My experience with RTX 2080 on DCS

So first of all, please apologize my english is not my native language.

Anyway I have an RTX 2080 since a couple of months and I want to share my experience.

With RTX 2080 and an I7 7700k runing at 4.7 with DDR4 16G 2800 and playing at 1080p I need to put shadows at plain and put a bit low the visual distance to compensate the use of VRAM.

So in my experience if you want to upgrade from a 1080 go for a TI card like a 2080ti or even the 1080ti. The RTX 2080 does not have all the VRAM that the game needs to run it well.

It's just a shame nVidia didn't up the VRAM on the 20s, but skyrocketed their price tags at the same time...

Yeah I'm routinely maxing the VRAM on the 2080ti.

Looks like DCS is using almost all the VRAM it can. My 2080Ti is running at 93% VRAM with 11Gb available.

How do you think the Radeon VII with 16GB VRAM would perform? At $697, it seems like a good value.

^Interesting question. My Vega isn't bad in DCS, it seems to slot in between 1070 and 1080 for DCS. Nothing to scream about, but maybe the VRAM might make a difference, enough to put it on par with a 2080 at least.

That said, if I'm gonna upgrade on the cheap, which I might, I have my eye on used 1080ti

I think DCS will pretty much use all the VRAM as you have available . If you have 6 gig , it will use 6 gig . If you have 8 , it will use 8 . I'm reasonably confident that if you had 24 , it would use all that as well . I seem to recall an R7 post using 15 .

How much VRAM it needs is another matter . At 1080p , my previous 1060 3gb performed quite well . And currently , i too am running low and flat shadows and low visibility . With a 1070 . In VR .

Having said that , depending on how the terrain engine optimisation falls regarding unloading the CPU or GPU , i too am eyeing the 1080ti :)

most games don’t do anything special with extra vram, they just don’t compress the textures as much if there is extra room.

it looks like dcs does the same.

So you save some compute time by not compressing them.

My experience with RTX 2080 on DCS

you do, but the perf benefit is very small. negligible.

that’s why they never require or recommend large amounts of it.

A 1080Ti is a solid performer with the 2080Ti bringing a bit more performance comparatively not so much you'll get blown away by the additional performance but it does improve DCS with Rift VR.

Still waiting to hear back from those with a Radeon 7 cards initial reports indicate it works well but it's not a 1080Ti/2080Ti more somewhere around the 2080 ish mark.

However looking on the web the Radeon 7 is still a reasonable performer, maybe improved drivers can squeeze a bit more performance from it.

As we all know DCS is it's own unique beast when it comes to game engine performance so teamed with fast CPU and system RAM the Radeon 7 with it's 16GB of HBM2 1TB/s VRAM might be useful.

BTW if someone has a Radeon 7 just laying around I'm happy to compare between 1080Ti/2080Ti and Radeon 7 for Rift VR. :thumbup:

So first of all, please apologize my english is not my native language.

 

Anyway I have an RTX 2080 since a couple of months and I want to share my experience.

 

With RTX 2080 and an I7 7700k runing at 4.7 with DDR4 16G 2800 and playing at 1080p I need to put shadows at plain and put a bit low the visual distance to compensate the use of VRAM.

 

So in my experience if you want to upgrade from a 1080 go for a TI card like a 2080ti or even the 1080ti. The RTX 2080 does not have all the VRAM that the game needs to run it well.

Thanks for sharing. We need more info like this.

Although I do not think I share your analysis. As others have said, its not likely the VRAM that makes the difference.

I have talked extensively with the developer of a (very) different flight sim, but what it has in common with DCS is that its pretty light on using shaders, but uses extremely large sceneries that are basically just big high res textures on a relatively simple mesh and transparent bitmaps for clouds. He says texture (aka texel) fill rate is the biggest GPU bottleneck, at least for his sim.

So I looked up some numbers for texel fill rate, and what do you know:

1080:    277.3 GTexel/s
1080 Ti  354.4 GTexel/s
2080:    314.6 GTexel/s
2080 Ti  420.2 GTexel/s

People attribute the performance boost of the Ti versions to the extra vram, I think its more likely the extra ROPs and TMUs and resulting massively increased texel fill rate. The above also shows why a 2080 may not be much of an upgrade over a 1080 Ti, it may even be a downgrade.

For the record:

Vega64      393.2 GTexel/s
Radeon VII  420.0 GTexel/s

People are excited for the Radeon VII, and that may be justified. But no so much because it has 16GB of VRAM, but because its a texel monster, on par with the 2080Ti. Vega64 may be the most sensible choice though, if money matters and if my presumption is correct that DCS performance is also heavily fill rate dependent.

I know right and yet still no one has sent me a Radeon VII to test,.. :P :D

Ive been doing a little performance testing with the F14, and I found that even with just a 1070 and at 1080p using the games "high" preset, im utterly CPU bound. Changing the clockspeed of my ryzen 2600X, I get almost perfectly linear FPS scaling. Changing the core and vram speed of my 1070, I get no difference at all. None (I even saw a tiny, and statistically irrelevant increase in performance at lower GPU clocks). I knew DCS was cpu hungry but didnt realize it was this bad.

Things will be different in other modules that are less demanding, and they are slightly different once you get off the ground, but the worst framerates are close to the ground, and in the F14, so that is what I focused on.

I was looking to upgrade my 1070, but this changed my mind. Its probably a waste of money. If you run a 4k monitor or particularly if you use VR, it could make sense to buy a 2080 or similar highend GPUs, but for 1080p, it seems all your money should be spent on the CPU.

Not that money can buy a lot of extra performance there, as more than 4 cores doesnt help, and we've been stuck at 4-5 GHz single threaded performance for quite some time, and likely will remain stuck there for quite some time.