Why GFX card with more RAM?

[SEE]

Great post FS_Phat, thanks for keeping and posting those comments and reminding us all of the technical challenges this sim imposed!

One more question, what is the relationship between the GFX card and the CPU with regards 'bottlenecking'? Is this simply a GFX card whose performance outclasses the CPU and thus has to wait for X amount of CPU cycles and seen as stutters, drop in FPS etc and why the use four cores should have a major advantage of say two?

[FS~Phat]

Originally Posted by SEE

Great post FS_Phat, thanks for keeping and posting those comments and reminding us all of the technical challenges this sim imposed!

One more question, what is the relationship between the GFX card and the CPU with regards 'bottlenecking'? Is this simply a GFX card whose performance outclasses the CPU and thus has to wait for X amount of CPU cycles and seen as stutters, drop in FPS etc and why the use four cores should have a major advantage of say two?

Forgive me if im a little out on this as your testing the limits of my knowledge here.. but i believe the CPU determines how fast polygons and triangles co-ordinates are calculated and the GPU renders the scene when all co-ordinates are complete for each frame. So for complex scenes with many polygons and triangles the CPU is very important.

I believe that currently the 3d rendering engine in the game is not running on separate cores yet so occasionally it hitches/stutters while it waits for the cpu core to complete some other instructions before it gets back to computing the polygon co-ordinates for the next frame.

When they move rendering to a dedicated core (or even split it over 2 cores) I believe most of the stutter issues will be gone. A lot of work has already gone into streamlining the rendering pipeline since the first release which is why stutters are all but eliminated in the current version. IT WILL only get better over time. Maybe they wont get it 100% first go with the next big change but they will keep working on it as its a very complex issue to spread the load across multiple cores and still keep the game fluid and everything in the game world in sync with each frame. 1 or 2 cores just isnt enough CPU power for everything that has to be calculated in this game, and more than 2 cores is harder to get everything running smoothly and in sync. Add SLI or Crossfire to the equation and its even harder again!

PS. This is why 4way SLI on my rig runs smooth as silk in split frame rendering mode because the scene is split into 4 smaller windows with less polygons per GPU to handle and no stutter in the rendering pipleline waiting for each frame to be rendered as all 4 GPUs render to the same frame at the same time. This also splits the load a little more over the CPU cores because Nvidia drivers are multi-threaded.
SLI Split frame rendering is smoother than a single card and way way way smoother than SLI alternate frame rendering, especially when 4GPUs are involved.

Forgive me for any inaccuracies, im just a sales guy working in IT with enough knowledge to be dangerous!

[Ataros]

Originally Posted by SEE

One more question, what is the relationship between the GFX card and the CPU with regards 'bottlenecking'? Is this simply a GFX card whose performance outclasses the CPU and thus has to wait for X amount of CPU cycles and seen as stutters, drop in FPS etc and why the use four cores should have a major advantage of say two?

CPU has to provide enough data for GPU to work with. It can be a problem if CPU has to calculate AI of many aircraft or ground vehicles.

I had stutters both online and offline with stock speed of my CPU (2.8 Ghz) and happy to run it on 3.8Ghz online or offline with about 30-40 AI around. I guess if you can take a dual-core to 4.5Ghz+ it may be sufficient not to bottleneck gtx560 but sometimes a 3rd core may be needed to avoid stutter or fps drop. I think no one did much testing on this. You can check out results of some benchmarks of many various systems here http://translate.google.com/translat...hp%3Ft%3D68723
Easy to understand and make conclusions.

[NervousEnergy]

I haven't seen any comment in the thread about texture size. IIRC, the game defaults to 'original' texture size, which are enormous uncompressed images. Reducing these to 'medium' will have a profound impact on the amount of VRAM used to run the game.

It's a minor thing, but the devs should have the game default to medium textures instead of original, if they haven't already. A lot of folks may never touch this setting, and with a 1 GB card they'd have to set the resolution really low to avoid thrashing.

[vanelle]

Well this game does not run very good at a ATI 4890 1GB.
Medium/low with stutters @ -30 fps. (above land, sea is a lillte bit better.)

Although my card is bottlenecking my system, good to know CLOD does need more vRAM.

(Appearantly my fist post)

[Chivas]

I assume the graphics rewrite the development is currently undertaking will address some of these problems. To what degree is anyones guess.

[ATAG_MajorBorris]

The sim uses over 2.4 gb of vram when I play online at times @ 1080p with all settings high except ssao (fps drop near ground). That being said a 3gb card might not work all that well unless the rest of the system is up to the task.

[furbs]

Just as Chvias said the sim needs optimizing...if you put 1 plane on one of the small online maps with nothing else and try to take off and look at the dust your wheel kicks up it drops the FPS to single figures.

[Ataros]

Originally Posted by furbs

Just as Chvias said the sim needs optimizing...if you put 1 plane on one of the small online maps with nothing else and try to take off and look at the dust your wheel kicks up it drops the FPS to single figures.

Did it for you http://forum.1cpublishing.eu/showpos...&postcount=116

If we keep our feedback in one place it will be easier for us to track fixes or failures and keep the devs accounted for them. All feedback in any other threads can be just lost without any use unfortunately.

[Buchon]

Originally Posted by MajorBoris

The sim uses over 2.4 gb of vram when I play online at times @ 1080p with all settings high except ssao (fps drop near ground). That being said a 3gb card might not work all that well unless the rest of the system is up to the task.

So it peaks at 2.4 gb ... I guess the last ATI 7980 3 gb hit the spot.

I have an eye on it but is too expensive, hope it have a drop soon.