Bottleneck Analyzer

[grant977]

Does anyone know of a program that will run a test of your PC and give you a run down of where you worst bottleneck might be?

[BitMaster]

Not really in the sense you describe.

 

You can run various benchmarks and come to some assumptions, but they will still be assumptions as every program that like DCS stresses your PC to a great extend all have different needs. Some torture all your cores, some stress your GPU to the max and some others have their needs more towards faster and more RAM, they all differ and it is hard to draw a conclusion that will tell you how it will perform in DCS.

 

The best way to do this is use THE app you need to run, in your case DCS.

You can start with MSI Afterburner OSD, configured to show at least GPU usage, VRAM usage, RAM usage, Pagefile, CPU uses total ( divided by the core count + HT ( a 4core + HT CPU has 100/8 = 12.5% max power per core/thread)).

 

In general, your GPU, if not FPS locked, should always run full tilt near 100% usage, this is normal and what you paid for. If your GPU never or hardly ever reaches near 100% then your CPU is too weak to saturate the GPU. Thhat is easy to find out. If that is the case, you need faster cores, not more cores.

If your GPU is usally 98-100% your CPU is good enough to feed your GPU.

 

RAM is another thing, some are happy with 8GB and SP mode with easy/light missions. The heavier the mission gets ( more objects, triggers, etc.. ) the more RAM you need. 16GB should be the minimum you strive for, 32GB is a safe bet and will eliminate RAM bottlenecks.

If you run into RAM shortage your OS will start to swap memory contend to a pagefile that resides on your disk(s). The less RAM you have you more likely you will need to swap, the more you swap the more likely you have bad stutter and all sorts of anomalies, depending on how fast you can swap. a 16GB DDR4 4000MHz system swapping to a PCIev4 NVMe at 5GB/sec will produce a less severe stutter than swapping from an 8GB DDR3 1333MHz to an aging 5400rpm HDD, there are wolds in between those two swap scenarios. Still, best is to avoid heavy swapping. Only more RAM cures this.

 

Apropos HDD. You should not run DCS from a HDD. A SSD is mandatory to have a chance for trouble free DCS. Best, if your Swapfile also resides on a SSD. You dont need NVMe SSD, any Sata3 is sufficient. If you still use a HDD, it's time to change to SSDs and use the ol' HDD for movies, pics, music and/or Backups only. Your OS and any game/app you use should be SSD driven.

 

Those are the usual bottlenecks. GPU-CPU-RAM-Drives, somewhere in that square is your Problem. MSI Afterburner can tell you GPU RAM and CPU easily, for HDD you need no test, get a SSD without any further thinking ;)

 

Hope that is a start to pinpoint your weak spot