Upgrade needed?

Question

I have just built a new rig with AMD CPU and GPU (3600, 5700), and I get about 60fps with medium settings in default aircraft and MisterX6's SFO. I also get about 45fps with the ZIBO 737 and MisterX6's SFO with medium settings. I would wish to fly the FFa320, but I get drops to about 19fps at the same settings. I have hear about Vulkan, but are the results really going to improve a lot? I am thinking about upgrading my CPU, GPU, or both, but don't really know if I should just wait or grab some other parts. If I should grab other parts, which ones are good? Looking at the 17-4790K, as it runs at 4GHz and has an OK price. Any GPUs I should look at, or is my current one OK?

Specs:

AMD Ryzen 5700

AMD Ryzen 3600 @ 3.6GHz

32gb RAM

8gbVRAM

 Help if you can, my current mind set is to go with the i7-4790k with a GTX 1080.

Answer 1

Here are a few videos from Michael Brown that are related to the discussion:

The RX 5700 with X-plane:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFBKCbE89_Y

The Ryzen Third Gen on X-Plane:                

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctgkv-4TIzU

AMD performance with X-Plane (or the lack of); with mention of “hope” for a solution from Vulkan:

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYKKVP_Ll4w

I agree with Greengolfer’s suggestion that you should hold on to your existing H/W for now.  The performance with most of your aircraft does not seem to be a problem.  Since I don’t have your H/W or the FF A320, I can only comment that running the Zibo at 45 FPS with the detailed SFO scenery is not bad.  You should actually consider increasing the graphics settings (for lower framerate).  And with the A320, I’d suggest you to run Task Manager (Windows) to figure out where the performance bottleneck is (i.e. CPU vs. GPU), and tune the settings accordingly.  

Answer 2

Hi noodles

I'm not with Laminar Research, just a fellow simmer in the UK. I'm also a qualified computer technician who builds his own bespoke PC's.

With that in mind, I note that your existing CPU & GPU are from AMD and I would normally say that Intel products are generally considered to be more superior than AMD.

However, in terms of your existing AMD Ryzen 5 CPU, it is actually, in this case, far more superior than the Intel i7-4790K CPU you have referred to. The Intel i7-4790K @ 4.0GHz is five years old now and only has 4 cores and 8 threads, whereas the AMD Ryzen 5 @ 3.6GHz is brand new this year and has 6 cores and 12 threads.

The effective speed of the AMD is also around 17% faster than the Intel. Please see photo below. (ALL COMPARISON DATA COURTESY OF USERBENCHMARK.COM)

With regard to graphics cards, I believe that you have an AMD RX5700 8GB (??) which is brand new on the market. When compared to the two year old NVIDIA GTX1080 8GB, the margin of difference in effective speed is actually a nominal @ 3% in favour of the Intel.

As far as RAM is concerned @ 32GB, there should be no issues with this, as it is more than capable when running XP11.

All in all then, I would suggest that you leave your PC spec well alone for now and wait for further XP11 developments later.

Regards