@JALxml still on the 2070 Super. I probably wouldn’t get a 3090 simply because as the tippy top of the hypothetical availability tree, you’re paying 50% more to get 5% more performance. And at this point, I’d probably not even get a 3080 (especially considering some of the “free” performance increases I’ve seen in the past few weeks that I can only attribute to changes in OXR), because we are (again, in theory) so close to next gen stuff that I’m inclined to wait for that. (For example, a 3080 Super or ti that at this point are only rumors or even figments of my own imagination.)
Now, having said all that, if 30 minutes from now an opportunity presented itself to buy a 3080 at MSRP with the caveat of “buy it right now or it’s gone”, I probably would, especially since I can probably sell my 2070 Super for more than I paid for it. But I’m not holding my breath about that.
So, now that I’ve answered your one sentence question with half of a book, is there anything else? (Asked sincerely, with no smartassery whatsoever intended…)
Probably no way because of cooling requirements but if there was a hint that the next generation would be downsized to RTX 20’s dimensions, I’d wait for sure, too, as I’m not 100% sure a 3090 could fit into my available space to replace the 2070S. Lack of space may be a good excuse to have a fling at building my own computer and hope the budget-conscious wife is not too perturbed by a month-by-month purchase of parts rather than announcing one day that I’ve just spent $3K+ on a new computer because my 2-year-old one doesn’t have enough space!
@JALxml, not to spill water on your fire of exuberance, but you know it doesn’t take $3,000 just to buy a case that can hold a card the size of a 3090? Though I would give you the same advice I’ve given myself about whether or not a 3090 is a good idea.
I’m actually using inheritance money to buy my computer parts with, it’s the ONE thing I’ve given myself license to do, the rest is going into retirement funds, even if they are (for the time being anyway) merely in non-interest bearing cash accounts. But there’s more than enough to buy a 3090 (even at scalper prices) in there if I chose to, I just fail to see the value in doing so. Especially taking into consideration the fact that all of a sudden I’m getting more performance out of my 2070 Super (which wasn’t exactly a slouch to begin with) that I can’t explain where it’s coming from. And considering that Nvidia hasn’t put out any specific VR FS2020 drivers, and Asobo themselves has a lot of room for optimizations, there may be a LOT of pure (and free) software performance increases to come in the not too distant future.
Along with a better GPU, I’d go for better RAM, better processor, better board that can do Gen 4 PCIe, better cooling, MONSTER PSU (is 850 W really enough?!), better motherboard that could potentially take dual GPU’s, more useful x 4 PCIe slots, etc, i.e., a WHOLE new computer from the ground up. As it is, Dell gave me 32 Gb 2666 MHz RAM (4 x 8 Gb) that would have to be discarded to expand to 64 Gb on my motherboard, etc. So I really would start over from ground zero and a new computer and everything around it could be totally set up for gaming, relegating the old computer to daily use, machine learning, etc.
You make a good point relative to trying to build a “future-proof” computer, say, starting in late 2021 to early 2022. My current computer is ~2018 vintage technology so perhaps not enough time has passed to be worth a $3K+ investment in hopes it’ll be so much MORE BETTER that I’ll be happy(ier) for another couple more years. There’s a Goldilocks optimum somewhere in there on how long to go between upgrades. I should try the latest OXR before planning to spend money - still making plans to survive the next Texas Deep Freeze and not fooling around much with MSFS in the meantime (bought a 25000 mAh Li-ion battery pack and unfolding solar panels that can provide 2x 5V/2A output to charge battery pack, phones, tablets, etc., or 1 18V output as natural gas and gasoline were in short supply - no electricity = no gas pumping & natural gas supply went out in parts of Texas).
One of the more humorous things of our power outage was our Texas electrical utility advised to go to their website to find out the current outage status of one’s residential area! I guess that was assuming you had a cellular data plan, you could reach overloaded cellular towers (since everyone’s cable was out!-and social media was probably going crazy…), and your phone battery (and supporting car battery?!) still had a charge …
As a user with a RTX 2080 Ti with 11G of Vram the only upgrade path for me is a RTX 3090.
As a VR Twitch Steamer on MSFS and X-Plane while trying to use my G2 on SteamVR because of the better tools. I need all the performance I can find and if I could find a RTX 3090 I would gladly buy one but not at scalper prices.
@Ianrivsmith, @CptLucky8, well it turns out the 2070 Super isn’t quite up to the task of the Flytampa version of KLAS during daylight hours. I had to dial the TAA back down to 80 and even that was just a bit marginal, but it’s a very complex airport, and the extra taxi lights aren’t helping. I don’t know if the strip worked with me or not, as I never had it in view and I just simply have no clue if it was still rendering it even though I couldn’t see it.
But I was able to go back up to 90 not long after takeoff, and back to 100 before landing in Reno, so it seems the scenery is going to play a huge factor in your performance moving forward. Ian, clearly you’ve got me beat in the GPU column, not sure how our CPUs would compare (I’ve got a 10600K OCed to 4.8GHz all-core), so at the very least the GPU is going to give you more headroom.
Generally speaking, I can avoid the monster airports like KLAS when flying the CJ4 (just as I would in the real world), so that may help some, but I am starting to learn how to fly the FBW A32NX, so when I start doing that more, the airliner airports are going to come back into play for me. However, though I very much want to learn how to use that b1rd, there’s no rule that says I have to fly it a lot once I do, because I’m having a blast with the CJ4, still want to learn the Longitude, we’ve got that ASA b1rd incoming, and I still love my GA stuff, too.
Sigh. Too many b1rds to fly, not enough hours in the day, and that’s just for me, Mr. stuck in the bed almost all the time cripple. It’s gotta be much worse for you regular people who have things like jobs and stuff. First world problems!
So I guess I’ll just have to keep monitoring the situation regarding GPU availability and pricing, as well as whether or not Intel’s 11th Gen is going to give a noticeable horsepower boost, combined with just how much airliner flying I want to do, and go from there. In the meantime, hopefully there is still some free performance to be had with new Nvidia drivers, MSFS optimizations, and whatever it is the MS is doing with OXR, and even more trivial things like fixing the taxi light problems.
That’s more than enough blah, blah, blah from me on this particular topic, if you have comments or questions, fire away! I’ll be here all week. (And probably a lot longer than that.)
@JALxml, that’s how it started for me, too. I bought the 2070S in an attempt to get a few more years out of my old system, but once it became clear that my 4790 wasn’t going to keep up, I really had no choice but to just toss out the old, and bring in the new. Well, except my 750W power supply survived the transition, as did my older monitor and a couple of SSDs, but that’s it!
As for whether or not you can “get by” with an 850W PSU, it’s too soon to tell.
It all begins and ends with your GPU. What do you have now? Is it good enough for another 6 months? Year? Two? Or do you need a new one now? Then comes the tricky part. What are you going to get, and how are you going to get it? Please do not feed a scalper, whatever you do. Personally, I would say no less than a 3070, and probably at least a 3080, but finding them is the problem. You could go AMD, of course, but I’m not all that bullish on AMD for GPUs. CPU, sure, if you think it’s a good fit, but I just don’t think their GPUs are where it’s at.
Once you’ve got that, the rest kind of fills itself in, based on your budget and other requirements. No spinners (HDDs), all solid state (with one exception), and preferably NVMe for at LEAST your boot drive, and go with at least a 1TB (or 2TB) model to give you room for data, FS2020, and maybe a few other favorite games. Then a 2nd SSD, SATA or NVMe, for storing tier 2 games, and data (other than vids/movies) if you have more than can fit on your 1TB Boot drive (like say a butt ton of photos), and if necessary, a 3rd. I have an entire 1TB SATA SSD that I’ve set aside for FS2020 (except the base game files that live on my NVMe), for cache, add-ons like LNM (though I haven’t figured out how to use that one), Navigraph, pilot2ATC, and whatever else you might use. May be overkill, frankly, but I actually had an extra SSD that I decided to use for this, and it gives me room on my 2nd to store even more games, but even with a full 100GB cache, and all my companion apps, it’s still about 80% empty. (1TB). But they are cheap, so why not, eh?
Then comes the one exception to the no spinner rule… And that’s an external drive (or even better, a NAS, but they’re spendy as hell) for backups (preferably daily and differential), and storing video and movie files on. If you opt for the actual external drive instead of a NAS, then try to keep it in your car or somewhere NOT where your computer is to protect your data if your house burns down. You can also use cloud storage, in fact I recomment it. I use OneDrive because 1TB comes with an Office subscription, it’s extremely easy to use, and it will store your rarely used stuff on their servers ONLY freeing up space on your system. All your data also shows up immediately upon signing in on a new system, or even after just reinstalling winders. At that point it’s ALL in the cloud, but if/when you need stuff locally, it’s just a few seconds for it to automatically download. You just have to insure all your important stuff is in a protected directory, as an example, I keep my FS addons (which I use Addon Manager to manage) in a directory under “My Documents” so they live in OneDrive, too.
I haven’t quite figured out the ramifications of what it means to have so much in OneDrive but NOT locally on my backups (like, what is my NAS actually backing up? Pointers?), but I suspect MS’s data retention is much more robust than mine could EVER be.
I’d recommend having wifi-6 and bluetooth built into your MB, along with good cooling and a feature rich chipset (I went with an Asus Z490-E), but no reason to go overboard here.
Be careful with cooling, I went with nothing but air cooling (with a Noctua radiator for my CPU), water cooling can be quieter, but if you go that way, be very careful what you get. There’s nothing wrong with aesthetics, but many AIOs are built for looks first, and their actual job (keeping your CPU cool) comes in second place, so if you go that way (and I probably will next time I get a new CPU), just pick wisely.
I see no reason for custom loop water cooling, as again, it’s more about looks than function, but smartly designed it will do the job and it DOES look good, so that’s up to you.
I’d go with at least dual monitors, I would have said three, but VR puts the usefulness of that into question.
Anyway, I’ve yammered on far too long about that, but if you do have questions, just HMU.
As for the battery power wall, if you go that route I want to hear about your experience. Where I live is PERFECT for solar, but the last time I priced it out, it was going to take like 41 years to pay for itself, and that assumes the panels, etc., would even last that long, which they won’t. Hopefully that has changed. We live in hurricane central (aka Florida, though ironically, since we moved here from NY in roughly 2010, NY has been hit more than Florida has), so it makes sense for us, and yes, if we ever have an extended power outage, we’d just charge phones and stuff in our cars, even if that means running them a bit to keep their own batteries charged. We’ve been lucky in that regard though, our neighbors across the street were without power for a full week after one of our tropical storms, but we only went down for a few seconds. Of course, if we went solar with the power wall, that is no longer a worry, and I’ve even thought about thinking about a natural gas generator for the same purposes, but those guys are about $6k, which is a lot to spend for something that only might be used for a few days once or twice a decade. Solar is different IF it replaces (or almost replaces) our dependence on the grid in the first place.
I bet you didn’t think you were in for all of this when you started your post to me, did ya?
@KevyKevTPA As someone who has a very similar system you and OP (9600k@5GHz, 2070Super, 457.30, 32GB ram, NVME) - I just want to confirm that you’re saying you’re getting a better FS experience (not FPS, but experience - Trying to not get caught up with FPS alone here) using the following:
OXR Preview OFF
OXR Custom Render OFF
OXR Motion DISABLED
TAA 100 (But you bumped it down a little a certain airports)
And pretty much High/Ultra for the remaining FS graphics options.
If so that seems a stark contrast to the bulk of this post. Having tried what feels like every possible combination i only get a smooth enough experience (read 30-40 fps) with OXR 50 TAA 100 and everything in the sim low or medium LOD & TOD 100. (TAA 100 because i like to see my EFIS)
With that said I will try the unchecking of OXR custom scale tonight and see what fresh FPS hell awaits me.
Consider me currently skeptical but hopeful! As always, Thanks to @CptLucky8 for giving us all this base of knowledge to learn from!
+1 for EFIS it requires TAA 100 for best legibility in most cases, but TAA70 + OXR 100 on a G2 is not bad either thanks to the 3K x 3K final image.
Otherwise with OXR Auto scaling is based on VRAM only (I’m 100% certain of this because I was told by a WMR dev!). With a 2070S it is about OXR 64%, it looks like from other report on a 3090 it is 100%.
I have a hard time with the G2 lately and even more so since WU3. I’ve diff 1.13.16 and 1.13.17 files and the only significant change is the Shader code (it has been updated). I didn’t launch today’s update with a G2 yet and I might not for some time, until they release SU4, but I hope their shader code changes are helping a little in the meantime.
Thanks for the helpful advice on getting started on a custom-built PC. I do have 2 Tb of OneDrive space and many Tb’s of USB backup drives for 5 computers of varying age (keeping a drive in a car sounds a little summer time too hot/winter time too cold and much more risk-prone than betting one’s house won’t burn down, though) . I’ll enjoy building a PC just for the learning experience, I think.
On solar backups, the setup that I alluded to is very modest. 25,000 mAh would only charge a smartphone 6 to 8 times. My car battery is getting pretty old and it was pretty cold at 9 deg F to go outside to put the phone in a very cold car (charging at less than ~45 to 55 deg F-opinions vary-is not supposed to be good for Li-ion batteries). Same at opposite extreme of very high temps. Amazon has lots of choices on modest battery packs and solar panels. Avoids having to run car engine or drive for tens of minutes just to keep phone warm (or cool) and charge phone. Can handle wife’s cell phone at same time, too.
Well I’ll be dammned it does work well. I hopped straight into the experimental build of the a320nx in cairo flying to larnaka and immediately noticed how clear and smooth it was. Loving it so far. Very surprised.
Didn’t work for me (2080TI, Ryzen 3900X). I’ve spent 3 days trying every combination and permutation suggested by OP and others in the forums, and so far there’s no configuration that is playable for me without motion projection turned on (and I have to set it to “Always on” - automatic doesn’t work).
It’s disheartening, especially when I can load any VR optimized game, like Half-life Alyx, and it runs perfectly in full native resolution at 90hz with all settings high.
It is unfortunately much more difficult with WU3 to get decent performance because FS2020 is most likely affected by a bug which is causing massing CPU/GPU stalls (or what looks like this). It affects therefore my recommendations too, but you might get some success in keeping these settings as a baseline but reducing Terrain LOD to 50% instead.
@Jonny5Alive6618, what you said is pretty much accurate, but I do want to emphasize that it’s the experience, not the frame count that I’m talking about. It’s also important to keep in mind that I’m talking about the VR experience, not on a 2D display. I haven’t flown MSFS on a 2D display since I got my G2’s on 12/22, though I will say at first it was a struggle.
Nobody documented even the basic steps you have to take just to get to the point that you’re sitting in a virtual cockpit and observing your plane, and the outside world, so even that seemingly easy step took me awhile to figure out. And once I got that figured out, I struggled with both performance, and “blurry vision” to the point that it looked like I was a guy who needs glasses, but who forgot them at home.
But between Cpt’n Lucky’s recommendations, my own experimenting, settling on the recommended driver and 3D Nvidia settings, things improved quite a bit from where I started.
And that latest OXR release made a HUGE difference, even though I couldn’t tell you what it did. Just 20 minutes ago I was flying around Dubai in an Extra 300, and except when I was really deep into some heavy scenery, I had very smooth performance. And even that was very playable, but it was noticeable (to my eyes, not my fps counter) that the scenery was bogging me down. For that matter, I don’t even use an fps counter any more, but my best guess is that I’m getting high 20s to mid 30s when it’s “smooth”, and probably 25 or less when it starts getting noticeably choppy.
And last night, I flew the A32NX into KDEN at 100TAA and it was very smooth. KDEN is one of those very detailed airports that still quite smooth, perhaps because except for the airport itself, it’s out in the middle of nowhere, and there’s nothing around that needs to be graphically processed except hills, trees, and grass.
Charles de Gaulle in Paris, on the other hand, tends to bring my system to it’s knees. In fact, at least so far, it’s the worst place I’ve found on the entire planet in terms of the performance I’m seeing out of my gear. Going into KLAX in the WT CJ4 was decent, but not great, whereas flying around Manhattan in an Extra or similar, is not bad at all.
Everything is very, very scenery dependent.
I do have 64GB of RAM compared to your 32GB, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that is a problem for you, as it seems like the more RAM you have to feed this beast, the happier it becomes. I also have a pretty healthy overclock on both my CPU and GPU.
While I’d LOVE to not have to worry about dense scenery causing me issues, when it’s not, everything looks great so I guess I’ll just deal with it. Right now I’m more in a mode of waiting for some additional software help (primarily from MS/Asobo and Nvidia in the way of targeted drivers, and maybe another good OXR upgrade), than I am looking for a HW upgrade for my rig itself. I’m not even sure where I’d get more bang for the buck right now, be it CPU or GPU. Of course, unless I’m willing to pay scalper prices (which I’m NOT!!!), I can’t get a CPU or GPU upgrade right now anyway.
And that’s my story. Bottom line is yes, especially since the OXR upgrade, I’m quite pleased (and to some extent, surprised) at just how good my overall experience is. But I’m ■■■■ sure not gonna complain. I’m spending more time flying and less time tweaking than I was even just a few weeks ago, which is largely responsible for me taking this long to get back to you.
I agree 100% with all of that. I have not looked at my fps since trying your settings and I’m actually flying again instead of in an out of menus and loading screens. I too love Denver but because it takes so much longer to get off the ground. It really adds a feeling of weight to the plane.
I’m in the evga step up queue for a 3080 but that’s not happening anytime soon. I set Windows to create a 32gb page file vs the system managed size, as I read it might help. Hasn’t hurt.
@TScottJ don’t give up. I cannot get the game to run consistently with any form of motion projection on unless I set my g2 to 60hz and lock frame rate to 20. It was the smoothest I’ve ever played, but the flicker is harsh.
