another performance thread

[cato]

hi,

long time lurker, 1st time poster.

i bought CLOD at release fully aware of its issues. i pretty much avoided it for the 1st few months but once some of the latest beta patches were released i started testing it out only to eventually give up due to really low performance.

fast forward to this week when i decided to upgrade my system.

heres my spec

Samsung SpinPoint 500GB 7200RPM S300 16MB
INTEL CORE I7 2600K 3.4Ghz
GIGABYTE GA-Z68AP-D3 MOBO
Corsair Vengeance 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C8 1600MHz
GTZ 260 896GB Video card
creative xfi extreme sound card

the old system had a core to duo running at 2.6ghz and 4GB of 1066mhz ram.

i fully expected to be able to run CLOD on at least medium settings without to much issues.

it seems not.

ive been running the quick cross country mission as a test bed as it ony has one plane sitting on a runway.

on medium settings at 1920x1080 im gettin barely 20 fps and when i lower the red to 1600x900 it rises to barely 25 fps which imo is pretty shocking considering there aint that much going on with the mission im trying to run.

basically im getting roughly the same performance i was getting before which is giving me the horrible feeling that ive just wasted £400.

sorry to make another one of these threads but i just need to get it of my chest.

should i be getting better performance with the system i have?

[CWMV]

Probably your weak link here:
GTX 260

[Mad G]

Your CPU is a very fine overclocker, your memory is OK, but the GPU...go for a 560 at least.

[Insuber]

You have less than 1 GB video memory, and a 4 years old video card. Your system is not balanced, you need a recent video card with 2 GB ram, ideally, and 1.5 GB at least.

yep a video card is granpa here

[cato]

is a card with 1.5-2GB of vram really requires to play this game with good performance?

is now the time to buy a card thats gonna last me for a few years or would i be better waiting until the 2GB+ cards come down in price a bit?
the only 2 games that give me performance issues are this and arma2, both which i read are more cpu hungry than gpu which is why i upgraded my cpu.

if i upgrade my gpu im also gonna have to get a new psu as it only pumps out 500 watts.

[katdogfizzow]

Originally Posted by cato

is a card with 1.5-2GB of vram really requires to play this game with good performance?

is now the time to buy a card thats gonna last me for a few years or would i be better waiting until the 2GB+ cards come down in price a bit?
the only 2 games that give me performance issues are this and arma2, both which i read are more cpu hungry than gpu which is why i upgraded my cpu.

if i upgrade my gpu im also gonna have to get a new psu as it only pumps out 500 watts.

Yeah u need a vid card for this sim. I would wait until the 2-3GB cards come down in price

Also, you could try back when the 50% improvement in performance comes with near future patches

Or if you simply must fly now, I'm sure you could squeeze some playable performance bc of your cpu by tweaking your setup. If you have low expectations, you could prob get some cool channel flying in

[335th_GRAthos]

Katdogfizzow was very quick and very right in what he said.

Originally Posted by cato

is a card with 1.5-2GB of vram really requires to play this game with good performance?

No, 2Gb-3Gb of VRAM is required

Originally Posted by cato

is now the time to buy a card thats gonna last me for a few years

No, the cards which can run this game have not come into the market yet. Wait for the next generation of NVDIA cards (were supposed to come this Xmas - they will not )

Still, you can get some reasonably good cards today. Ranked in order of performance + price:
GTX560ti 2Gb (watch the "ti")
GTX570 2.5Gb
GTX580 3Gb
Needless to mention, the day the new GPUs will hit the market, these cards will be outdated... So, if you can not wait and must have a GPU now, do not invest a lot of money!

Originally Posted by cato

which is why i upgraded my cpu.

Your CPU upgrade was the right thing to do and the best choice. And overclocking will give you very good performance.

Originally Posted by cato

if i upgrade my gpu im also gonna have to get a new psu as it only pumps out 500 watts.

Yes, you will not get away with this.


~S~

[CWMV]

That's not quite correct.
There are many of us very happy with our "insufficient" 1.5gb GTX580's, lol!
Personally, I almost never drop below an average of 55fps during online play.
OP there are more than a few options that will suit you well, but its all about budget! The more you have to spend, the better the game will play.
I know several guts that have excellent performance with gtx570's, and of course any 580.

[coolts]

Yep, your card is the weak point there. I’ve got an i7 930, 6gb RAM & a 580 1.5gb and the game is GPU bound and I got poor performance so that I’ve had to drop the resolution down way below my monitors native resolution (2560x1440).
Test this for yourself;

With the game running, on a 2nd monitor, run task manager in the performance tab to see if your cores / Ram are being hammered by the game, (won’t happen with your specs).

Also download and install “MSI Afterburner” and run it. Set monitors for “GPU usage” & “GPU RAM usage” & “FPS” and I absolutely guarantee you will be flat lining 100% in the GPU usage and the game will have gobbled up all your GFX card RAM and will therefore be hammering your hard disk page file.

Engine optimisations are sorely needed but probably won’t happen much till the bigger issues are fixed. In the meantime drop your resolution, (and AA, AF), and texture quality and re-check the graphs. Tweak till you have a good frame rate. Like ARMAII, it’s a trade-off.

Sheer resolutuion is one of the biggest killers with big monitors. My native res needs (2560x1440 =), 3,686,400 pixels pumping out for each frame, whereas when I dropped down to 1920 x 1080 my GFX card ‘only’ has to produce 2,073,600 pixels per frame. That’s a drop of 77% in pixels, and my performance still wasn’t super smooth so I had to cut more corners. Such is life.

With your card, drop the rez first. Find a resolution on this list that is the same ratio as your monitors native rez (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution), and re-test on medium settings (grass off BTW), and drop again till you are smooth. Then you can start re-adding the eye candy till you get a comfy balance.

It can be done.