What will an upgrade deliver?

[MarkW 1,493]

So I have gone the longest time ever in delaying an upgrade to my flight sim computer.  Last build was before MSFS and current machine is an 8700K (overclocked to 4.6) with 1080Ti graphic card.

I have adjusted the settings to be what I consider very good, the aircraft graphics are great (PMDG, FENIX, etc), scenery looks good to me, maybe the LOD distance is too short, not sure.  Performance is reasonable, I don't really look at frames but in and around 25 to 30, maybe slightly less on the ground at a busy airport.  I really used to notice lots of stutters and pauses in P3D but not really noticing much if anything of that with MSFS.

So the question is, what would I actually get out of a big upgrade to the latest and greatest ?  

[Ted Striker 338]

Nirvana Mark! Sorry, but I had a good chuckle from your question. If you look at my computer specs you'll understand. I bought all the components to upgrade my system to an 8700k when the CPU was released but never had the time to build it. They are still sitting on a shelf. Ray recently upgraded from the identical system as yours and has lots of posts about it. He will probably respond to you when he wakes up on the other side of the pond.

Ted

[jlohrenz 133]

Well if you are happy with your current system's performance no need to update is what I'd say.  I was on a exact same system as you and I did upgrade, but I was also going from a single screen to 3 4K projectors so I needed the extra horsepower to get to where I wanted.  I think there are two schools of thought on updates.  School one likes to have the latest and greatest so will update every other, or every generation change to stay up to date.  School two, gets a well tuned system configured and will ride that out until the software / simulator enhancements improve to a level that it cannot run smoothly or be compatible with that system.  School 1 means lots of money out the door almost yearly.  School 2 means you may only need to update every 5 years or so, or never if you are satisfied.

[hs118 707]

22 hours ago, MarkW said:

So the question is, what would I actually get out of a big upgrade to the latest and greatest ?  

if you are using any kind of head tracking such as TrackIR or equiv, you will notice an immediate increase in smoothness when moving your viewpoint around. 

My personal philosophy on buying technology is what I call "-1". I don't buy the latest and greatest when it costs twice as much for about a 30% increase in performance. I buy the tier below the latest and greatest. For example, just built a system with AMD 7900X processor and AMD RX 7800XT GPU.

The CPU is overkill for MSFS (based on core count, but I do a good bit of Photoshop) but was reasonably priced. I expect to upgrade the GPU in 2-3 years but it's working fine at this point.

[MarkW 1,493]

Thanks for the info.  I have TrackIR, however, I no longer use it, preferring to go with the hat switch.  For sure I will wait for FS2024 to see what that delivers and how current hardware stacks up.  By that time maybe the 4090 will be "-1".