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What's the weak point in my system?


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Hi together,

 

just wanted to ask you about your opinion on my system, which is slowly growing old, and can't really cope with my P3d v4.5 anymore, at least not at big airports with complex planes.

 

So my system is now:

- ASUS Z77 MB

- Intel i5-3570K @ 3.4 Ghz

- NVidia Geforce GTX 970 (4 GB)

- 850W power supply unit

- 16 GB RAM

- Windows 10 64bit, of course

- Only SSD hard drives

 

My problem: At most bigger airports with the famous complex aircraft, I get around 12 fps. And under those circumstances, it's difficult to steer the plane, it's really no fun anymore. What is strange: My settings seem to be less and less relevant to it - for example in earlier P3D versions (yes, even v4.X versions), it seemed there was a very noticable difference between the different AA settings. Now, even after deleting the P3D.cfg and shaders, it seems to have ZERO difference wheather I choose 2 x MSAA or 8 x SSAA. Even other settings are not too important anymore. But what is very significant: In the cockpit, fps are a LOT worse than in any outside view of any plane. For example, with the PMDG 737 in Bogota (PKSIM), it's rather common to get 12 fps inside the VC and 25 fps outside. And I'm not even talking about dynamic lights.

Furthermore, when approaching an airport after cruise flight, ground textures are often blurry as soon as I've used even a little time acceleration minutes before, and autogen scenery loads VERY late - even too late.

 

I'm ready to invest money into my system, but I'm not willing to pay 1000€ just to be sure everything works without thinking about anything. So, I'm looking for the most urgent part(s) in my system to be replaced.

 

I've heard newer P3d versions are more and more GPU demanding and less CPU demanding. This is why I was very surprised that on another forum, I was told my CPU would be what should be replaced first. Before that, I've thought about a new graphic card ...GTX 1070 or 1080 maybe. But now, I'm uncertain again, which part(s) to replace first??

 

Or do you think, there is this ONE setting that can kill performance in the cockpit so much? At the moment, most sliders are in the middle.

 

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Cheers,

Dominik

 

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CPU is a bit old and underpowered for todays sim standard. You might wan to get at least a 6-7th gen i5 onwards but that will only buff the fps by a small margin. My previous PC was an i5 6400 with a GTX 960 fps on p3d around 22-40.

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I suspect it could be a software thing. Antivirus maybe? Some antivirus packages are quite heavy on the system, restricting resources to other applications such as flight sim.

 

Other than that I agree with the posts above that the CPU and GPU are quite outdated, but that should not be the major problem. P3D doesn't lean on the CPU as much as FSX did, in fact it hardly makes any difference. Although not the best CPU, it should be sufficient. It can't be the GPU either, I got one less than you (GTX 960) with the same amount of memory and I get higher frames than you.

 

It could be that 16 GB RAM isn't enough, or that you have slower RAM installed than your motherboard can cope with. I got 32 GB RAM myself, that could be the reason for my higher frame rate.

 

Last but not least, how is the cooling in your system? Do you have a sufficient cooler for your CPU and GPU? Don't they get too hot? Might there be dust clogging up inside your system? Or even worse, nicotine (often a problem if you smoke near the computer). Laptops are known to throttle down if they get too hot, causing all kinds of problems. But if the cooling is insufficient it could happen with desktops as well.

 

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vor 3 Stunden , chinjh sagte:

CPU is a bit old and underpowered for todays sim standard. You might wan to get at least a 6-7th gen i5 onwards but that will only buff the fps by a small margin. My previous PC was an i5 6400 with a GTX 960 fps on p3d around 22-40.

 

OK, I'm really not a fps hunter, so as soon as I get 15-20 fps in the worst situations (for example approach to AS London Heathrow in the Wilco Embraer v3 in clouldy weather and with 50% AI traffic and sliders set to medium in the average, I would be perfectly happy.

 

vor 2 Stunden , PatrickZ sagte:

It could be that 16 GB RAM isn't enough, or that you have slower RAM installed than your motherboard can cope with. I got 32 GB RAM myself, that could be the reason for my higher frame rate.

 

OK, but has RAM to do with fps? I thought that would be responsible for loading textures and thus for OOM crashes if it's too little. I have DDR4 ram installed, which should be the newest component in my system.

 

 

vor 2 Stunden , PatrickZ sagte:

Last but not least, how is the cooling in your system? Do you have a sufficient cooler for your CPU and GPU? Don't they get too hot? Might there be dust clogging up inside your system? Or even worse, nicotine (often a problem if you smoke near the computer). Laptops are known to throttle down if they get too hot, causing all kinds of problems. But if the cooling is insufficient it could happen with desktops as well.

 

 

I don't remember exactly the name of the CPU cooler (Alpenföhn??), but it was huge and at the time I bought it, it had good recommendations, even for higher overclocking. I did some temperature tests in the beginning, and temps never got more than 60°C, rather below 50°C at maximum. The graphic card has the default coolers, but was never overclocked, so I didn't suspect temperature problems here. No smoking anywhere around my house, so the only problem here could be that it has simply become dirty over the time. I should really open and clean it first. But I don't think that's the main issue here.

 

 

Vor 1 Stunde, Mathijs Kok sagte:

 

While your GPU is certainly weak for P3D I would start with wiping your disks and do a clean install of everything. 

 

I've feared it^^ Tried to find a way around that because it's so much work. But that really seems the way to go first. Do you also mean a Windows reinstallation? If I'm gonna do that anyway, would it make sense to just switch to P3d v5 then? I mean... GTX 970 and DX12 is something I never really understood if it would work (??).

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  • 3 weeks later...

All right, for the case someone might be interested because he has similar thoughts on upgrading his hardware, here's a little update on what I did:

- Just tidying up the sim brought nothing than a little shorter loading times.

- Deleting the graphic driver completely and reinstalling didn't help either.

- Various settings almost changed nothing at all.

- Cleaning the inside of the tower was not point either, it wasn't that dirty.

 

So I had to invest. I tried a new graphic card first, not because I thought it was the main issue, but because it was the easiest part to change. Now, I've got the RTX 2060 Super with 8 GB VRAM. What to expect: The blurred textures on the approach have gone, autogen scenery is now ALWAYS there - yay! Even at very dense settings, and I could extend the LOD, cloud and shadow radius a bit. Very good, but fps only improved very little at the big airports. But at least I've tried if it might have been "good enough" - well, it wasn't.

 

Upgrading the CPU means indeed a new mainboard (no octa core for my 1155 socket), and updating the mainboard meant also updating the RAM - because it now really needs to be DDR4 RAM. And that means probably a new Windows 10 licence, because the old one was a free upgrade from a Win 7 OEM licence, which would be linked to the old mainboard, as people say... (?) You see where things go... I hope at least the CPU cooler, the PSU and the case will do their job as well as before.

 

I've now grit my teeth, closed my eyes and ordered an ASUS Prime Z390-P with an i7 9700k and 16 GB DDR 4 RAM, additionally to my new RTX 2060 Super. Don't this new system dare and work brilliant for anything less than the next 10 years of flightsimming ;) I'm gonna report back again how much better it is when it's done.

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  • 8 months later...

Hi BudSpencer, 

 

to solve your problem I would definitely upgrade your PCs processor. If you want to stay in the intel i5 universe, i recommend you to get the 9th or 10th generation. But in case you would like to move on from the i5 processors, I would highly recommend you to get a i7 processor. Again, here I would recommend you to get one of the latest generations, like the 10th generation, which is the latest one for this processor. 

 

And if you are really ready to invest money I would recommend you to the the intel i9. It is the top of the line for processors at the moment. A better processor will give you higher fps and a smoother playing experience. 

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