Hi all,

I would like to update my old low-end PC with a new one more efficient for my (our) purpose: flying with P3d and its various different addons such as FSLabs, PMDG, ORBX, Active Sky and so on.

So I write to you all what could be an ipothetical configuration and I really will appreciate your comments and recommendations.

- CPU I7-10700kF (min 3,80 GHz - max 5.10 GHz in turbo mode )

- Ram Kingston DDR4 16Gb/3200

- SSD 512 Gb PCIe M.2

- VGA Radeon Sapphire RX570 8Gb DDR5 (with a very competitive price compare to NVidia but ... it is my major doubt; I mean: is it a good VGA? Good perfomance?)

.....

 

What do you thing about it?

Thank you in advance

Raffaele

Edited February 15, 20215 yr by raffaele

My $0.02...

CPU - yes, the 10xxxK/F series generally are good chips and they overclock well. To get the best performance you should overclock directly rather than relying on turbo do it for you - I pin my overclocked CPUs to their max stable frequency and turn off SpeedStep and core parking etc. Yes, it shortens the CPU life a bit but I expect to upgrade hardware every other year anyway. You'll need good cooling for it, though - I would strongly suggest a good AIO liquid cooler over an air cooler. Stock coolers will definitely not be adequate.

RAM - I would suggest you should look at 32GB rather than 16GB. As fast as you can afford.

Storage - 512GB is a good start but if you were going to be using the likes of True Earth then it'll get eaten up quite quickly. If you could afford 1TB or even 2TB, or maybe a 512GB NVMe M.2 (and definitely *not* SATA M.2) and a separate bigger SSD (say 2TB), then I think you'd do better, but 512GB NVMe up-front is a great start and will last you for a while.

GPU - this is the point of your spec that I have the most doubts about. RX570 is an mid-to-entry-level card from the previous generation. It's most directly comparable with a GTX1050 or 1060. I have a GTX 1060 in my desktop PC and that runs P3D OK for dev purposes, but I wouldn't try to game seriously on it. The performance is lacking even at 1080p. At 4K? No way.

More generally, if you're going to run P3D v5.1, ie DX12, you may have problems with 8GB VRAM in terms of running out of VRAM and crashing (which doesn't really happen on v4.5 as it's DX11). Some people don't, some people do. Were I buying new, I would have 11GB+ VRAM as a baseline, and today that really means either an RTX 3080+ or a Radeon RX6800+. That said, I have an RTX 2080 SUPER in one of my PCs and that has 8GB I I've only had 2 out-of-VRAM errors to date, so your experience may vary. But if were I buying a new GPU I would not buy one with less than 11GB VRAM. Of course, you really can't buy a 3000 or 6000 series GPU now anyway, but you will be able to later in the year.

 

Edited February 15, 20215 yr by neilhewitt

Thank you very much for your comprehensive reply.

You made me understand so much.

I'm afraid that at this point I will have to spend a lot of extra money if I wanted to have a PC suitable for our purposes and very performing.

However, I still wonder if it's worth it.
I'll explain.
On my PC, the new MFS 2020 works very well with medium graphics settings. For me it is valid.

In case PMDG, FSLABS, AEROSOFT, etc. developed aircraft that do not require high-performance PCs, what's the point of spending thousands of euros?
Of course, having a performing PC never hurts and, anyway, P3D remains a great program for me.
I always wondered, however, why LM decided to create such a heavy program that requires a very high performance PC while Microsoft managed to create a beautiful program that works on medium performance machines.

Great dilemma.

 

Raffaele

24 minutes ago, raffaele said:

I always wondered, however, why LM decided to create such a heavy program that requires a very high performance PC while Microsoft managed to create a beautiful program that works on medium performance machines.

Great dilemma.

 

Raffaele

 

Hi Raffaele,

LM is still using the Microsoft FSX engine (ESP) , even though it has been refined and improved over time. The engine code base is still fairly old (P3D released in 2010) in comparison to FS2020 which was essentially written afresh using more up-to-date programming methods.The scenery compilation is also entirely different.

Another aspect of the old ESP engine that P3D is built upon, it still relies upon on core CPU power although over the different generations of P3D we now have 64 bit application support and the balance between the load on the CPU and GPU is now more evenly balanced.

And lastly, LM s main commercial customers can afford to invest in high performance PC hardware.

 

Regards

Mark

 

 

 

The only real issue with the spec you suggested is the graphics card. The thing is, if you're happy with the performance then that's all that matters. You might well have a great experience with that card. Don't let my opinion put you off!

One thing I will say, though, is that I suspect some people who are happy with their performance / experience balance in MSFS right now will be less happy when they move to DX12 because it is more demanding of your GPU and some will find that lower-spec cards just aren't enough any more. 6GB VRAM in particular will be an issue, I think.

If you do decide to upgrade then of course you can upgrade further later on if you need to. Storage can be expanded, RAM can be added, and GPUs can be swapped. There is a strong 2nd hand market for graphics cards right now, if it came to that. 

Whatever you decide to do, I hope it works out for you!

6 minutes ago, aldridgem said:

Hi Raffaele,

LM is still using the Microsoft FSX engine (ESP) , even though it has been refined and improved over time. The engine code base is still fairly old (P3D released in 2010) in comparison to FS2020 which was essentially written afresh using more up-to-date programming methods. The scenery compilation is also entirely different.

Another aspect of the old ESP engine that P3D is built upon, it still relies upon on core CPU power although over the different generations of P3D we now have 64 bit application support and the balance between the load on the CPU and GPU is now more evenly balanced.

And lastly, LM s main commercial customers can afford to invest in high performance PC hardware.

I'm not sure I entirely agree with you. I mean, yes, P3D is an evolution of ESP, but given the amount of change that LM has pushed through the ESP engine including tesselation on the GPU, the move to 64-bit, and now DX12, I would expect the code to have been substantially re-written and optimised. The idea that there's creaky old code that doesn't perform well on modern hardware and is causing below-par performance in the core engine is, I think, a red herring. There's plenty of code out there running in state-of-the art-systems of all kinds that has existed largely untouched for decades - like large portions of the innards of Windows and Unix (and MacOS). Old != bad or slow, or at least not necessarily.

Recompiling on your target platform using the various optimisations available in current CPU families will improve the performance of any old code. One of the reasons that very old code tends to perform less well is precisely because the old compiled code doesn't use any of those optimisations and doesn't take advantage of the changes to modern CPUs, whereas P3D (and MSFS) are both in active development. The FSX binaries, OTOH, have not been compiled since before 2006, or certainly not since the Steam Edition. 

(I'm not sure quite what you mean by 'more up-to-date programming methods', either. LM will have access to the same level of tooling as Asobo. Both P3D and MSFS are written primarily in C++ for Win32 with a bit of .NET thrown in for good measure and are object-oriented code. I see no difference there at all.)

Equally, MSFS is not a ground-up build. It is based on the FSX codebase at its core - Asobo has said as much. Again, so much of it will have been touched and changed during development that it is absolutely fair to say it's almost a completely new platform, but then I think P3D v5 is basically a new platform that happens to be rather more backwards-compatible with FSX than MSFS is.

All simulators have bottlenecks - they are just different bottlenecks. 

 

3 hours ago, aldridgem said:

 

Hi Raffaele,

LM is still using the Microsoft FSX engine (ESP) , even though it has been refined and improved over time. The engine code base is still fairly old (P3D released in 2010) in comparison to FS2020 which was essentially written afresh using more up-to-date programming methods.The scenery compilation is also entirely different.

Another aspect of the old ESP engine that P3D is built upon, it still relies upon on core CPU power although over the different generations of P3D we now have 64 bit application support and the balance between the load on the CPU and GPU is now more evenly balanced.

And lastly, LM s main commercial customers can afford to invest in high performance PC hardware.

 

Regards

Mark

 

I completely understand your point of view.

Thank you

Raffaele

 

 

3 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

The only real issue with the spec you suggested is the graphics card. The thing is, if you're happy with the performance then that's all that matters. You might well have a great experience with that card. Don't let my opinion put you off!

One thing I will say, though, is that I suspect some people who are happy with their performance / experience balance in MSFS right now will be less happy when they move to DX12 because it is more demanding of your GPU and some will find that lower-spec cards just aren't enough any more. 6GB VRAM in particular will be an issue, I think.

If you do decide to upgrade then of course you can upgrade further later on if you need to. Storage can be expanded, RAM can be added, and GPUs can be swapped. There is a strong 2nd hand market for graphics cards right now, if it came to that. 

Whatever you decide to do, I hope it works out for you!

Yes, I agree.

Just today I went to my friend's electronics store from which I usually supply. He told me that 11Gb or higher graphics cards are not found. Suppliers around the world do not have them. (Gosh!)
I also checked on Amazon and other sites: nothing!

I have found, anyway, a PowerColor AMD Radeon RX 5700 Red Dragon 8GB GDDR6.

What do you think?

Thank you

Raffaele

 

3 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

I'm not sure I entirely agree with you. I mean, yes, P3D is an evolution of ESP, but given the amount of change that LM has pushed through the ESP engine including tesselation on the GPU, the move to 64-bit, and now DX12, I would expect the code to have been substantially re-written and optimised. The idea that there's creaky old code that doesn't perform well on modern hardware and is causing below-par performance in the core engine is, I think, a red herring. There's plenty of code out there running in state-of-the art-systems of all kinds that has existed largely untouched for decades - like large portions of the innards of Windows and Unix (and MacOS). Old != bad or slow, or at least not necessarily.

Recompiling on your target platform using the various optimisations available in current CPU families will improve the performance of any old code. One of the reasons that very old code tends to perform less well is precisely because the old compiled code doesn't use any of those optimisations and doesn't take advantage of the changes to modern CPUs, whereas P3D (and MSFS) are both in active development. The FSX binaries, OTOH, have not been compiled since before 2006, or certainly not since the Steam Edition. 

(I'm not sure quite what you mean by 'more up-to-date programming methods', either. LM will have access to the same level of tooling as Asobo. Both P3D and MSFS are written primarily in C++ for Win32 with a bit of .NET thrown in for good measure and are object-oriented code. I see no difference there at all.)

Equally, MSFS is not a ground-up build. It is based on the FSX codebase at its core - Asobo has said as much. Again, so much of it will have been touched and changed during development that it is absolutely fair to say it's almost a completely new platform, but then I think P3D v5 is basically a new platform that happens to be rather more backwards-compatible with FSX than MSFS is.

All simulators have bottlenecks - they are just different bottlenecks. 

 

I understand your points Neil, but coming back to the OPs question, why is P3D more heavily reliant or demanding upon higher performance hardware than MSFS 2020? Both vendors have access to the same tooling, can recompile their code as you stated.

Sure there's been some optimizations, but exactly where is the "bottleneck" in P3D compared to FS2020? I do agree with you that P3D has more obvious "roots" in FSX, but I am not sure I would call that true backwards compatibility with FSX, especially with v4 and v5.

 

So I guess I am still left wondering then why the significant difference?

 

 

5 minutes ago, aldridgem said:

I understand your points Neil, but coming back to the OPs question, why is P3D more heavily reliant or demanding upon higher performance hardware than MSFS 2020?

It's not.  Not P3Dv5.  I get roughly the same frames with v5 compared to MSFS.

7 hours ago, aldridgem said:

I understand your points Neil, but coming back to the OPs question, why is P3D more heavily reliant or demanding upon higher performance hardware than MSFS 2020? Both vendors have access to the same tooling, can recompile their code as you stated.

Sure there's been some optimizations, but exactly where is the "bottleneck" in P3D compared to FS2020? I do agree with you that P3D has more obvious "roots" in FSX, but I am not sure I would call that true backwards compatibility with FSX, especially with v4 and v5.

So I guess I am still left wondering then why the significant difference?

I'm not so sure that it is reliant on better hardware for similar performance. I know P3D performs better on the same hardware in v5 than v4, and in turn v4 had performance improvements over v3. I do think P3D uses CPU on things that MSFS doesn't - for example, the rendering engine has multi-viewport support and even if you're only rendering a single window on a single screen, that still adds overhead (which MSFS will eventually have to deal with when it goes multi-view as planned). 

If you go the MSFS forums you'll find tons of complaints about poor performance, stutters etc. Just like the P3D forums. I don't see a general consensus that MSFS out-performs P3D in terms of FPS etc. Only really in visual scenery detail and (for now) the weather depiction. But individual experiences will of course vary. 

I also think MSFS somehow feels as if it performs better because the visual fidelity of the scenery (in the detailed areas) is much greater, at least that's the feeling I had testing it, but that's mostly about the scenery data - all those petabytes of model data and textures. I dare say that if LM had access to the same resources (and wanted to do it, which I doubt they would) they could generate a highly detailed world along the same lines.

That said, the rendering engine in MSFS produces a more realistic looking result and that's because that engine was tweaked for years to make Forza look sharp and hyper-real at 4K. That's not going to be LM's priority, and 3rd parties can only do so much with shaders etc without direct access to the underlying rendering engine code. It's also clear that MSFS can render more and more detailed objects at the same FPS than P3D can, though v5 has improved that significantly which is why I can fly in Orbx True Earth GB South's London at high scenery complexity and still get 30 FPS. I could never have hoped to do that in v4.5.  

One thing I know from being a long-time FSX and P3D user is that a bad add-on, or just a clash of add-ons, can really tank your performance. A badly written shader. A poorly designed ground poly. Lots of things can spoil the experience, and the big big difference is that while almost no-one flies P3D stock, MSFS is not yet a platform that you need to install a hundred different add-ons for. But that will come and with it I'm sure will come add-ons that break things.

7 hours ago, Mace said:

It's not.  Not P3Dv5.  I get roughly the same frames with v5 compared to MSFS.

And that's something we should all be making a bigger deal of. Not so much the vs MSFS aspect, but that performance has increased significantly in v5, in some cases dramatically. Bottlenecks in DX11 around copying texture data between reserved RAM and VRAM, for example, which DX12 can avoid at the cost of not being a fully memory-managed API (hence the VRAM crashes). We all want LM to do something about those but that might well be at the cost of overall performance. 

At the end of the day you still need a high-end machine to run either sim well at high settings. 

 

1 hour ago, neilhewitt said:

And that's something we should all be making a bigger deal of. Not so much the vs MSFS aspect, but that performance has increased significantly in v5, in some cases dramatically. Bottlenecks in DX11 around copying texture data between reserved RAM and VRAM, for example, which DX12 can avoid at the cost of not being a fully memory-managed API (hence the VRAM crashes). We all want LM to do something about those but that might well be at the cost of overall performance. 

At the end of the day you still need a high-end machine to run either sim well at high settings.

Hey thanks for your inputs.

Very informative.

Cheers R

9 hours ago, neilhewitt said:

And that's something we should all be making a bigger deal of. Not so much the vs MSFS aspect, but that performance has increased significantly in v5, in some cases dramatically.

 

 

Thanks Neil for the additional detail.

I can certainly vouch for v5 and my own observations that its the best running version although I only moved to P3Dv4 from FSX. The stutters that I had even in v4 have pretty much all disappeared and performance is smooth.OK, EA still needs some work IMHO.

As it relates to MSFS, I guess we will wait and see how it handles the load of a study level sim plus the variety of scenery add-ons and other utilities that are yet to come to that platform. For me that would be a better comparison to make...  FS2020, multiple complex scenery add-ons, plus weather, plus ATC, plus flight tracking sw.