Video Card Performance

[Flamingskull5000]

As baseball ends and my football team is at 1 - 6 it's the time of year when I drift back to CFS3 world. Yesterday I installed a new video card, a cast off from my son's gaming rig. I always have been a Nvidia guy, but this new card is a 2 gig Radeon. With CPU speeds being what they are these days, I don't know how essential a good card is anymore. Yesterday I was getting frame rates around 75FPS with 5 Spits against 5 109's and 5 He-111's. No stutter etc. Just wondering what everyone uses and results etc.

[MajorMagee]

In my case I have a GTX 980 4 GB video card. It's gone through two different monitor configurations (3840x1024 and 3440x1440), and two different CPU/Motherboards (3.8 GHz and 4.3 GHz), with 4X SGSSAA (or 4x DSR) and it's been able to keep up.

Having the CPU and the Video Card running at the same pace seems to be key as long as your hard drive can keep up. Most recently, I discovered that if I use both the In-Game and NvidiaInspector FPS limiter to keep it somewhat below my typical average rate it holds a steadier pace with less micro-stutter. With the current configuration I'm holding it at 77 rather than letting it free run in the low 80s and occasionally range up to 100. This also has the advantage of preventing either the GPU or CPU from ever needing to throttle back for thermal reasons during long sessions.

The answer to a well running CFS3 is to treat it as a complete system, rather than just pieces. For example, adding a fast SSD to replace a slow hard drive on my old mother board left it still limping along trying to get the data across the slow buss.

[Flamingskull5000]

I replaced my MB and added a SSD that just has CFS3 installs on it last winter. It seems to like the new video card also. Will I get the same smooth action on WOTR when it's released.........jury's out on that!

[hairyspin]

Most of us find CPU speed is what really counts with CFS3 - i5 760 in my case. I have a GTX 1050Ti 4GB GPU, but it's overkill and is really for Prepar3D 4 some time in the future.

[Daiwilletti]

As baseball ends and my football team is at 1 - 6 it's the time of year when I drift back to CFS3 world. Yesterday I installed a new video card, a cast off from my son's gaming rig. I always have been a Nvidia guy, but this new card is a 2 gig Radeon. With CPU speeds being what they are these days, I don't know how essential a good card is anymore. Yesterday I was getting frame rates around 75FPS with 5 Spits against 5 109's and 5 He-111's. No stutter etc. Just wondering what everyone uses and results etc.

Its great the way modern vid cards can do the job properly :wavey:. I am sure the game designers must do a double take if they ever look at old CFS3 with modern Vid card, drivers and Ankor's shaders.

One thing often overlooked is the cfsconfig settings. Stuff these up and even with the best CPU and card things can look wrong.

Then there are the various budgets.xmls - these can make the scenery look terrific with a modern vid card....

[gosd]

In my case I have i5-7400 cpu@3.00GHz and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB, works fine.