CPU vs GPU Settings

[RebelRabbitt]

Hi All,

I don’t suppose anyone can recommend a topic describing which settings affect CPU vs GPU? I’m looking to ease a main thread bottleneck without degrading visuals unnecessarily and wondered which settings to tweak.

Thanks!

[MikePapa4008]

Most settings will have some CPU and some GPU impact, the point is to create a good balance. You can do this by checking the FPS monitor in devmode, and whether you are severely limited by GPU or CPU (main thread). The goal is to tweak settings until you have a good balance between the two.

Check the video in this thread. Very helpful to create a balance, and includes the Nvidia CPL settings you should look at.

Amazing NVIDIA settings, amazing performance. Really worth a try

Hi everyone…! What worked for me can also works for you: so I decided to share with you these settings. I’ll be fast and clear: These are not the common settings already seen hundreds of time. I found this video; I don’t know who did this and I don’t even know what half of these things are. I tried theese settings and they made the magic. 2070s, i5 9600k, 32 GB Ram, 4k @ 80% scaling, high-end settings plus ultra on pre-cache. I’m not a fan of numbers because they don’t tell all the story, I…

[RebelRabbitt]

Thanks for the reply, but you’ve kind of just repeated what I was asking. I’m aware of the need to strike a balance, but I’m sure some settings are more CPU or GPU dependant and was looking to find out which are which, so I can weight my changes accordingly without going in totally bind. For example I’m reasonably certain that glass cockpit refresh will be more CPU intensive than GPU as it needs to query the sim for updated values for the refresh which is not a GPU task.

[MikePapa4008]

I tried to explain that most settings will impact both. The reason is for example, if you raise the LOD, you need more computation to calculate it, and more GPU to display them. The lens bloom or the more detailed clouds need to be calculated, rendered and displayed too. That’s with most settings, excluding some very obvious ones. The link I shared has advice for sorting out both shortages.

There was a good thread testing each and every setting, but hasn’t been refreshed since SU5 and the sim is changing very fast, so of little use.

[HOW-TO] Graphics Settings and Performance Guide (SU12 Update) (7/26/2023)

Here is a detailed analysis of each graphics setting’s visual and performance impact. This guide is supposed to help you make decisions on visual impact versus CPU / GPU impact in the simulator. Note that situational and hardware differences results can result different performance responses to individual settings, System Specifications: i9 9900k, @ 4.9 GHZ OC Hyperthreading Enabled 32GB of 3600MHZ 18-20-20-36 DDR4 RAM RTX 3080 at 1980 / 10251 MHZ @ 1011v Windows 11 22H2 build 22621.1992 …

Hope you find what you’re looking for.

[TheOriginalBabu]

no worries thread should still be roughly accurate

[RebelRabbitt]

For anyone looking at this thread, based on the information kindly provided by TheOriginalBabu, only Terrain LOD, Object LOD, Buildings and Contact Shadows have any noticeable affect on CPU performance. Of course as rightly pointed out by MikePapa4008, these settings also have a knock on effect for the GPU heavy settings, but they go a long way to easing CPU bottlenecks as lowing some of these has solved my original problem. If in doubt, lower these settings first to get a smooth sim, and adjust the remainder from there to get the look you’re happy with.

[Kjaye767]

AI traffic impacts CPU a lot too, and weather.

[PHSepp796]

Also if you pan and zoom around will impact, and iwould say if you find your best zoom setting (for me it is around 76%) than set freelook speed low like 10 to 15 which give a smooth pan transition.
I find If set to higher numbers and move/pan fast the imput on render gets heavy to.