Good thing SOW is Nvidia's friendly !

[T}{OR]

Originally Posted by JG27CaptStubing

I'm now running an EVGA 580 and it's been a fantastic NO hassel experience. In terms of SOW I don't think it's going to matter much which camp you're in though I know for a fact Oleg likes Nvidia.

Excellent point. No hassle with single GPU-s.

Originally Posted by C_G

Just a bit of speculation here, but I think that in most cases SoW is going to be bottlenecking the CPU, not the GPU.

I think this because there is a lot more going on "under the hood" (i.e. non-visually) in terms of DM than before.
We know that each subsystem of the aircraft is modeled internally for DM purposes.
We also know from his thread on radar a while back, that ground objects are also subject to a sophisticated DM model. IIRC he stated that if the power generator for a radar station (or maybe it was for a searchlight) is knocked out then the radar station (or search light) will not work, though it has not been damaged itself.

I think it's safe to assume that AI routines will be more complex and that FM routines will also.

On the other hand, we also know (iirc- I may be mistaken) that SoW is being designed to utilize all the cores of multicore CPU's, so it may well be that notwithstanding the increase in "under the hood" complexity CPUs will not be the chokepoint and a need for bleeding edge cards will still exist.

This uncertainty is a large part of the reason I'm holding off my upgrades until after SoW is released and we have some definite information on this.

C_G

IIRC long time ago when news about SoW started Oleg confirmed only dual core support. If they implemented support for more than two cores it would be a pleasant surprise. The fact that we will have x64.exe is more important that +6 core support.

Originally Posted by LoBiSoMeM

Always amazes me why people think in therms of upgrade because some VGA brand "support" a game development...

The problem with IL-2 and ATI was the OpenGL drivers. IL-2 was optimized using OpenGL, runs with higher quality under OpenGL, and ATI do some bad work in these drivers, but IL-2 is a "discontinued" product. And TODAY ATI cards with TODAY DRIVERS can run IL-2 like NVIDIA cards. IL-2 is "easy" for today VGAs.

But let's look at ALL OTHER TITLES. Neither ATI or NVIDIA have "gigantic troubles" running any other title. And all the major titles today runs under DirectX. So, why in hell do you believe SoW will run so better in NVIDIA hardware, if SoW will use Dx9-11 APIs?!?! Just because you think ATI didn't take the hand of Oleg and leave him to a walk on the park?

Unbelieavable. Any modern DX title will run "better" in a "better" card, ATI or NVIDIA. I alway bought cards of the two brands just looking at the actual market, and have my share of good cards of the two brands, and my share of melting cards too. And I never had to change the brand to "run better" some title, NEVER.

Pointless discussion. Read reviews, look at the specs of each card, and let the developers use the cards potential. It's their work and Oleg team will do great with ATI or NVIDIA brands, it's just DirectX API.

And if some of the two companies screw some driver, it's the way it is. Just to remember: is better some blocky text in IL-2 because of a bad driver than a melting card... Do you remember? All the two major companies make HUGE mistakes...

Out of this kind of discussion.

Nvidia (allegedly) already has SoW code over a month (so said Oleg) for the purposes of driver optimization. And if you looked at all those reviews you would have seen that certain rival cards like GTX 570 and HD 6970 run better in some games and worse in others - with a margin of 10 FPS. Not much, but difference exists non the less.

[JG27CaptStubing]

Another point I wanted to bring up... We are very used to seeing performance in IL2 with its older yet updated OpenGL engine. I can assure you one thing. The move to DX9 and above will offer a much better scaling and visuals. In other words if IL2 used DX9 you would already see much better performance versus the visuals.

What is going to be interesting is to see the impact on the CPU. Getting a game to scale via CPU is usually a myth. It just may be that it offers more options more than FPS.

[Biggs [CV]]

One brand or the other is not gonna make a huge differance. If Nvidia gets 10 more frames per second so be it. If you notice the differance in 10 fps you need a new GPU.

[klem]

Originally Posted by T}{OR

..............
IIRC long time ago when news about SoW started Oleg confirmed only dual core support. If they implemented support for more than two cores it would be a pleasant surprise. The fact that we will have x64.exe is more important that +6 core support. .................

I hope he has by now! I don't know what's involved in making it run on more than two cores but "flight sims tend to be CPU rather than GPU limited" (a quote I picked up somewhere) so that has to be an important focus for him in a cutting edge sim. Anyone upgrading for SoW now is going to have more than two cores and will be pretty £!$$*^ off if they can't get the best out of their investment. I know I will be.

Can you imagine Oleg saying (eventually), "best system requirements AMD 3800+ dual core CPU (recommend overclocking)" ?!

btw the 64 exe won't be available for some time and won't be as important as multi-core (another quote I picked up somewhere, please don't shoot the messenger).

Originally Posted by klem

btw the 64 exe won't be available for some time and won't be as important as multi-core (another quote I picked up somewhere, please don't shoot the messenger).

What the ...? Didn't Oleg see what happens with only 2 GB of Ram at Igromir?

[swiss]

Originally Posted by Hecke

What the ...? Didn't Oleg see what happens with only 2 GB of Ram at Igromir?

1st: klem is not oleg or part of the dev team
2nd: Oleg programmed it, he probably knows better than you what he does.

[klem]

Originally Posted by swiss

1st: klem is not oleg or part of the dev team
2nd: Oleg programmed it, he probably knows better than you what he does.

Quite right.
But Oleg did say in a post during the last couple of months that the 64 exe would not be available for a while as they have more pressing things on their minds. Thats all I know.

Then again it's my understanding that 32 bit supports 3.?? Gb RAM and can assign a full 2Gb RAM to a 32bit application. That's much better than trying to share a bare 2Gb RAM across the system AND the application as the Demo PCs apparently had to.

Originally Posted by swiss

1st: klem is not oleg or part of the dev team
2nd: Oleg programmed it, he probably knows better than you what he does.

@ 1st: Bananas are crooked.
@ 2nd: Not only better than me.

[LoBiSoMeM]

People thinking about ATI/NVIDIA support and I only can think about multi-core full support and x64 memory adress.

I dream with devs working hard in these two points. It's time to go in this direction, and people with less than 4GB of RAM and x4 CPU starts to think about some upgrade...

In sims, will be a must: much more performance for less money, with fully optimized engines for x64 and x4 or more cores.

[JAMF]

Originally Posted by LoBiSoMeM

People thinking about ATI/NVIDIA support and I only can think about multi-core full support and x64 memory adress.

I dream with devs working hard in these two points. It's time to go in this direction, and people with less than 4GB of RAM and x4 CPU starts to think about some upgrade...

In sims, will be a must: much more performance for less money, with fully optimized engines for x64 and x4 or more cores.

I hope Mr. Maddox at least meant he's programmed for two threads. Since people noticed smoothness, when they upgraded to 2 cores with IL2, I'd expect more smoothness. At least the programming for 2 threads can divide the calculations. One for the flight model and one for AI, ballistics, weather, logistics, special effects and other calculations. The other 2 cores/threads on a 4 core CPU can and will be used by the OS for everything in the background. Teamspeak/Ventrilo, FRAPS capturing, HD activity and what not.

So one can see that programming for 2 threads will necessitate at least 3 cores for smooth operation. When we look at the Steam hardware survey, 63% has less than 3 cores!!! 51% has a CPU speed between 2.3 and 3GHz. Just 40% has 4GB or more in their system.

One can't blame 1C for developing the programme for the largest customer base. Going by these numbers you'd get the following minimum recommended system specs:

            Minimum - Recommended:
CPU: 3 cores 2.4GHz - 4 cores 3GHz
RAM:            3GB - 8GB
OS:      Windows XP - Win7 64B
HD space:      10GB - 20GB
VRAM:   512MB SM3.0 - 1.5GB SM3.0
DirectX:       9.0c - 9.0c (*)

(*) Hey, Mr Maddox never said DX11 was needed, only "supported". That's like saying it's programmed for DX8 and will run on higher spec'd systems.

[EDIT] To put this back on topic: 60+% of DX11 GPUs in the survey is AMD, so nVidia isn't likely to have pushed for DX11 implementation.