I currently have a GeForce 1080Ti - an excellent card, but I’m looking to upgrade to something better.
My PC is I-9 - 32gb Ram - M.2 hard drive - 3 x 40" TV’s at 1920 x 1080.
I don’t think the TV’s can do high res than 1080 so maybe it’s not best to upgrade yet?
Any recommendations? Thanks.
Hello,
Questions about graphics cards go into the Hardware and Peripherals category. Your post has been moved.
Was I not already in that Forum?
Unless your current graphics card is rendering the sim across all three screens then I’d say you’re probably CPU limited and a new GPU won’t help much if at all.
The best card is the best that you can afford.
I have an RTX 3080ti paired to an I9-11900 and run ULTRA and most of the time the GPU is around 50-60%. The CPU is the main limiting factor. I also run with three monitros with my main one being 1440.
So am I getting full use of the 3080ti, no. Not until the CPU streams are better optimized.
I think VR does use the GPU more, but for just monitors, a 2080ti is probably fine and you will save yourself a lot of money.
After I bought my card they came out with the 3090ti. Not sure what the specs are, but the 3080ti is pretty close to the 3090 just with less memory.
And thet say the 4000 series will be coming out soon and they are suppose to be twice as fast.
So if you can get a good deal on 2080ti, I would go for that for now and see what the 4000 does to the markets. The 3000 series may drop drastically in price and then you can step up the a 3000 series at a much lower cost.
I’m sure that once the CPUs are optimized, the 3080ti will really shine. But GPUa have slowly been dropping in price. You can now gt a 3080ti for about $1600 US or less, plus tax and shipping.
Someone told me that Bestbuy was selling a full system with a 3080 for about $1600.
You can also get used 3080tis on eBay for as low as about $1200. Not really sure why people sell them.
Maybe they don’t realize that they need a bigger case and PSU, plus you need a lot of colling in the room you are in. They are space heaters!!
You also need a lot of cooling power, meaning good airflow through your system. I use six fans in my system.
That thing gets really hot when the sim is running!
Quick question for you. What percentage CPU usage do you get with the i9-11900, I have one and it never goes over 30%?
Are you using Task Manager? If you are, you probably have it set to show CPU overall utilization, which is the default, you should change it to Logical Processors. To change after selecting CPU, on the right, right-click on the chart and select “Change graph to” and select Logical processors.
In there you will notice the a few Logical Processors get pegged out while some are close to idle and probably why you are seeing only 30%.
I normally run on ULTRA. When I set it to 60FPS, a few of the main processors will pegged out at 100%, so I often only run at 30 FPS and then they average about 80-90% and I don’t any stutters, which I sometimes do in high photogrammetry areas.
I’ll bring up the shim and show you what I mean. I will fly around KJFK set at ULTRA and 60 FPS. I will add the CPU utilization after I do it.
If you look at the CPU, you will see that I am hitting 100% at time, but my GPU hardly ever goes above 50% utilization.
Right now, it not doing too bad, but at times, the CPU does get hit harder than it is now.
Here I was flying in an area not as populated and LOD set to 300. CPU, stays lower here.
Excellent tips and help … thanks all. I’ll do more research on my current CPU load and GPU load and get back.
I never can understand why there are so many variations of Nvidia cards… multiple cards with the same model number, but somehow different with different specs and names eg. Founders Edition?
I do have it on logical processors and I see the graph you are showing but none of the 16 cores gets above 30%. I am also on win 11 and DX12 beta, which by the way is far better than DX11 in my opinion.
I run three monitors 2x 1080 and 1x2k and everything on ultra and 400 LOD etc. 3070 GPU 85% locked at 60 PFS.
Founder Edition is the original one made by NVIDIA. They license them to other vendors that overclock, use different speed RAM, different voltages, more fans, etc.
The Founder Edition is not an overclock one on steroids like some of the other versions.
I think you are probably pushing the GPU to the max and why the CPU can’t go any higher. When I go to 400 LOD, I di get stutter on the ground and don’t often use it.
Try just doing regular ULTRA which set LOD at 200 and see if your GPU goes down a little and you CPU up a little.
I have a good rig, buy honestly, I mostly just run it at ULTRA and only 30 FPS in-game and that seems to run the smoothest overall.
I really don’t like spending a lot of time tweaking. Every now and then when I’m in sparse areas, iI I’ll fun at 60 FPS. But honestly, I really don’t see much of and improvement and like I said, the sim for me seems to run smoother at 30 FPS.
I never change my setting and the GPU is running perfectly.
The cause of the limitation in MSFS varies greatly depending on the scene.
Mainly due to the CPU, but of course there are also scenes where the GPU is the cause.
For example, when flying high in the sky, under many conditions (especially from an External view), the GPU utilization will be close to 100%, limiting the fps.
So, in conclusion, the better the better, i.e. RTX 3090Ti is the answer.
However, this is not realistic because it answers the question “what is the best Graphics Card for MSFS?”
And it is not possible to run MSFS at its best with today’s CPUs and GPUs.
Therefore, the recommended graphics card depends on your available budget and what part of the performance you are willing to compromise.
I also have a 1080ti, resolution like yours, 1440p, and want to ask you how your video card behaves at the “render 200” setting. Is its performance and video memory enough for 45+ fps?
I have a 3080ti not a 1080ti. The Topic Author @CaptainCoop779 has the 1080ti and is looking to upgrade.
I have a second system with a 2060 Super and it does a pretty good job at 1440, but I usually run that one on High-End, not Ultra. It has a I-7-10700 and 64GB.
I use the second PC to practice chasing with Drone Camera for Air Shows. I chase with my main PC and fly the second one.
Well after some testing it looks like my CPU / SSD / Ram performance is ok, did not get anything maxed out, The GPU shows about 80-90% utilized in dense scenery locations.
Current settings:
Render Scaling: 160
Terrain Detail: 250
Objects Detail: 180
Other settings on ULTRA.
I have smooth performance in 99% of cases, but my FPS looks very low? Don’t understand that. And it does say I’m limited by GPU.
I guess my main question is:
Would I be able to increase graphics quality and GPU performance if I upgrade from my 1080Ti to say a 3080 Card?
Why are you setting your render scaling so high? That’s why you have such low frame rates. 8939x1675 render resolution means you’re rendering 1.8x more pixels than native 4k resolution which your 1080ti will already struggle with.
If you’re running 5760x1080 (100% render scaling) with 3x 1080p displays you’ll still be rendering much less than 4k at native and your 1080ti will probably be able to keep up much better.
Try setting your Render Scaling to 100 and see if you’re still GPU limited.
Thanks I will try that… will I see a difference in graphics quality? ie. does higher look better? I would lose some crispness in detail right? That’s the reason I’m thinking of upgrading. I’m looking for higher settings and better detail.
Higher can look slightly better since it’s doing downsampling to remove jagged edges along with antialiasing but generally speaking it’s almost never worth using render resolutions over 125% because the loss of frame rate is far too high.
In your case, trying to drive such a high resolution with a 1080ti, it would be much better to use 100% render resolution and just rely on antialiasing to smooth edges.
A 3080 might allow you to run at 110-125%, but it’s not going to be worth the cost if you can get sufficient performance out of your current GPU.
Try it at 100% and see how it looks to you. I’ll bet you’ll be hard pressed to notice a large difference unless you’re looking at side by side screenshots.
Render scaling is basically just very ‘expensive’ (computationally) Anti aliasing. You’re rendering at a higher resolution, then downsampling to the output resolution. This is very taxing on the GPU (the rendering bit, the downsampling is trivial). This gives a smoother output image with better perception of detail.
First up I’d try render scaling to 100 and see how your GPU does then, a 1080ti should be ‘ok’ at 3x 1080p, and if you’re used to 17FPS the 30Fps at 100% render scaling will probably feel great, so long as you like the image quality. You can also walk some settings between high-end and ultra and see how you feel about performance. LOD settings primarily hurt the CPU performance before they hurt GPU performance, so treat them as CPU load settings not graphical settings as such.
As for your original question, your resolution is ‘3K’ equivalent. It’s about on a par with a 3440x1440p monitor, or half way between 1440p and 4k. Good strong GPus for that resolution would be the RTX 3070Ti, RTX 3080 10GB or 12Gb, or the RX 6800Xt. Expensive GPUs. I’d honestly consider if you’re spending that amount, if a monitor upgrade to a single ultrawide might be sensible too, for an overall resolution upgrade and to get rid of the bezels and 3 screen complexity.
