Hi all,
I currently have a i9 11900k with 3070ti and 32GB RAM. 850w PSU
I am furthest thing from tech savvy so I would be interested in hearing you advice around potential hardware upgrades.
I am toying with the idea of upgrading to a 4080 but not sure if that is a good move as I play 1440p and only MSFS.
Furthermore maybe a new CPU and Mobo would make more sense?
Any advice welcome
Thanks and happy weekend
I love new toys as much as anyone, but honestly, you have a rig that is probably in the 95th percentile of all gaming rigs. For 1440p gaming, I wouldn’t change anything.
Consider putting that buying urge into a killer peripheral you’ve been wanting.
Agree with @BigCow74 Unless the money is burning a hole in your pocket, save it for something else. You wont see any benefit, even at 2K.
Only throw cash at it if your going to go the VR route, which is amazing btw
As long as you are getting about 30fps it’s fine as it is.
However, adding additional screens so your peripheral vision sees the view out of the side windows, and transforms flying, particularly VFR.
Adding touchscreens under the main screen to use Air Manager takes it another level higher.
Those extra screens would probably mean CPU and GPU upgrades.
I suspect VR also needs lots of horses.
Thanks all appreciate the feedback!
I need to play around with settings more as performance can be hit and miss which of course is more than likely down to my configuration!
As mentioned previously peripheral may be a wiser move!
My processor is a little more stout than yours, but your GPU is a little better. Since my CPU barely works when the sim is running, I’m guessing yours isn’t really sweating either. If you’re looking for more frames, try tweaking some settings. Pull up my profile and you’ll see my specs and settings list. I keep several settings that don’t have a big visual impact scaled back to save resources for the settings that really pop on the screen.
Take your cash and get a 4K monitor. The one I’m using retails for less than $400US, but I was able to pull off the scrounge of the century and got it for nothing. It’s good to have friends in the right place!
Amazing!
Extremely helpful thank you!
Monitor seems like a great shout
I would agree with what other people have said here.
If you intend to stick with pancake mode and can tweak your settings to provide you with an enjoyable experience then it might be wiser to upgrade other hardware first.
Personally, I would take a slightly different route and consider upgrading (or rather investing in) decent/higher end devices e.g. some form of head tracking (if you dont have any), decent rudder pedals, then HOTAS/Yoke or whatever suits your type of flying or adds to the immersion for you.
Possibly not a bad idea to look further ahead (VR? 4k? multi-monitor?) than spending funds you have available now and form some long terms upgrades paths to follow. For example have you ever considered or had the opportunity to try VR? If this is something on your radar then I would definitely consider your upgrade path carefully. Not a great deal of sense in going 4k or multi-monitor if that is on your horizon. There are lots options open to you but it is rather dependant on your future plans and what sort of aircraft you prefer to fly that would have an influence on upgrade paths.
Thank you!
I have used VR before and it’s awesome I have an Oculus Rift which I believe if it was from the first generation!
I mainly fly airliners mid to long haul so I think 4k monitor is a actually a great call.
Would a 3070ti manage 4k well enough?
My base 3070 runs 4K at 30+ frames/sec in most conditions with my tweaked settings, so I’m pretty certain the “ti” model should be just fine.
Need to play around with settings a bit. What CPU do you have?
Here’s my full system specs and graphics settings list. Hopefully the list will give you a good starting point.
Game rig:
Thermaltake H570 TG Tower
X670 Aorus Elite AX motherboard
AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 12-Core Processor
NZXT Kraken X Cooler
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
32GB DDR5 RAM
750 Watt PS
Settings are an eclectic mix:
Render Scaling > 100
V-Sync > Off
DX Version > 11
Anti-Aliasing > TAA
Terrain LOD > 100
Off Screen Terrain Pre-caching > High
Terrain Vector Data > Ultra
Buildings > High
Trees > High
Grass/Bushes > High
Objects LOD > 100
Clouds > Ultra
Texture Resolution > Low
Anisotropic Filtering > 4x
Texture Supersampling > 4x4
Texture Synthesis > Low
Water Waves > High
Shadow Maps 2048
Terrain Shadows 128
Contact Shadows > Ultra
Windshield Effects > High (no glass screen reflections)
Ambient Occlusion > Ultra
Cubemap Reflections > 256
Raymarched Reflections > Ultra
Light Shafts > Ultra
Bloom > On
Depth of Field > Off
Motion Blur > Off
Lens Correction > Off
Lens Flare > Off
Glass Cockpit Refresh Rate > High
There’s also a video on YT that I’ve linked on this board several times that was published just days after the initial release of the sim. It gives a fantastic visual comparison for most of the settings available in the sim. The ones not covered are the ones that were added to the menu later. It’s long, so grab yourself a pen, paper, and your favorite beverage to sip while you take notes.
I second this! I’m sitting here in light snow, waiting on my engine to warm up, coffee on the seat beside me, engine vibrating thru the buttkicker, plane shaking thru the DOFReality motion platform.
Truly Mind-bending.
Buy a buttkicker!! Your rig can handle 1440, and it will come ALIVE with a buttkicker!
This is great thank you very much!
Which DOFReality platform do you use? 
I have the H6 with the new (as of a year ago) screw drives. Insanely powerful, though I wish the resolution / action was less notchy in subtle movements.
Do you get the FPS you mentioned with addons?
I have i7 1200K and rest of the specs pretty much the same as yours with 1440p monitor. With a lot of settings set to ultra along wit combo of Fenix a320 + Complex airport like Aerosoft Brussels and FSLTL set at 85% it barely gets past 20+ FPS which is without stutters for most part.
I am still using my PowerSpec 434 purchased Aug 2020, with I7 9700K, RTX 2070 Super, NVMe 1 TB, 32 GB DDR4 (upgraded to 64 GB), 27 inch 1080 upgraded to 32 inch 4K, and doing great on mostly ULTRA (40-60 FPS).