Best graphics solution for dynamic lights?

[J0hannes Butz]

Hi,

as the title suggests I'm not particularly blown away by the performance of dynamic lighting on my system, that is currently equipped with a GTX 970 and I've "heard" that the 10 series of GTX chips are way better at rendering dynamic lighting.

I currently get around 27-30FPS in bad weather scenarios in areas like New York, when flying an approach across the city (using all Drzewiecki NY products) but this drops to single digits at night. I don't really want to do without dynamic lighting and as far as I could gather information, the 1080ti seems to be "the best graphics card" dynamic lighting.

So I'd like to know if anybody here has experience with GTX1070/80/80ti graphics cards and dynamic lighting (with MSAA, SSAA seems to impact DL as well), to give an honest opinion from what you are seeing in performance with dynamic lighting, especially a 1080 vs 1080ti comparison would interest me most.

[Amir Parsian]

I have GTX1070 and dynamic lighting has a noticeable impact, I lose 5-6 FPS. 

[Telmo]

Hi,
as the title suggests I'm not particularly blown away by the performance of dynamic lighting on my system, that is currently equipped with a GTX 970 and I've "heard" that the 10 series of GTX chips are way better at rendering dynamic lighting.
I currently get around 27-30FPS in bad weather scenarios in areas like New York, when flying an approach across the city (using all Drzewiecki NY products) but this drops to single digits at night. I don't really want to do without dynamic lighting and as far as I could gather information, the 1080ti seems to be "the best graphics card" dynamic lighting.
So I'd like to know if anybody here has experience with GTX1070/80/80ti graphics cards and dynamic lighting (with MSAA, SSAA seems to impact DL as well), to give an honest opinion from what you are seeing in performance with dynamic lighting, especially a 1080 vs 1080ti comparison would interest me most.

I have a gtx1080 and im not far from what u getting on yours gtx 970 . On xplane11 im having 70/80 fps with very high settings on p3d with more less same setting 30/40 but still some hiccups. I know they are different sims but I can't find a good explanation for this difference, maybe still some small fixes will come soon.

Sent from my SM-G928F using Tapatalk

[J0hannes Butz]

Thanks for your answers! I'm actually quite pleased with the daylight performance of around 30fps in dense areas, usually I get around 40 in less dense areas and 50-60 in cruise. I guess in MS flight based sim's the boundaries are and probably will be set by the CPU. The separated autogen draw distance & LOD radius really make a big difference if you've set the visibility depiction via PTA/ASP4 accordingly.

But non the less I was going onto this topic just for the dynamic lighting aspect, as I can't fly any of my PMDG Boeings or especially the A320 at night in 3-10fps with all individual airports having the DL option turned off. I've seen some "test" videos that were not very helpful, but other than that there wasn't really an answer on how the 10 series graphics cards differ from each other in a DL environment.

[Jeff baird]

I have a 1080ti and have no problems at all with frames or dynamic lighting. This card chews up everything I throw at it. Money well spent...

[J0hannes Butz]

6 hours ago, Jbaird said:

no problems at all with frames or dynamic lighting

not even at KSMP with overlapping gate lighting, dome and floods on? That's the dream... especially in the A320

[Jeff baird]

Hi Johannes,

All the Flightbeam airports are smooth and  locked in at 30fps. I had a 1080 then saw the advantages of the 1080ti and upgraded. I'm also running a 4K and the 1080ti is a perfect fit.

[J0hannes Butz]

wow nice, have you been able to test with the 1080 as well in similar scenarios? Or would you say that for pretty much only P3D the 1080ti is worth it's money?

[Lafar]

Hi, I also have the GTX1080Ti and an i7 7700k and I wanna say that for example in the new scenario of LEBL Barcelona (From Aerosoft) and our beauty of 320 jejej I've got 20/30 FPS at night with Dynamic Lighting active...
Honestly, I'm confused about this whole thing ... I don't understand why prepar3d kills FPS thus. I think my hardware is capable of much more ...
But well from my point of view it does not matter so much the hardware, since I think that the software is limiting us. Little by little the thing can evolve to better, but for now we go step by step. The simulator already looks much nicer with this v4, which we have not had so far. Patience and a Greeting.

[J0hannes Butz]

3 hours ago, lrafa33 said:

20/30 FPS

are you running all lights in the A320? I currently drop from 30+ to about 10 with switching on the floods, when I switch on nose/landing lights I'm maybe around 3-5fps... But I guess I'll get a 1080Ti when I've got the money... Probably LM will increase performance in the next version of v4 for DL as it causes all kinds of weird problems and it is still new to them...

[Chris Keller]

If people quote fps numbers withouth knowing their AA settings you have to be careful. FPS will suffer at night with DL on and any form of SSAA. You get acceptable performance around 30 fps in heavy areas with 1080TI with 8 x MSAA and DL on. I am coming from a 980TI and now I have the 1080TI. While FPS have not been significantly improved, I can now put the AA slider one notch up, and flying through clouds is less a fps hit. If you are patient, you could wait for the new VOLTA generation that presumably comes out next year.

[J0hannes Butz]

Thanks for that tip Christian, I was assuming everybody using 8xMSAA with dynamic lighting on GTX 10-series cards. I'm just really annoyed that I can't light up the runway at landing for now. Actually my FPS dropped that significantly, as I pushed my GPU to it's limits with my settings and never looked at CPU/GPU utilization. I'm now - after optimization - at around 75% CPU and 95% GPU load (day) with 40FPS in very dense areas.

That pretty much answers my question in itself, as I thought my CPU was the bottleneck while I was constantly running into my GPU's limits.

With my GTX 970 I use 4xSSAA (somehow performs better in DL) but the difference to 8xMSAA isn't really a problem for me. If the 1080 Ti drops below 800€ before the new cards are out, I'll probably get one. I guess there will be some good offers during Christmas shopping time...

[J0hannes Butz]

So I swapped from my 970 to a 1080Ti FTW3... I thought that my 970 already handled what was possible within P3Dv4 as far as texture drawing, autogen etc goes, so I expected the 1080Ti to "only" give me the DL functionality.

On the 1080Ti - with my settings as on the 970 I got 30FPS at minimum but with DL enabled. I was curious if autogen settings etc. would dip my frames and they didn't really do much, so I've got a lot of autogen buildings now, full dynamic lighting at around very smooth 22-38FPS in the New York area while throwing around my A320 to stress my system as much as I could. Average FPS in that area were around 30, if I turned Fraps off, I could not tell that it was dipping below 30. Basically a full win, except for the Antialiasing.

I couldn't remember how edgy 8xMSAA looked and somewhat ignored it in testing on my 970. BUT during stress testing I found that between 2xSSAA and 8xMSAA there's virtually no difference in FPS/smoothness on my system and the "downgrade" from 4xSSAA to 2xSSAA is very acceptable for me, as Christmas is around the corner I'll probably get myself a nice 1440p monitor.

Also my concerns with overlapping dynamic lights hitting performance are not even present on the Ti, it just eats everything you throw at it.

Thanks for all your feedback, It has been pretty helpful!

[Chris Keller]

Enjoy your new hardware, Johannes. Have a good simmer year 2018!