Nvidia RTX 3090 vs 2080 Ti vs 1070 Ti

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

2 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

So I got my 3090 installed over the last few days, and I have to say, the results are great with my other games but disappointing with MSFS.

On one hand, I’m able to play all my other games at 4K 60fps on highest settings. One DX11 game from a couple years back is well over 60fps, allowing me to run res scaling at 110% and still never dip below 60fps. This is great compared to my 2080Ti that struggled to do 40-45fps on max settings at 4K. So about a 40% improvement. 

Now in MSFS, with terrain visuals maxed, I’m seeing a 5-10fps improvement in non-photogrametry areas. So I went from 40-45fps in GA aircraft under these conditions with the 2080Ti to 45-55fps with the 3090. Ugh.

But if I fly around photogrametry areas, I’m not getting a single FPS extra... as I’m main thread limited. And for GA sight seeing flights, I like to hack the Terrain LOD to 4 (400) and that also gets me nothing as it shifts more load onto the already poorly optimized main thread. My 3090 is rarely getting over 70% utilization.  It’s horrible to have an ultra high-end GPU being starved. And my CPU is an i7-9700K 8-core (no HT) 4.6GHz monster.

We really need Asobo to invest in optimizing this. It’s badly flawed. 

Your cpu is too weak I believe for that card. I have a 10900 at 5ghz and a 3090, and I’m limited by gpu in almost all scenarios at 4K. That’s with render scale at 100. And LOD at 200. LOD I found is heavily cpu dependent and causes stutters, so manually posting it beyond what the slider can do (200) is not going to give good results regardless of what gpu you are running. Try and dial it back to 200. 

[Virtual-Chris 682]

36 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Your cpu is too weak I believe for that card. I have a 10900 at 5ghz and a 3090, and I’m limited by gpu in almost all scenarios at 4K. That’s with render scale at 100. And LOD at 200. LOD I found is heavily cpu dependent and causes stutters, so manually posting it beyond what the slider can do (200) is not going to give good results regardless of what gpu you are running. Try and dial it back to 200. 

Your CPU has marginally more performance than mine. 300MHz and 2 cores... and I’m guessing the 2 cores matter nada in this workload. I could throw more money at this and get a new CPU (like the Zen 3 5900X) but instead, I’m going to look at overclocking my CPU. A 300-400MHz OC might shift the balance a bit. But ultimately, this software is terribly optimized. And my advice to anyone is not to throw more hardware at this until it gets better. 
 

Ps. As this is a flight sim, where draw distances are super important, I prefer LOD over FPS. I’ll take LOD 4/400 and 30fps over 200 and 60fps. I just can’t stand looking at a flat texture in the distance with stuff constantly popping in up close. That’s way more immersion breaking for me than a crappy frame rate. 

Edited November 12, 2020 by Virtual-Chris

[icewater5 181]

 

1 hour ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Your cpu is too weak I believe for that card. I have a 10900 at 5ghz and a 3090, and I’m limited by gpu in almost all scenarios at 4K. That’s with render scale at 100. And LOD at 200. LOD I found is heavily cpu dependent and causes stutters, so manually posting it beyond what the slider can do (200) is not going to give good results regardless of what gpu you are running. Try and dial it back to 200. 

I thought hyperfocal had the same gpu at 4k res?.His system is running ok though. Unless he has another cpu

Edited November 12, 2020 by icewater5

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

11 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Your CPU has marginally more performance than mine. 300MHz and 2 cores.

You said you had an i7, that’s 3 generations ago. It’s not just about cores and hz. Plus you don’t have HT, which helps immensely in this sim. 
 

Also,  A larger cache size on a multi-threaded CPU helps deal with multiple tasks more efficiently. The i7 processors feature an L3 cache size of 12MB, whereas the i9’s come commonly come equipped with 16MB.

Edited November 12, 2020 by Ianrivaldosmith

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

4 minutes ago, icewater5 said:

 

I thought hyperfocal had the same cpu at 4k res?.His system is running ok though. Unless he has another graphic card.

No idea what a hyperfocal is? YouTube I assume? 

[icewater5 181]

Sorry a member here a few posts up

[icewater5 181]

44 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

You said you had an i7, that’s 3 generations ago. It’s not just about cores and hz. Plus you don’t have HT, which helps immensely in this sim. 
 

 

Ignore my question (i typed in cpu by mistake). This answers it here, thx

Edited November 12, 2020 by icewater5

[micstatic 4,319]

While a 9700k isn’t the newest processor anymore, msfs also needs major optimization work still. 

[VeryBumpy 272]

4 hours ago, Virtual-Chris said:

We really need Asobo to invest in optimizing this. It’s badly flawed. 

 

I'm still waiting for a solid FS2020 test review using a 3080 or 3090 and comparing several different old and new CPUs.

Then we will really see whats going on.

[dtrjones 356]

On 11/3/2020 at 8:22 PM, Virtual-Chris said:

EDIT: Hard to believe that a 3090 still barely manages 30fps on 4K ultra.  BTW, what settings are most CPU intensive?

LOL Chris my friend you can only make a statement like that if you believe there were no other bottlenecks other than the GPU, somehow I find that hard to believe.

[Ianrivaldosmith 5,317]

On 11/3/2020 at 8:22 PM, Virtual-Chris said:

EDIT: Hard to believe that a 3090 still barely manages 30fps on 4K ultra.  BTW, what settings are most CPU intensive?

My 3090 is running between 45-65 FPS in msfs. It’s not about just that anyways, it’s how smooth it is. 

[Virtual-Chris 682]

10 hours ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

You said you had an i7, that’s 3 generations ago. It’s not just about cores and hz. Plus you don’t have HT, which helps immensely in this sim. 
 

Also,  A larger cache size on a multi-threaded CPU helps deal with multiple tasks more efficiently. The i7 processors feature an L3 cache size of 12MB, whereas the i9’s come commonly come equipped with 16MB.

Yes, but if the primary workload is not multi-threaded as we have here, all those extra cores are sitting around twiddling thumbs. 

My CPU is at 50% Utilization, with one core pegged at 100% while the others wish they could help. My GPU utilization is at 80%. I don’t see a way to solve this problem with hardware... the only thing that will make a substantial difference is to optimize the software to better leverage modern multi-core CPUs. But as it stands, we’re really limited by single core performance, which hasn’t changed much from year to year. 

Ps. What evidence do we have that hyper threading helps immensely? All the evidence would support single core performance is king. If anything is actually threaded in this software, surely 8 physical cores can handle it. Right? Is 16-20 cores going to help at all here? I don’t think so. 

Edited November 12, 2020 by Virtual-Chris

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

5 minutes ago, Virtual-Chris said:

Yes, but if the primary workload is not multi-threaded as we have here, all those extra cores are sitting around twiddling thumbs. 

My CPU is at 50% Utilization, with one core pegged at 100% while the others wish they could help. My GPU utilization is at 80%. I don’t see a way to solve this problem with hardware... the only thing that will make a substantial difference is to optimize the software to better leverage modern multi-core CPUs. But as it stands, we’re really limited by single core performance, which hasn’t changed much from year to year. 

Has anyone tried disabling some of the cores to give the main core more headroom ?

[Virtual-Chris 682]

1 minute ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

Has anyone tried disabling some of the cores to give the main core more headroom ?

That’s a good idea. I have no idea if that provides much of a boost. But it’s worth looking into. If I could run my CPU as a dual core at 10MHz, that would probably solve my issues 😉

[Virtual-Chris 682]

7 hours ago, dtrjones said:

LOL Chris my friend you can only make a statement like that if you believe there were no other bottlenecks other than the GPU, somehow I find that hard to believe.

Ha... true. Now I’m experiencing it first hand. I believe it. 😄