Upgrade for more FPS

[Raven Morpheus]

Hello

 

I'm thinking of upgrading my PC to hopefully get better fps in the flight sims I play (DCS World and IL2 1946).

 

In about a month or two I may have saved about £150 (max +/- £10, and I stress the word may).

 

To upgrade my CPU to an i7 would be too costly, as I'd have to buy a new motherboard, and even a basic package with a >=4ghz i7 + cooler + motherboard + RAM would cost me about £300-£400, and I just can't afford that at this time. I'm also inclined to partially build a completely new rig with a new case and PSU if I buy a new CPU/motherboard, and I totalled up the parts and they'd set me back just over £500, so again not affordable at this time.

 

 

I've been looking around and I can however just about afford to upgrade my GPU to an XFX Radeo HD 7870 2GB for about £150, which is what I should have saved in a month or two.

 

My question is this, given my current spec, listed below, will I get any better FPS from DCS world by upgrading to that GPU? I currently get on average 30-40 fps when flying in open unpopulated terrain with drops to around 12-20 fps, mostly when around FARPs like the one in the UH-1H campaign or other similarly populated areas, I had similar very low FPS the other day on the 1st mission of Georgian Oil War.

 

My PC specs -

 

AMD Phenom II x4 955 BE @3.2ghz

Gigabyte GA-880GM-USB3 motherboard

Corsair TX650 PSU

Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 1GB (would be replaced by the XFX 7870)

8GB 1333mhz RAM

Hitachi 7200RPM HDD

Windows 7 64bit

 

 

Thanks in advance for any input on this.

Edited September 15, 2014 by Raven Morpheus

[KLR Rico]

I think you're CPU bottlenecked, I don't think you'll see much improvement with a GPU upgrade. You could try setting all the graphics settings to low, if your FPS don't change much then you know for sure you're CPU limited.

 

If so, then it's as you already know, you'll have to go for the whole CPU/MB/RAM package... If your primary use of this machine is gaming, I think you'd be fine to stick with the i5, but you're still looking at a pretty good chunk of change to do so.

[ZaltysZ]

There is a hope we will get EDGE (new rendering engine) till 2015. If DCS is the sole reason for upgrade, wait for EDGE at first.

[Taproot]

There is a hope we will get EDGE (new rendering engine) till 2015. If DCS is the sole reason for upgrade, wait for EDGE at first.

 

And save more money. :-)

[159th_Viper]

Aye, don't even think of upgrading now. Stick it out and wait for DCS 2.0

[MoGas]

@Raven, what is youre graphic setting at the moment?

[Kuky]

you won't get much better FPS just by upgrading that GPU, you would need new mobo/cpu but also bit better GPU than 7870.... so do hold on (and save more) little more... with EDGE we should see better performance so you'll get better idea (and everyone else) what upgrade would be good to go with.

[Raven Morpheus]

@Raven, what is youre graphic setting at the moment?

 

 

This -

 

 

 

I've tried it with everything on rock bottom, albeit just sitting on the FARP on the Stray Eagle mission and I only get about 5-10 extra fps and it looks ugly (more so than usual).

[Kuky]

Don't disable Aero Interface... uncheck this option.

Disable civilian traffic (it uses lot of CPU cycles and civ traffic is not required for mission anyway)

[Raven Morpheus]

There is a hope we will get EDGE (new rendering engine) till 2015. If DCS is the sole reason for upgrade, wait for EDGE at first.

 

DCS isn't my sole reason for wanting to upgrade, I also play Project Cars, which is supposedly soon to be released. I play IL2 1946 v4.12.2m + TFM412. I'm awaiting GTA V. And I've got other games I play which I'm sure could do better with a newer GPU.

 

DCS (don't know about GTA V obviously, and pCars is in Alpha/Beta still so has a way to go and hopefully will be optimised more) is the only one I can't quite seem to enjoy unless the map is practically empty. Even IL2 1946 a far older game, but still a flight sim, runs better than DCS, although that too does have it's framerate issues at times but no where near as bad as DCS is for me. Although I'm not flying helicopters in IL2 1946 so I'm not so close to the ground most of the time.

 

Currently DCS seems to be rather unflyable if I have to do missions at 20fps, like the Ka-50 Georgian Oil War campaign mission 1, or if I can't land at FARPS in the UH-1H because I get in the region of 12fps as soon as I get to about 10nm.

 

 

Don't disable Aero Interface... uncheck this option.

 

Ah OK I only checked it last night when fiddling around with my settings. Never tried it out to see what it does though.

Edited September 16, 2014 by Raven Morpheus

[Kuky]

Aero actually improves performance when not using Full Screen option.

[Cnuke]

If you would like I share my modded files for better fps.

I do have i7 920 at 3.9GHz and 5850 amd card.

I use the 14.4 amd catalyst drivers in the bin folder.

If there's anything you need help I post downloadlinks :)

[Gloom Demon]

Don't disable Aero Interface... uncheck this option.

 

Why is that? I recall getting a small gain in FPS when I unchecked this.

[Raven Morpheus]

If you would like I share my modded files for better fps.

I do have i7 920 at 3.9GHz and 5850 amd card.

I use the 14.4 amd catalyst drivers in the bin folder.

If there's anything you need help I post downloadlinks :)

 

 

Anything at this point would be welcome and I'd certainly give it a go.

 

EDIT - I just tried that 14.4 drivers .dll in the bin folder trick. Doesn't help. I use the UH-1H Stray Eagle mission to test and without those two files I get about 25fps sitting on the FARP on a hot start. With those 2 files I get 9! I'm currently running 10.2 catalyst drivers because I have found they're the only ones I don't get flicker with due to running dual monitors, and I tried 14.7 a few weeks ago but had major problems uninstalling them after finding out the widely used fix for monitor flicker no longer works. I had to restore my C partition from a backup I had made 3 weeks earlier!!

Edited September 18, 2014 by Raven Morpheus