting was turned down, then frames come right back up to 30 w/ very smooth performance.

So then what happens when we add FSLabs Airbus or PMDG NGX3 and a respectable amount of AI traffic? I feel like we will be right back at the "it can look amazing or run amazing, but not both at the same time" place we are with the other sims. I remain hopeful but skeptical.

I'm actually cautiously optimistic on PMDG stuff at least.  My understanding is the core of the aircraft systems sim for it actually runs externally to the sim which means those with newer multi-core CPU's might not be super impacted similar to streaming with CPU encoding while flying.  I can do that now and lose like 1 maybe 2fps avg off my low.  So my thought is hopefully while the sim is running its processes on cores XYZ for example, the PMDG module can go run on a couple of the other more idle ones.  The other reason I think this is going to work ok is right now I see "limited by mainthread" which is not the same as CPU limited (all cores pegged).  Generally I'm only using around 50-55% of my 3700X while running the sim. 

I'm hoping it will be a similar impact as something like the default 787 where all the glass in that thing has a noticeable hit to FPS over GA aircraft and even the A320.  However my current 3700X, 2080 Super, 32GB of RAM can still run the sim at 1440p with mostly high and a few non-CPU impacting options set to Ultra (as per the tweaking thread on the flghtsimulator forum) and with the new glass cockpit option set to medium I can get a low of around 32-34 in the 787 at night in heavy weather at a big airport like EGLL. 

I'm also not too worried about traffic with it.  I have turned Live Traffic on and multiplayer set to Live and have seen very little impact if any.  Strangely though the middle traffic option AI traffic even just at 15 on both GA and commercial gives a 5+ fps hit in that heavy load scenario.  Don't know why, and after figuring out that I can run live traffic and get a lot more density and no noticeable FPS hit, I'm never going back to the AI generated stuff again anyway 🙂 

Oh, I forgot to mention in my examples above with my system, one of the reasons I tend to see mainthread limited vs GPU right now with my settings is I also capped FPS at 40 in the Nvidia Control panel to keep temps down until I can expand my cooling loop with another rad.  My single 30mm 360 is not enough to keep temps down with a 3700X and a 2080 Super FTW edition both hammering it.  The parts themselves don't get overly warm, but the loop coolant was getting warmer than I'd like without just blasting fans at 100%.

11 minutes ago, sivart2000 said:

So then what happens when we add FSLabs Airbus or PMDG NGX3 and a respectable amount of AI traffic? I feel like we will be right back at the "it can look amazing or run amazing, but not both at the same time" place we are with the other sims. I remain hopeful but skeptical.

Well, as I keep saying, this sim is very GPU limited, not CPU limited.  And we haven't even gone to DX12.  My prediction is you have ample headroom in the CPU to manage study-level planes.  What's truly remarkable is how much very high quality stuff is happening in MSFS, and all w/ very little draw on my 9900K which also runs at 4.8Ghz, but was somewhat recently HT-enabled, which I don't think is possible for your 9700K.  I don't know how you can go wrong you're only talking about less than the cost of the NGXu.  I'd wait until this patch issue is resolved before jumping in though lest you be disappointed until it's fixed.

2 minutes ago, Noel said:

I'd wait until this patch issue is resolved before jumping in though lest you be disappointed until it's fixed.

👍

5 minutes ago, flyinion said:

Generally I'm only using around 50-55% of my 3700X while running the sim.

And I'm only seeing maybe 25-30% for the 9900K and that is w/ HT enabled, 4.8gHz, and with most sliders on Ultra. 

1 minute ago, Noel said:

And I'm only seeing maybe 25-30% for the 9900K and that is w/ HT enabled, 4.8gHz, and with most sliders on Ultra. 

Honestly I'll have to double check, it's possible I'm remembering a number from when I was streaming the other night, oops.

4 minutes ago, Noel said:

And I'm only seeing maybe 25-30% for the 9900K and that is w/ HT enabled, 4.8gHz, and with most sliders on Ultra. 

And that is corroborated by very low CPU temps considering it's 1.21v and air cooling w/ HT enabled. 

Even though there is no flashy payware airliner for MSFS yet, you can still make a rough estimate of what one will do to your system even at this point, although it will cost you a quid to find out. Here's how...

Fire up P3D, run a stock aeroplane in it which gets good performance and get the frame rate monitor on screen. Now fire up another GPU/CPU intensive application which takes away approximately the same amount of system resources from P3D - such as streaming a movie, or rendering a video in Premiere Pro or whatever - as a decent payware airliner would. P3D will now be approximating the frame rate it manages when you run it with a fancy airliner and so now you have a method you can use to test the new sim with. So...

Now get a gamepass for a quid from MS, download the new sim, fire it up, run it and do the same thing, i.e. running that process which stresses your system to about the level of a flashy payware airliner. This will approximate the same load on your system whilst running MSFS as it would presumably have when a funky new payware airliner is in there and running, and you will have your answer. It'll be a bit of a guesstimate, but it should be pretty close.

Edited September 19, 20205 yr by Chock

1 hour ago, Noel said:

I appreciate your ideas but in my case, clearly it's a case of 

I understand the idea but with respect to how MSFS behaves in my install, and being vsync'd to 30Hz screen, as VRAM in use as displayed by MSI Afterburner/RTSS starts to hit 8Gb, you see frame rate start to drop under the critical 30 so stuttering ensues bigtime.  When I first loaded FSDT's KORD VRAM quickly hit ~8Gb and frames which stay solid at 30 (as long as GPU and VRAM stay under 99-100%) but now started down into the teens and with it loss of really stellar performance.  I needed to change several sliders from Ultra down to high, as well as AA setting was turned down, then frames come right back up to 30 w/ very smooth performance.

Ok Noel, you leave me no choice then to start charging for my repaints so I can fund my 48GB Titan Ti when its released. 🙂

I almost wonder if that is why my old Titan with 12GB seems to do well.  I haven't ever looked at Vram usage....maybe I should. 😉  I guess I figured I aint gettin' more than 12 anytime soon so what's the point? hehe.

 

 

21 minutes ago, Noel said:

And that is corroborated by very low CPU temps considering it's 1.21v and air cooling w/ HT enabled. 

Yeah I just double checked, 35-40 with some spikes to 45.  787 with avionics on sitting in YSSY in real weather, traffic, multiplayer.

This is getting really bizarre.  I flew out of KBJC so lots of Front Range scenery and CPU utilization now averaging around 20% with few spikes to 30-50.  Which means we saw lots of 12-13% CPU utilization and 41C on air HT enabled!  It's definitely heavily GPU limited, which I hope helps translate to ample headroom for study-level aircraft.  Definitely need a serious GPU upgrade.  And the RTX 3090 could be it.  But I must say it ran great and image quality seemed better since I had experienced some degradation in IQ after the 2nd patch went in.  We'll see again next time up.  I really like this game-sim and hope they continue to polish it--it really deserves it.

Edited September 19, 20205 yr by Noel

9 hours ago, sivart2000 said:

I'm going to wait and see what happens for a while. Right now, the option I'm leaning towards is going to V5 since it will take better advantage of my RTX2080 giving me a few precious fps, which can be the difference between a stutterfest and enjoyable flying. Also, many or most of my 3rd party addons can be used with little or no extra $$ investment. 

I am running it on an i9-9900K with 32GB of RAM and an RTX2080. If you have a similar Rig you can achieve steady 60FPS easily by lowering some setting which don't have any big visual effect. I am on a trip from Germany to Australia in the G36 at the moment. Flew low level across Tehran yesterday which is obviously a vast City and didn't encounter any FPS drops or stutters. Right now the ONLY lagging i have sometimes is when i am close to the ground right after being airborne or shortly before touchdown. The first/last 300 feet or so i get some lags but i can live with that.

So my recommendation is give it a try and see for yourself. You won't be disappointed!