NVidia 970 running slow when VRAM approaches limit

[Keith Smith]

Hi Mike,

I think it's important to accept that there is a wide range of performance specs for video cards because there are many different performance needs out there. Someone who watches netflix and browses the web doesn't need spectacular 3d acceleration performance. The things you're asking the system to do when you use a sim such as X-Plane are pretty extensive. I have no problem paying for hardware to bring the sim to a higher level of visual immersion.

There have been many times that my frames have dropped below an acceptable level (especially while streaming) in the Socal area with the desired rendering settings. So, spending a few more $ to fix the problem seems to be a suitable approach.

I generally upgrade once every 3-4 years, and when I do, I plan to spend $300-400 for the video card portion of the hardware solution.

The UPS package was late, btw, it's coming today according to UPS. It's arrived at the local sorting facility, so it's getting close.

[Keith Smith]

so I had the presence of mind to do 2 framerate checks with my ancient Radeon 7970 prior to installing the new card. I cranked the clouds up to 80% density (which I would normally never do) and set an overcast (cumulus) layer at about 2000' AGL. I took benchmarks in the default cockpit view and full screen forward view...

They were 24fps and 17fps respectively. Changing absolutely nothing in xplane, I removed the AMD driver, rebooted, removed the card, installed new card, booted up, installed Nvidia drivers, rebooted, then launched xplane.

I'm at 56fps and 49fps respectively.

I think I might just cry a little bit.

[stevekirks]

so I had the presence of mind to do 2 framerate checks with my ancient Radeon 7970 prior to installing the new card. I cranked the clouds up to 80% density (which I would normally never do) and set an overcast (cumulus) layer at about 2000' AGL. I took benchmarks in the default cockpit view and full screen forward view...

They were 24fps and 17fps respectively. Changing absolutely nothing in xplane, I removed the AMD driver, rebooted, removed the card, installed new card, booted up, installed Nvidia drivers, rebooted, then launched xplane.

I'm at 56fps and 49fps respectively.

I think I might just cry a little bit.

That's it. It's time for me to buy a new card. Maybe not one that costs as much as a prebuilt storage shed, but still...

[fivechickens]

I'm running a Gigabyte G1 GTX 970 on my system and I've been happy with the performance.

My system is a 2500K at varying overclock levels from 4.2 to 4.6ghz depending on how frequently I mind rebooting.
32GB of PC3-2133 CL11 RAM for the scenery helps but I still get bogged down by scenery loads...

I am using the GPU baked-in MFAA now instead of HDR AA and it seems to improve my framerates a bit, I'm holding at around 45-60fps on average in HDMeshV3 areas at 1440p with the following settings. I don't seem to notice a huge difference from compressing or decompressing my textures in terms of visual quality, so to keep myself away from that 3.5GB VRAM limit I elected to stay with compressed textures.

[fivechickens]

Updated rendering settings:



System running at 4.9ghz now (I have 7 noisy 120mm fans now, not sure how long I'll live with this...), GPU at 1479 mhz, vMem at 1878mhz




Sierra Nevada UHD mesh at about 45-60 fps. Notice how the in-game screenshot doesnt show any AA, the MFAA is done by the GPU inside the framebuffer.



Here's an example of the post-framebuffer MFAA in action:

[fivechickens]

Whelp. I got greedy and tried for 5Ghz. Ended up spending the last two days recovering data off my Raid array by installing Ubuntu, learning how to use mdadm, and then copying 300GB off manually. (Fortunately I'd cleaned off the other 4TB recently or this post would be a longer time coming.)

Morale of the story, don't mess around with overclocking with your system drive installed, use a spare drive.

[Keith Smith]

I found the hit from global shadows was really high, so I've backed those off to 'on aircraft' for now. I also found there wasn't much difference between in-game anti aliasing vs nvidia-based, so I went with in-game using super sampling. The post-rendered FSAA in hardware was a bit rough for me, still too many jaggies.

[kullery]

I also found there wasn't much difference between in-game anti aliasing vs nvidia-based

I found the same results with my GTX780. Also, with the NVidia based settings, the text on the x-plane menu options was so blurry that my old eyes couldn't read it.

[Keith Smith]

Hi Ken, yep, that's a great point, too.