Hi Guys

Belated Happy new year to everyone.

As a long term FSX user (yep there are sitll some us about 😉) and also a increasingly frequent user of P3D v4.5 i am looking forward to what V6 brings. The only possible concern i do have is my graphics card as I am currenly running a 2080 8GB one a single screen at 1920x1080. This is plenty for my current sims.

I only started using P3D fairly recently after purchasing V4 when that was the current version so I didn't upgrade to V5. I don't have spare pennies for a new graphics card so do you think 8GB Vram will be enough?

Cheers

Daz

 

It is sufficient as long as the settings are adjusted.

One thing to note is that many legacy sceneries will work fine - certain scenery and aircraft will however eat your VRAM for breakfast. LatinVFR's KMIA is by far the worst offender on my end, so that is worth keeping in mind.

For V4? Yes. I even managed to do with a 4 GB GPU (1650, actually).

 

For v5, possibly, if you watch both your settings and your texture sizes. I seldom use 4096px textures, and only in user aircraft. All sceneries and AI textures are reduced to 1024px, and the majority of user aircraft textures to 2048 px.

I was using 8 GB in V5 for a couple of years, so yes it is possible.  As others have mentioned, keeping your textures below 4k is key to managing VRAM. If you are running at 1080, then you should be fine. Some heavy airports (latinvfr KMIA, Flytampa EHAM, etc) will push the card close to the 7 GB ceiling but it is manageable. 

GTX 1070 8GB here with no problems. Most sliders about 3\4 to the right. Graphics set to high. Can run with ultra.

Same here -. running an RTX 3070 (8GB) (was also running a 1070Ti) and in P3Dv5 its very fluid providing you dont have all sliders set to the right. My texture resolution is now set to 2048 (was 1024 with the 1070Ti)  and I am running a 3440x1440p UWHD monitor. So far, touch wood, I have not run out of VRAM even though I run some complex  airports such as Simwings EGLL plus Orbx regions installed. I would also say I have moderate settings for Hifi's ASP3D  - 80 mile visibility and 3 layers of cloud which keeps things nicely balanced.

With your 2080 you should be OK with v5 especially at 1080p providing you dont go overboard with the sliders all the way to the right as mentioned above.

If you are asking about is your 2080 is going to be adequate for v6, who knows. This is anyone's guess right now based on new features and capabilities that may come with this future version and its impact on graphic card performance in general.

Are you planning to switch to v5, or are you waiting for v6?

In case of the latter, no one can tell you if 8 GB VRAM will be enough or not because the sim has not been released yet and the minimum requirements not specified.

As far as v5, I myself have a video card with only 6 GB VRAM. I know it's little compared to the latest cards, but keeping the graphics settings at a reasonable level helps a lot. For example, changing the texture size from 2048 to 1024 can make a big difference, and that way, I am able to fly the Majestic Dash 8 Q400 in- and out of FS Dreamteam Chicago O'Hare and use GSX v2.

On V5 with 2048 textures I was able to run decently at 2560x1440 on a 10600K/1070 with addons like ORBX Global, Orbx LC, FlyTampa Vegas, FSL.

Perhaps there is a variable around the AA setting that is used.

Guys

You are forgetting one big thing. All the latest graphic cards, - I have RTX3080, also 4070, they al have 8GB. No more memory is needed because the motherboard itself is so fast, it just doesn't need more memory.

Of course 4080 has 16 gb and RTX4090 has crazy 24gb of ram, but they go for a price of a PC

I've switched to to the AMD RX 6700 XT for 12GB but it doesn't seem as issue free as my GTX 1070. I got my first DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG with an AMD card.

I would imagine 8gb would be plenty for a few years yet, just don't max out your settings. The majority of people on steam have 4-6 gb video cards, i know that's not related to P3D, but I am sure lockheed are paying attention to what hardware people are using. I realize most sales of from big corporation's, but they do make a little money from us. When everyone can get their hands on the 4000 series at retail prices, the vram won't be an issue anymore for many years. 

Looking at the cost of graphics cards on Amazon UK, I think we will be selling our souls to buy the 4000 series.

10 hours ago, vl1 said:

Guys

You are forgetting one big thing. All the latest graphic cards, - I have RTX3080, also 4070, they al have 8GB. No more memory is needed because the motherboard itself is so fast, it just doesn't need more memory.

Of course 4080 has 16 gb and RTX4090 has crazy 24gb of ram, but they go for a price of a PC

No, the 3080 was produced in 10 and 12 GB versions--none were produced with 8GB.  And there is no 4070--only the 4070Ti, which is configured with 12GB of VRAM, not 8.

The 1080Ti, released in Mar 2017 (nearly six years ago) came with 11GB of VRAM, as did the 2080Ti released 18 months later (still over 4 years ago).

The first versions of P3D v5 made good use of the additional VRAM on the 10-11GB cards, but caused crashes for people with 8GB or less running heavy scenery, as DX12 does not handle VRAM overcommitment gracefully.  So LM had to dial things back in later versions of P3D v5 to stabilize the platform for users running middle-of-the-pack GPUs.

The current batch of 40-series nVidia cards run from 12GB (4070Ti), to 16GB (4080) to 24GB (4090).  In the previous 30-series, only the lower-end cards (3050/3060/3070/3070Ti) were configured with 8GB.

So 8GB is now something of an outdated spec.  I'd surmise 8GB will work just fine for quite a while to come, but will probably need more and more attention to graphics settings.

 

Thanks for all the input guys.

I think it will be a case of wait and see what the requirments are like for P3D V6 and take it from there. I am hoping that my 2080 will last for a few more years to come. I really don't fancy "selling a kidney" towards the cost of a new graphics card.