Yet Another "Upgrade Advice" Post

I think I've figured out what to do, but I have a couple of minor questions I was hoping to get answers to. I've been playing DCS since December 2018, and I mostly play single player, but I'm wanting to play multiplayer in the future. Graphics quality is probably near the top of why I play games like this.

 

My wife surprised me with a gaming computer for Christmas: HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop 690-00xx. It's certainly not a great gaming computer, but it's much nicer than the toaster oven I thought I was getting.

 

Basic components out of the box are: AMD Ryzen 7 1700 @ 3.0GHz, 16MB RAM, Seagate 1TB HD, and AMD RX 550 GPU.

 

I found a cool site (http://www.userbenchmark.com) that allowed me to get a baseline of my performance and then to get performance estimates if I swap out various components. It looks like the most bang for the buck is to upgrade the GPU to a GTX 1070ti, which is a little over $500, which is about what I want to spend. Adding RAM or moving to SSD didn't seem to improve FPS. Obviously an SSD would help with boot up and loading times, but I can live with what I have.

 

So, my two basic questions: I have most of the display settings in DCS at LOW or MEDIUM, and I get 40 to 60 FPS. What should I expect by upgrading to a GTX 1070ti? Second, does it matter which vendor I go for when buying this GPU? Prices vary a little, so is there any reason why I shouldn't go for the least expensive? I see that the 2070 and 2080 have been released recently. Will this drive down prices on the 1070 in the near future?

 

Thanks!

Edited February 15, 2019 by Shakey
i'm horribly confused

You need CPU every bit as much as GPU in this game. Look at the ryzen 5 2600 and 2600x, same socket and you should notice a difference. Starting at $160 it's a great investment imo

 

Graphics settings often affect both gpu and CPU, max out your settings with a 1070 and that CPU will likely wind up being a bottleneck

 

Update your Mobo bios before you do anything

Thanks. I haven't really done any work with PC components in 20+ years, so I'm trying to learn some of the basics. For example, after writing this, I started to check to see if the 1070ti GPU will even fit in the case. The specs for the GPU also recommend a 500 watt power supply, but it looks like I have 350 watts. Any other suggestions on what I need to educate myself on to see if this will work?

https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3714338&postcount=52

 

https://forums.eagle.ru/showpost.php?p=3713321&postcount=51 Or get a Tier 3 if your short of money.

Edited February 16, 2019 by Demon_

GPU quality is all over the place, you have to read the reviews. Depends on the quality of components -- cheap cards are slower -- and the quality of vram, which doesn't (in my experience) always correlate with price. techpowerup is a good place to start

 

Prices are all over the place too, make sure you keep your eye on the price of 2070 vs 1070. newegg is a good reflection of the market I think

 

Didn't mean to slam your CPU too hard, I went from a 1st gen Ryzen 7 to a second gen Ryzen 5 and didn't notice a measurable difference. Granted I was able to squeeze 3.8ghz out of the former, and only 4.0 out of the latter, so it depends on the chip. You can definitely make the Ryzen 7 work, but in order to do so, you might have to back off on your settings (and I'm running pretty low settings)

You DO need that SSD, aside from the GPU.

In looking through a bunch of sites yesterday and today, the power supply (PSU) appears to be the limiting factor. It's a proprietary HP component with non-standard cabling. I can upgrade to another HP PSU that's 400W, but that still is below what the 1070ti and other higher-end GPUs require.

 

I may just upgrade from the RX550 to the RX580. I know it fits, and I can keep my current PSU. In looking at benchmarks, I'll get some improvement out of it for a relatively low cost.

 

Since I'm not spending $500 on a GPU now, going with the SSD makes sense. I had been running DCS on a work laptop. I originally installed it on the conventional HD, but then moved it to the SSD. I did notice a HUGE improvement in load times.

You DO need that SSD, aside from the GPU.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Preferably an M.2 NVMe

Do you have a power connector for that 580? If not, maybe a 1050ti?

 

ETA sometimes you can find PSU adapters for hp mobos

Edited February 17, 2019 by DeltaMike

Preferably an M.2 NVMe

 

 

I did a side by side SATA SSD vs NVMe about a month or so ago. There was zero difference in performance, FPS etc. *IF* you do other things with the PC, NVMe is the newer and better choice. But for DCS, it made ZERO difference.

I did a side by side SATA SSD vs NVMe about a month or so ago. There was zero difference in performance, FPS etc. *IF* you do other things with the PC, NVMe is the newer and better choice. But for DCS, it made ZERO difference.

 

Helps a little with load time, but only a few seconds as compared to a SATA SSD.

Not enough to say ohhh I need that m.2 Nvme drive.

I built a new rig a month ago and have two of them, I don't regret getting them but can't say it made any real difference for me.

 

Newer tech is always nice though.

Yet Another "Upgrade Advice" Post

 

*IF* you do other things with the PC, NVMe is the newer and better choice. But for DCS, it made ZERO difference.

 

yes, because dcs doesn’t do enough disk i/o for the advantages of NVMe to kick in.

 

it’s the same for almost all non data center workloads.

I'd say the RX 580 is a sensible choice if you keep the CPU.

 

 

 

When I had the 1070 or 2080ti installed and ran @1440p, the GPU was kinda idling most of the time, because my i5 7600k@4.6Ghz wasn't fast enough to keep the GPU working at 100%.

I did a side by side SATA SSD vs NVMe about a month or so ago. There was zero difference in performance, FPS etc. *IF* you do other things with the PC, NVMe is the newer and better choice. But for DCS, it made ZERO difference.

 

Still there would be no reason to not go with it even if it's zero difference, it's not like the new SSDs are way more expensive. As long as it's compatible with the board it's the best choice.

 

Get the RX580 it's very strong for its price. I've tested 2560x1440 resolution, mid to high settings and anti aliasing x2 on a Ryzen 1300X (4x3,7 Ghz) and rarely dipped below 35 and never below 30 in low level flight singleplayer missions. Get a SSD aswell.

I'd say the RX 580 is a sensible choice if you keep the CPU.

 

 

 

When I had the 1070 or 2080ti installed and ran @1440p, the GPU was kinda idling most of the time, because my i5 7600k@4.6Ghz wasn't fast enough to keep the GPU working at 100%.

 

hmm...strange.

 

since our cores are basically identical in 7th and 8th gen, I wonder what your settings were when you say IDLING ?

 

Idle is 0-5%, just short of doing nada.

 

When i unlock my frames and tunje my CPU down to 4.7, my GPU is still constantly hitting the upper limit..like hitting 98-99% all the time, 1440p, high/ultra settings and MSAA4x.

 

Either your "idle" is different than my idle understanding or something is wrong on your end with that rig, dunno :huh:

I did a side by side SATA SSD vs NVMe about a month or so ago. There was zero difference in performance, FPS etc. *IF* you do other things with the PC, NVMe is the newer and better choice. But for DCS, it made ZERO difference.

 

 

It's not supposed to improve FPS/"performance".

 

 

The NVMe drive has very high data transfer rates. It reduces mission loading times to more reasonable/tolerable levels, especially when running max settings at the highest preload radius.

 

 

Nobody ever said using a faster storage device would increase your framerates! It doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with that!

 

 

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It's not supposed to improve FPS/"performance".

 

 

The NVMe drive has very high data transfer rates. It reduces mission loading times to more reasonable/tolerable levels, especially when running max settings at the highest preload radius.

 

 

Nobody ever said using a faster storage device would increase your framerates! It doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with that!

 

 

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I could be wrong here but a game "loading" involves many files that might not be all that large in size, which limits the speed a drive can access the files.

 

Now if you were say, transfering a 50-100GB file from one NVME to another NVME, it would smoke the speed of transferring to or fro sata III. I've had video projects that can get this big. If I was doing it for a profession and had to back up my work alot, NVME speed could be a time saver.

 

I can't speak for DCS but looking at most games, 1 sec difference isn't that much to be excited about. Still.. I agree on the price point.. 970 Evo Plus can be had for $127USD for 500GB. Can't say I feel bad about that, even if I can get a 500GB sata III for like $70 or sometimes even less. I paid current NVME prices for each of my sata III drives years ago when they were new. They were on sale lol.

 

We can thank Western Digital for driving samsung to lower costs and increased write speeds with the new WD Black drives.

Edited February 20, 2019 by Headwarp

 

I could be wrong here but a game "loading" involves many files that might not be all that large in size, which limits the speed a drive can access the files.

...

We can thank Western Digital for driving samsung to lower costs and increased write speeds with the new WD Black drives.

 

 

You very well could be right, I bought my NVMe drive a while back when I found DCS loading times to be dreadful (250GB Samsung 960 Evo, only for DCS--I use my SATA 3 SSD for Windows, paging file, and other stuff.)

 

Loading times aren't bad now, although I do wonder if it's because of the NVMe drive or because DCS itself has been refined. Only way to find out for certain is to copy DCS to the SATA drive, and time it to see how long it takes to load. I'm too lazy to bother :)

 

The NVMe drive certainly benchmarks very well, 3200-3500 MB/sec reads, and I have it installed so that's what I use for DCS. But, under no circumstances should anyone ever get the idea that fast storage improves the "performance" of your computer by increasing framerates! :)

 

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Throw your money by the window.

I just upgraded my GTX 980 to an RTX 2080 and observed a 100% increase in frame rates, I can now run at 4K on my TV and maintain 60fps on fairly high graphics settings, the GTX 980 was giving me 20-30 fps on the same settings. Rest of the hardware is I5 4670k (Haswell OC at 4.5 Ghz) 500 Gb SSD, 32 Gb DDR3 memory. Perfmon is reporting the bottleneck still as the GPU though, surprising as my CPU is now quite old.

... I can't speak for DCS but looking at most games, 1 sec difference isn't that much to be excited about. Still.. I agree on the price point.. 970 Evo Plus can be had for $127USD for 500GB.

I'm not sure why you're pushing the price argument against a M2 drive versus a normal SSD. The prices for a Samsung 860 M2 SSD and a normal Samsung 860 SSD is the same right now (except if for you 10 bucks is really a price difference). You seem to be a bit stuck in the past considering M2 SSDs vs normal SSDs prices.

Can't say I feel bad about that, even if I can get a 500GB sata III for like $70 or sometimes even less. ...

It's not quite obvious what you mean by SATA3, both HDDs and SSDs can be SATA3, this is the name of the interface. You don't compare prices of an SATA3 HDD against a SATA3 or even M2 SSD do you?

The only argument against a M2 drive in the last months and years was the price but it has changed a lot, they cost about the same right now. Sure the difference or advantage of the M2 drive isn't that big over a normal SSD for DCS but look at it from the other side: why wouldn't he get the newer device if they cost the same?

Throw your money by the window.

Sounds quite stupid to me now doesn't it?

Edited February 21, 2019 by Der Hirte

is it "just" M2 format with Sata3 AHCI protocol or M2 format with NVMe protocol, there is a BIG difference. M2 alone says nothing but the format

is it "just" M2 format with Sata3 AHCI protocol or M2 format with NVMe protocol, there is a BIG difference. M2 alone says nothing but the format

Psht, don't make it too complicated. First let people see that SATA3 can be both HDD and SSD before you come with protocols.:book:

What is a "normal SSD"?

What is a "normal SSD"?

Those using the SATA3 interface, with the highest market share.