RTX 4080 & 7900 XTX/XT benchmarks DCS

[Thinder]

21 hours ago, Johnny Dioxin said:

I've just done a flight in VR with my Pico 4 and the RTX 4080 - jaw-dropping smoothness. I used the same settings as with my 2080Ti, which always had either a solid 30 or 45fps, depending on headset used. Despite having my Pico 4 settings at 90Hz, DCS World ran at 72 - but OMG! Now I can finally up my settings. Not sure if the HD is processed yet - this is the onboard Pico headset recording - finally a VR headset manufacturer has included an easy onboard recording option - just a press of the screenshot button on the controller:

 

I recorded the test flight, which was just a take-off from Addis Ababa in the A-10A followed by a low-level flight around the city until my demise when I misjudged a couple of appartment blocks! Unfortunately, the commentary wasn't recorded. Nevertheless, fpsVR is visble for the whole flight - flatlining

 

It's  gonna be PICO 4 and RX 7900 XTX MBA 24GB for me, I suppose we'll have similar VR experiences...

[Johnny Dioxin]

2 hours ago, ODBU_Mongoose said:

I'd say a 4080 would do. Went from a 6800XT to 4080 and the difference is noticable.

FPS are between 45-55 fps on busy MP servers but the experience is just butter smooth. No blurred experience, no stutters. Silky smooth. Great frametimes.

Running on a 13600K, G2, 64GB 3200 CL16

Seconded

[Johnny Dioxin]

Just flew a night time mission over the Caucasus in the F-16C with a huge amount of units and a lot going on. Framerates were half, as expected - 36 with Pico's ASW kicking in, but performances were still smooth and the average framerate shown on fpsVR was in the high 50's. CPU was most affected, but even that was well within the acceptable range.

I did record it, but as it was night time and without NVG there isn't a lot to see. I'll post a couple of fpsVR shots in the heat of the action.

Okay here are the screens. I magnified them so that the fpsVR info is easier to read, and added titles to describe what was going on at the time of the screenshot, also included a shot of the mission editor (its a QM generated mission) to show how many units are involved:

 

Edited December 28, 2022 by Johnny Dioxin

[Jimmytime]

On 12/27/2022 at 5:34 AM, Andrei said:

Jumped the gun, bought 4080 at last. Will do some VR comparison tests between 2070S and 4080 when it arrives

Andrei,

Looks like you were in a similar position as me, I have an RTX 2080 almost ready to pull the trigger. Looking forward to your comparison.
Do you run anything at 4K?
Thanks,

JT.

[Andrei]

40 minutes ago, Jimmytime said:

Andrei,

Looks like you were in a similar position as me, I have an RTX 2080 almost ready to pull the trigger. Looking forward to your comparison.
Do you run anything at 4K?
Thanks,

JT.

I only have a WQHD monitor, so 1440p is max. However, I fly exclusively in Reverb G2, although at 65% scale resolution with 2070S. At 100% that thing gets pretty close to 4K, so that should be relevant comparison. 

[ssg]

14 hours ago, Thinder said:

It's  gonna be PICO 4 and RX 7900 XTX MBA 24GB for me, I suppose we'll have similar VR experiences...

Let me know how your experience is. I have XTX and Quest 2. I have been trying to make VR playable with this card, but it is impossible. Well, depends what you are doing. Instant actions with solid 72 fps  are fine. Multiplayer like Enigmas is just impossible without ASW and ASW on AMD cards does not work. 3080 with ASW is much much smoother experience than 7900 XTX.

Edited December 28, 2022 by ssg

[Thinder]

40 minutes ago, ssg said:

Let me know how your experience is. I have XTX and Quest 2. I have been trying to make VR playable with this card, but it is impossible. Well, depends what you are doing. Instant actions with solid 72 fps  are fine. Multiplayer like Enigmas is just impossible without ASW and ASW on AMD cards does not work. 3080 with ASW is much much smoother experience than 7900 XTX.

 

I will but my card of choice is not yet available, my PICO is in order as well as the GEEKVR Facial Interface & Halo Strap for PICO 4, it increases FoV...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/geekvr/the-geekvr-facial-interface-and-halo-strap-for-pico-4?ref=ksr_email_backer_pledge_collection_successful

Obviously the situation is a little bit frustrating but there is little I can do but wait....#

I don't think it is an issue of card, it has plenty of power, but much more support for the headset, if it works smooth with Microsoft flight simulator, it should be OK for DCS.

The reason why I chose the PICO is its native software, I won't need Steam VR or other apps and it is important, the GPU is not limited by a third party package that might or not offer support for it.

 

Edited December 28, 2022 by Thinder

[Bloodlet]

1 hour ago, ssg said:

Let me know how your experience is. I have XTX and Quest 2. I have been trying to make VR playable with this card, but it is impossible. Well, depends what you are doing. Instant actions with solid 72 fps  are fine. Multiplayer like Enigmas is just impossible without ASW and ASW on AMD cards does not work. 3080 with ASW is much much smoother experience than 7900 XTX.

 

Wondering what CPU and how much ram you have. I had a Quest 2, Ryzen 5800x (non 3D) and an RTX 3060 with 32gb of RAM and could play on Enigma's fairly well. I actually upgraded to 64gb of ram the other day but haven't really tested that much yet in multiplayer since I am trying to learn new modules first. Regardless I am also considering an upgrade to the XTX or possibly the 4080. The money I save on the XTX could go towards a better monitor is why I haven't pulled the trigger on a 4080 yet.

p.s. Upgrading my ram originally from 16gb to 32gb was one of the biggest things that helped make my DCS experience smoother.

Edited December 29, 2022 by Bloodlet

[ssg]

1 hour ago, Bloodlet said:

Wondering what CPU and how much ram you have. I had a Quest 2, Ryzen 5800x (non 3D) and an RTX 3060 with 32gb of RAM and could play on Enigma's fairly well. I actually upgraded to 64gb of ram the other day but haven't really tested that much yet in multiplayer since I am trying to learn new modules first. Regardless I am also considering an upgrade to the XTX or possibly the 4080. The money I save on the XTX could go towards a better monitor is why I haven't pulled the trigger on a 4080 yet.

p.s. Upgrading my ram originally from 16gb to 32gb was one of the biggest things that helped make my DCS experience smoother.

 

5800x3D and 32Gb of RAM. I also have 3080. It works better than 7900 XTX. Heck, even 3060 Ti I had for a while worked better.  The issue is XTX and/or AMD drivers. Reddit.com/r/AMD has several threads complaining about the issue. There are some indication it is just driver issue not hardware so there is some hope it will be fixed.

As for now I would avoid XTX for VR. It is fantastic however for 3440x1440 resolution and non-vr applications which is shame. 

 

Only issue with 3080 now that fps death by VRAM has been fixed is frame time spikes. If I could get rid of those I would be pretty happy with that card.

Edited December 29, 2022 by ssg

[Thinder]

5 hours ago, Bloodlet said:

Wondering what CPU and how much ram you have. I had a Quest 2, Ryzen 5800x (non 3D) and an RTX 3060 with 32gb of RAM and could play on Enigma's fairly well. I actually upgraded to 64gb of ram the other day but haven't really tested that much yet in multiplayer since I am trying to learn new modules first. Regardless I am also considering an upgrade to the XTX or possibly the 4080. The money I save on the XTX could go towards a better monitor is why I haven't pulled the trigger on a 4080 yet.

p.s. Upgrading my ram originally from 16gb to 32gb was one of the biggest things that helped make my DCS experience smoother.

 

Ram is important but RAM latency is the most important of all.

You can have 64GB of RAM but still have a RAM/CPU bottleneck, especially with the Ryzen3/3D CPUs, which are designed for low latency.

Here is the gain I experienced going to a CL14/3600 5800X 3D combo from a 5600X Cl14/3200, the cache on the 3D is working wonder, tests were conducted at 4K 2 X MSAA, with the 5600X 3D Mark Pro, both CPU and GPU were boosted with Ryzen Master and NVIDIA Afterburner, RAM kits both were/are 32GB.

GPU was/is EVGA GEFORCE GTX 1080Ti for both tests, not boosted with the 5800X 3D.

So if you own a Ryzen, think of it if you want to upgrade, just sticking faster RAM or more RAM won't do, their controllers are limited to 3200MHz unless you use Cl14, in which case you can manage 3600MHz, my kit is not OCed but stock 3600MHz.

Idealy those CPU will best work with 3200/3600MHz Cl14 4 X 1 brank kits, those are the absolute limits of their controllers.

Edited December 29, 2022 by Thinder

[Johnny Dioxin]

If I can find a server running release version I'll test my set-up on it - provided there is anything going on, of course.

[SkateZilla]

AMD devs on Reddit stated they are aware of 7K VR Performance issues on Windows.

VR Performance on Linux is extremely better, which proves it's a Windows Driver issue.

[MK IX Hawk]

@SkateZillaI believe this the reddit post you are mentioning -

 

[ssg]

56 minutes ago, SkateZilla said:

AMD devs on Reddit stated they are aware of 7K VR Performance issues on Windows.

VR Performance on Linux is extremely better, which proves it's a Windows Driver issue.

This however does not prove that it will be fixed or when it will be fixed. Better skip XTX until the fix materializes for now.

[MadKreator]

4080 is a beast, very happy with mine! Came from a 3080 and, while dcs performance increase is marginal during missions ( not because of the card, because of the rest of the bottlenecks in dcs) the4080 blows the 3080 right out of the water on every other game by a long shot. I did see a good  improvement in VR on both DCS and MSFS 2020. Much more of fs2020 than dcs.   Granted I’m using a quest 2 but I left all of my high/ maxed out pancake settings the same, just turned off terrain shadows, and put the regular shadow setting to flat, and it purrs right along at 90 fps, 11ms frametime, and it seems to hold very solid. That was in one of the a-10c premade missions, not just freeflight. Headset is on x1.4 resolution in oculus, and in the OTT all I did was set the FOV multiplier to .8 ( since the fov isn’t great in it anyway) but I’ve had that setting for a long time. I do run msaa at x2 and anisotropic at x16, textures high, water high, clouds ultra, civ traffic medium, dirt/flare on,  cockpit displays 1024. Makes me want to step up and get a reverb g2. I don’t fly in vr much because I’m a graphics kinda guy. I love the looks on my 5120x1440 monitor and with the quest2,  looking like an original xbox at best, it’s really tough for me to enjoy it ( and the shimmering drives me nuts). Now I’m trailing off subject…. The 4080 is awesome… If you have a varjo aero, you prob want a 4090, but if you want to save that bit of cash to put toward something else, the 4080 is far, far from a bad choice! Never tried anything with AMD but from the video comparisons it seems to be great as well.

Edited December 29, 2022 by MadKreator

[Bloodlet]

3 hours ago, MadKreator said:

4080 is a beast, very happy with mine! Came from a 3080 and, while dcs performance increase is marginal during missions ( not because of the card, because of the rest of the bottlenecks in dcs) the4080 blows the 3080 right out of the water on every other game by a long shot. I did see a good  improvement in VR on both DCS and MSFS 2020. Much more of fs2020 than dcs.   Granted I’m using a quest 2 but I left all of my high/ maxed out pancake settings the same, just turned off terrain shadows, and put the regular shadow setting to flat, and it purrs right along at 90 fps, 11ms frametime, and it seems to hold very solid. That was in one of the a-10c premade missions, not just freeflight. Headset is on x1.4 resolution in oculus, and in the OTT all I did was set the FOV multiplier to .8 ( since the fov isn’t great in it anyway) but I’ve had that setting for a long time. I do run msaa at x2 and anisotropic at x16, textures high, water high, clouds ultra, civ traffic medium, dirt/flare on,  cockpit displays 1024. Makes me want to step up and get a reverb g2. I don’t fly in vr much because I’m a graphics kinda guy. I love the looks on my 5120x1440 monitor and with the quest2,  looking like an original xbox at best, it’s really tough for me to enjoy it ( and the shimmering drives me nuts). Now I’m trailing off subject…. The 4080 is awesome… If you have a varjo aero, you prob want a 4090, but if you want to save that bit of cash to put toward something else, the 4080 is far, far from a bad choice! Never tried anything with AMD but from the video comparisons it seems to be great as well.

 

Yeah the shimmering very annoying. I've never been sure if that's due to using a Quest 2 or from some other setting or lack of sufficiently powerful enough graphics card.

[MadKreator]

2 hours ago, Bloodlet said:

Yeah the shimmering very annoying. I've never been sure if that's due to using a Quest 2 or from some other setting or lack of sufficiently powerful enough graphics card.

I read the other day its mostly the type of anti-aliasing that DCS uses. fs2020, for example uses a different kind, TAA, which i guess applies antialiasing to the entire screen as opposed to each individual object and it severely reduces the shimmering.  Hopefully the new game engine will have some of these more modern settings when it comes out. But I don’t really know, could be any number or combination of things

[Johnny Dioxin]

Pleased I didn't decide to go with the AMD card. The 4000 series isn't perfect, but it has given me a reason to get back into DCS World in VR after so much disappointment making me hesitant since 2.1, now that I'm able to fly again too, instead of just watching AI fight it out - a nice 'welcome back' situation!

I checked last night and there are indeed a number of servers still using 1.27 2.7 (d'oh!), so I'll keep an eye on them and if one gets a good number of clients (a big "if") I'll jump in and see how the 4080 handles things.

Edited December 31, 2022 by Johnny Dioxin
d'oh

[Andrei]

Now that I finally got the 4080 I thought I could add a few more cents to the benchmarks. Maybe some people upgrading from the older hardware will find it useful. I've recently upgraded from Zen 3 5800X to 5800X3D and just now from 2070 Super to 4080. So there will be stats for both upgrades.

Setup

All tests are done in VR (Reverb G2). By no means those figures are scientific, so treat those as ballparks. The frametimes are taken using using OpenXR toolkit that records results every second. Therefore the resolution isn't all too great and might not show details of e.g. 1% lows.

For DCS settings, all tests until indicated otherwise are perfomed with the following. Those are my normal settings for flying online and offline. For VR specific settings PD in DCS is 1.0 and Open XR resolution is downscaled to 65% of max for Reverb G2. 

null

CPU Tests

Let's start with CPU upgrade. Those are the runs of Plasma's Torture map which is loading CPU very well. Objectively you don't see too much of a difference between 5800X and X3D. Subjectively V-Cache gives you a much smoother experience. 

The tests were done in DCS version 2.8.0.32937.

5800X Plasma Torture Map 2070S
Average FPS: 42
Average CPU frametime: 15 ms
Average GPU frametime: 23 ms

 

5800X3D Plasma Torture Map 2070S
Average FPS: 42
Average CPU frametime: 13 ms (-2 ms)
Average GPU frametime: 23 ms (same)

3D cache gives you around 15% improvement in CPU frametime, but as mentioned above, the overall experience is subjectively better due to less stutters. 

 

GPU Tests

Now to GPU tests. Note that compared to CPU test prevoiusly, this one is using DCS 2.8.1.34437, newer graphics driver and CPU is curve optimized to -20 all cores. So don't compare it directly to previous test. 

NOTE: When you see "low spikes" in GPU frametimes it is where I pointed my helmet up towards the sky, which of course gives it a nice FPS boost / FT decrease.

First one is Marianas benchmark used earlier by Th3ChosenOn3 and xoxen. As CPU frametimes there are quite low, I think it's a good indicator of overall graphics performance. 

5800X3D Marianas 2070S
Average FPS: 31
Average CPU frametime: 8 ms
Average GPU frametime: 33 ms

 

5800X3D Marianas 4080
Average FPS: 68
Average CPU frametime: 6 ms (-2 ms)
Average GPU frametime: 15 ms (-18 ms)

As you can see, the FPS and GPU frame times doubled with the same graphics settings. Interestingly enough, the CPU frame time has decreased a bit as well, which suggests that 40 series might be working better with CPU then 20 series. You'll see this behavior repeat itself in another test.

 

Next we turn back to Plasma's map to evaluate overall performance increase in CPU bound scenario.

5800X3D Plasma Torture Map 2070S
Average FPS: 40
Average CPU frametime: 13 ms
Average GPU frametime: 25 ms

 

5800X3D Plasma Torture Map 4080
Average FPS: 70
Average CPU frametime: 11 ms (-2 ms)
Average GPU frametime: 10 ms (-15 ms)

 

Again, we see that performance has pretty much doubled and in this case we're really becoming bottlenecked by CPU occasionally. However, the CPU frametimes have also improved.

 

High Settings

Finally, I wanted to see how does RTX 4080 handle higher graphics settings. I switched OpenXR render to 100% (up from 65%) and DCS graphics as on screenshot below. The biggest change was shadows (terrain = default and shadows = high).

5800X3D Marianas 4080 High Settings
Average FPS: 47
Average CPU frametime: 7 ms
Average GPU frametime: 21 ms

Obviously performance is lower than with original graphics settings, but still more than playable for me. In fact, it's giving a better framerates and notably better picture then 2070S at lower settings. 

 

Conclusion

Overall, the results were pretty much according to my expectations. Huge improvement with same settings and still better performance with better visuals. Also, it was interesting to see better CPU utilization with 4080.

This upgrade was due a loooong time ago. I skipped 2020 due to availability, I skipped 2021 because of miners. At the end of the day I paid same price for 4080 what it would effectively cost me to buy a 3080 a year ago. Is it worth it? For me - I think so.

[dock999]

Such a nice comprehensive review . I am convinced .  Basically 4080 is adequate to play DCS in VR. I saw someone had got both 4080 and 4090 and he thought the 4090 was not that good in terms of lifting performance . I wonder the 4090 may require next generation CPU to fully utilize its GPU power .

[xoxen]

6 hours ago, Andrei said:

Conclusion

Overall, the results were pretty much according to my expectations. Huge improvement with same settings and still better performance with better visuals. Also, it was interesting to see better CPU utilization with 4080.

This upgrade was due a loooong time ago. I skipped 2020 due to availability, I skipped 2021 because of miners. At the end of the day I paid same price for 4080 what it would effectively cost me to buy a 3080 a year ago. Is it worth it? For me - I think so.

Many thanks for your input. And I´m happy that you are satisfied with your buy as I am. The 4080 is pure fun (for high cost, I know) and I find myself in 2D complaining about everything below 70 FPS where I was happy with 50 FPS before. If I see it right the upgrade to the 5800X3D wasn´t that much of a performance boost. But I also have this in my mind to get the most out of my rig, but I will wait for the new multi core engine to arrive. I guess it might even be better for my marriage to spend time to my wife instead of money into my hobby

[Johnny Dioxin]

15 hours ago, Andrei said:

Interestingly enough, the CPU frame time has decreased a bit as well, which suggests that 40 series might be working better with CPU then 20 series.

I found that, too.

Think I will look at a cpu/mobo upgrade anyway - although the 9600k is holding its own, it is getting close to its limit.

Edited December 31, 2022 by Johnny Dioxin

[iQyThradz3137i]

Hey, Happy New Year to All

 

I have a question how is the 7900XTX looking to get a 7900XTX (Not the Hotspot Burner made by AMD) and curious how the 7900XTX is which i will be pairing with a 7700x

[RaTzo]

On 12/30/2022 at 4:40 PM, dock999 said:

Such a nice comprehensive review . I am convinced .  Basically 4080 is adequate to play DCS in VR. I saw someone had got both 4080 and 4090 and he thought the 4090 was not that good in terms of lifting performance . I wonder the 4090 may require next generation CPU to fully utilize its GPU power .

Right now it seems nVidia is the best choice for DCS VR... ticks me off but that doesn't change the reality.  

My fear is the 4080 seems to be an over expensive compromise card. It's priced to be a zero compromise product but it isn't. Soooo... the painful thing is to look to see if the 4090 is enough faster to justify the insane price that it sits at. 

I have not each and every post in the thread (sue me) but does anyone have a link to a 4080 vs 4090 in DCS VR comparison? 

[VpR81]

1 hour ago, RaTzo said:

Right now it seems nVidia is the best choice for DCS VR

Has this ever been different? I highly doubt that this will ever change...