New PC setup for MSFS 2024 - Graphics card decission

User Support Hub Hardware & Peripherals
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42

Could I ask what cooler you use on the 7900XTX please?

43

Whatever it came with.

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45

Thank you all for the feedback, I really appreciate it. I’ve now ordered all the parts except for the graphics card. Are there already benchmarks with the new MSFS 2024? I could afford a 7900XT, would that make sense? Or maybe a 4070 TI Super, but that one only has 16GB of VRAM instead of 20GB.

46

I think those GPU’s are comparable, and both are well suited to this sim.

The questions are:

  1. Can the AMD drivers be trusted to have the same stability that nVidia drivers have shown? History is not in their favor, but it appears they’ve greatly improved things recently.

  2. Do you need 20GB VRAM? Some might say more is always better. On the other hand, only VR users seems to be pushing VRAM to the limit. With your budget I think VR may be off the table - for now. Driving a 4K and a 2K monitor, and running the sim at Ultra/High settings, I’ve never seen over 12GB VRAM usage. But that’s just me (I don’t fly complex, high-polygon airliners.)

  3. Do you think the sim will eventually support AMD’s frame gen natively, the way they support nVidia’s? Does that matter to you? My 3090 Ti does not do frame gen, and I don’t think I would use it if it did. I’m happy with the FPS I get from my system, and from what I’ve read, frame gen introduces some visual fidelity issues I’d rather avoid.

In short, if I was looking to buy a new GPU today, I’d buy whichever one of those I could find for the best Black Friday price, and be happy going forward. If they were the same price I’d pick the 4070 Ti Super, mostly because I’ve had a very good experience with my nVidia card.

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47

Thank you @BegottenPoet228

I have a 4K monitor, so I likely need a significant amount of VRAM. Currently, the 7900 XT is about 15-20% cheaper than a 4070 Ti Super. The only thing holding me back is the missing FSR 3 implementation in MSFS 2024. I was under the impression that it would be available at launch.

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48

I think that’s a real oversight on Microsobo’s part.

49

I couldn’t care less about FSR, so that’s a non-issue to me. In 2020, I was still better off using a lower render resolution option (not render scale) vs FSR2. FSR would blur text even on the quality setting, but setting full screen resolution in the sim to 3200x1800 has no noticable blurring while keeping me at a nearly locked 60fps. Maybe my monitor is really good at scaling noon-native resolution, but I suggests others give that a try and compare your results.

50

@blackwizard154

No benchmarks from me. But using 2024 I have learnt:

  • A very fast NVMe drive is needed for the streaming cache.
  • The cache is the bottleneck loading an airport/scenery
  • Fast cpu to crunch the scenery and send it to GPU. The huge L3 cache on the X3D cpus may still help with fps.
  • The sim does DX12 magic. So ideally we want a gpu driver thats good with DX12.
  • Loading of new airport can peak at 300 Mbps for 1 or 2 seconds on my 380 Mbps broadband.
  • The flight only displays Start Flying when the final network packet is downloaded, and crunched by the CPU.
  • A rolling cache writes new data over the oldest data when full; the old data is lost. (Circular buffer - Wikipedia)
  • Considering all the above we want the cache as big as possible and as permanent as possible (on a PC)
  • For users with ample very fast storage, a permanent cache or set of caches may improve performance.
  • A PCI 4 motherboard is on my shopping list - it shuffles data around at twice PCI 3 speeds and is a good price point. (PCI 5 is more expensive and I don’t know if PCI 5 GPUs exist or if it makes a difference)

I hope that helps.

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51

With 64 GB of memory, I’m using a 32 GB RamDrive (Imdisk)
for Rolling Cache.

52

Interesting. What happens to the file when Windows shuts down?

53

Windows 11 stopped saving the contents of a RamDrive on shutdown/startup.

3 old fashioned .bat files on Desktop to copy the
RamDrive (R:) RollingCache.ccc to K:\FS2024 folder to save it.

  1. mySleep.bat
    copy R:\MyRollingCache\RollingCache.ccc D:\FS2020
    powercfg -h off
    rundll32.exe powrprof.dll, SetSuspendState Sleep

  2. myRestart.bat
    copy R:\MyRollingCache\RollingCache.ccc D:\FS2020
    shutdown /r /t 3

  3. myShutdown.bat
    copy R:\MyRollingCache\RollingCache.ccc D:\FS2020
    shutdown /s /t 1

1 old fashioned .bat enabled on Windows11 Startup to copy the saved RollingCache.ccc to the RamDrive.

Startup.bat
mkdir R:\MyRollingCache
Copy K:\FS2024\RollingCache.ccc R:\MyRollingCache\ /Y

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54

I want to love AMD GPUs but Nvidia always find ways to make their products work above and beyond their spec, their software and support is outstanding. AMD seems to come down to requiring a game developer to utilize the hardware. The specs are usually quite impressive on paper.

55

Have you tried the Arsenal Virtual Ramdrive?

56

No, do you use it?

I looked at it but, idk.

57

Nope, but was considering it. Looks like it’s a newer, more robust version of Imdisk that was created by the same developer.

58

My .bat files are working great.

I looked at it but didn’t see how easy/confusing it would be
to set it up, etc.

So, I’m not going to try it.

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