Best recommended Mobo/ CPU / Memory combo for DCS VR

[markturner1960]

As title, thinking of upgrading, and wanted thoughts on the best combo. Particulary in terms of memory speed etc . Leaning towards AMD rather than intel but happy to be persuaded otherwise, although I dont want to have to rely on overclocks to get performance, rather have less stress and heat. Cheers

[LuseKofte]

AMD is looking very attractive but I think overpriced Nvidia cards suit better for flight sims. I am thinking of building one with amd prosessor. And see if anyone can prove my statement wrong about gpu

[Bazz_Mulder]

7800x3d + 64gb DDR 6000 ram + 4090 (go nvidia only for VR) + external powered USB hub for all the toys

[Insonia]

78003d chip is the best price and overall gaming choice.

However, atm, the AMD chip is underperforming and underutilized in DCS particular. I saw a lot of testing and benchmark. DCS is one of the tiny few exceptions that 78003d lose to intel.. 

At moment, DCS MT preview is focus on intel hybrid CPU optimizations. it's pcore ecore shenanigans. we dont know if ED will spend more time on AMD side make sure utilize those 3d cache.

[SharpeXB]

When looking at CPUs for these sim games it’s best to look at their single-core performance. That’s still important even though DCS uses multi-core as the speed of each core matters.
Intel looks like the leader on all of them.

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r23_single_core

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks
 

 

 

[Richi]

Difference less than 10%. Is it really recognizable?

[SharpeXB]

52 minutes ago, Richi said:

Difference less than 10%. Is it really recognizable?

The difference between 90 and 99 FPS

[Richi]

4 hours ago, SharpeXB said:

The difference between 90 and 99 FPS

From what I see in the tests, the 4090 runs at 90-95% and both CPUs at 20-30%.  The difference in performance in single is below 10%.

So the question is, your experience, your FPS? VR + UHD? Can you confirm such a big difference in FPS?

If so, then this is important information.

[SharpeXB]

8 minutes ago, Richi said:

From what I see in the tests, the 4090 runs at 90-95% and both CPUs at 20-30%.  The difference in performance in single is below 10%.

So the question is, your experience, your FPS? VR + UHD? Can you confirm such a big difference in FPS?

If so, then this is important information.

The question here was just about CPUs. Unless someone ran an actual test using DCS there’s no way to know the performance difference for certain. So benchmarks are your best bet. In the actual game scenarios can be either GPU or CPU limited. Arguably if a given CPU is 10% faster and that scenario is limited by a particular CPU thread, you’re going to get that % of extra frames. But that just theoretical. No way to know for sure. You wouldn’t go wrong picking a CPU from the top of those charts though. If you’re in a situation where the GPU is the bottleneck then the CPU won’t make any difference. 

Edited January 1, 2024 by SharpeXB

[Dragon1-1]

Single core performance is not the whole story, though. Particularly, the X3D CPUs speed up graphics-heavy tasks by having prodigious amounts of L3 cache. This can more than make up for their somewhat middling single core speeds. Intel will perform better when raw power and number of cores matter, but the X3D series are measurably superior on 4K displays and VR, since they're better when there's a lot of pixels to push (and no, it's not only GPU doing the work in that case).

[SharpeXB]

2 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Single core performance is not the whole story, though. Particularly, the X3D CPUs speed up graphics-heavy tasks by having prodigious amounts of L3 cache. This can more than make up for their somewhat middling single core speeds. Intel will perform better when raw power and number of cores matter, but the X3D series are measurably superior on 4K displays and VR, since they're better when there's a lot of pixels to push (and no, it's not only GPU doing the work in that case).

AMD X3D apparently does out-perform Intel very well in MSFS. I don’t know if that translates to DCS though. The trouble with buying a CPU because of how it performs on a particular game is rather self explanatory though. 

[Dragon1-1]

You are going to get superior performance from AMD on everything where memory is a bottleneck. That pretty much includes all VR games, as well as anything you may want to play on a 4K monitor. A large L3 cache means that a lot of data can be stored physically close to the cores, being on the same die, it'll be faster than any RAM could ever hope to be. Fewer transfers from RAM to cache translate will to measurable gains as long as the game is not bottlenecked by something else. Single core speed of the Ryzens is sufficient for that to be the case.

The X3D line are definitely one trick ponies, in a way, but if it's the trick you want, then they're great. Worth noting, even without overclocking, and with thermal issues that such chip design involves, the clock on those CPUs is very respectable. You need to run some seriously CPU-heavy productivity stuff to be better served by Intels and their faster clocks.

[SharpeXB]

That’s interesting to know. It’s too bad DCS is such a niche game we likely won’t see any actual tests for a real comparison. I’m curious if any of those benchmarks replicate this type of game usage. According to its description Geekbench tests using system memory.
Those tests and benchmarks don’t seem to take overclocking into account though. Some of these oc better than others. 

Edited January 2, 2024 by SharpeXB

[markturner1960]

Thanks all, I will only be using the PC for DCS, so looks like AMD the choice..regarding memory....any specific advice on timings, latency particular brands or products ? I am probably going to go large and look at 96GB ( 2 x 48 as have heard that 4 channel with AMD sucks) 

 

Cheers