Hello,

I'm currently flying (or rather avoiding crashes due to insufficient vRAM) on P3Dv5.
I have an i7-3770k, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB (who reads the minimum requirements for P3Dv5 and FSLabs before buying stuff, right ?) and 16GB of RAM.

So of course, 3GB of vRAM (in fact it's rather 2.3 to 2.5) is not enough. I'm looking for a GPU upgrade since I learned that P3Dv5 was more oriented towards vRAM. My CPU is very old, and I'm wondering if I can upgrade only the GPU - of if, at this point, I'd rather change everything ?

I'm thinking about upgrading to an 8GB card, for instance the GTX 1080 (8Go DDRX5). I'm not looking for extreme graphics - as much as I can afford, certainly, but I'm used to fly with all my sliders set in about the middle.
However, I've seen on thebottlenecker.com that this GPU/CPU association could cause a 25% bottleneck - whatever that means (https://pc-builds.com/calculator/Core_i7-3770K/GeForce_GTX_1080/0020Uulu/16/100). I'm not really an expert and I've also read elsewhere that this site was a joke.

So, for those who know, is it a good idea to keep the old CPU and would an 8GB vRAM card be enough to improve my experience on v5 ?

Thanks

Every 8GB GPU paired with that CPU will create a bottleneck, that will be unavoidable. It will work just fine, it will just mean that you can't use the full potential of your new GPU due to the limited CPU performance. 

It is therefore always best to upgrade both, CPU and GPU, at the same time. But if your budget doesn't allow that, then you will get at least SOME more performance with such a GPU and your VRAM crashes will stop.

I've recently come to P3Dv5 from no flight simming at all and it must be the most CPU limited thing I've ever seen. Any new Mid range card and up is never going to be the limiting factor for P3Dv5. I cannot drive my card over 66% or so in any circumstance using P3Dv5 but all 8 CPU cores will be very busy / maxed for a flight. 

As Markus said, VRAM crashes can be solved with the GPU but P3D needs an unreasonably beefy CPU for good performance. 

And how about this?

Laptop Legion 5 with AMD Ryzen 5 5600H; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (6 GB)

Please skip "laptop is not good for flightsimming" part  I know that but have no choice. Both components exceeds 3x passmark from requirements field.

 

Cheers,

&

Thanks for your inputs. I decided to change everything (considering the current prices of the GPUs) and I'm now waiting for an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 (12 Go) and 32GB of RAM.

It should do the trick