Looking to upgrade my PC for this game

[Noxos]

I bought IL-2 BOS shortly after release but was unsatisfied with my PC's performance and kind of just forgot about it for a bit. My performance was decent, but it averaged like 45-50FPS and would sometimes drop into the 25-30 zone (especially when there were lots of planes on screen) which was kind of driving me up the wall, so I just set aside for the moment. I'm about to upgrade my GPU and add some RAM though and was wondering if that will be good enough upgrade to get 60 FPS consistently and never drop below 50. IIRC back when I quit playing the engine was about to be updated (I believe this was going to coincide with the release of the FW190 A5 -- this was a while back now) which was supposedly going to improve performance as well.

 

I guess I'm mainly asking if I need to update my processor as well to get the performance I want.

 

Current rig:

 

Intel Core i5 4690K Unlocked Quad Core 3.5GHZ/3.9GHZ Processor

GeForce GTX 970 4GB

8gigs of RAM

 

I was planning on just upgrading to a 1060 and adding another 8 gigs of RAM. Will that be sufficient?

[ShamrockOneFive]

Upgrades are definitely going to help but you already have a fairly strong system so I'm curious why your performance isn't quite up to spec.

 

If you push everything to the max, yeah, that'll slow things down a bunch but the GTX 970 4GB is definitely faster than my GTX 960 2GB and I'm running on a tweaked but very playable Ultra (with about 50-60fps mostly of the time except on busy Career mode missions). Doubling the ram to 16GB is a good one for sure. Make sure you match your new RAM with the old ones to prevent any issues.

 

I don't know if there's going to be much of a difference between the 1060 and the 970 you have. Looking at this comparison (http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-970-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1060-6GB/2577vs3639), there is an edge for the 1060 to be sure but is it worth the price? I'm not so sure. A 1070 probably would be but the price is much higher too.

 

I'm not sure about the CPU. What do other folks think about it? The 4690 should still be good IMHO.

[DiscoPhil]

Especially in multiplayer I get choppy fps when there are a lot of planes around. On kuban map it is very noticeable. (WoL server with 84 players in prime time)

 

In sp career mode it runs good at 60 fps until I switch to high density setting. The ingame fps counter will show 60 fps all the time but it definately gets choppy when over the target area with a lot of stuff giong on. 

 

Overall I experienced a huge fps boost from upgrading i7 2600k to i7 8700k. If I avoid extreme situations with many planes and many ground units the game runs very fluid at stable 60 fps all the time. 

 

I would advice against upgrading to a gtx 1060. It is just a little bit faster then your gtx 970 and will not make much difference. More ram wont hurt but wont do magic. Your cpu is still good. 

 

(1080p, Ultra Settings, 4x AA, Vsync on, no motion blur, simple mirrors, max landscape detail and draw range)

+ reshade lumasharpen

 

My specs for reference: 

i7 8700k stock

gtx 970

16 gb ram 2400mhz

game installed on ssd 

 

cheers

Edited May 27, 2018 by DiscoPhil

[kendo]

What screen resolution are you using?

 

I'm a little puzzled too that you are not getting better results with what is actually quite a strong system - unless you are using 4k screen?

 

Have you actually TRIED the sim again recently? You mention performance was bad before game engine was updated. The various updates to game engine have made a big difference to performance (64 bit and DX11)

 

On face of it your system should give decent results, and like Shamrock I'm not convinced going to a 1060 would be a major improvement.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 27, 2018 by kendo

[Seb71]

There is no point in upgrading from GTX 970 to GTX 1060 (GTX 1060 6 GB, I assume), as already mentioned. The performance increase will be minimal. A real graphics card upgrade would be to something like GTX 1070.

 

You did not said what is your monitor resolution.

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

It might not be necessary to buy more ram; 8 GB is generally sufficient for Il-2. Don't buy a 1060; it will be very similar to a 970. 

 

First, find out what's causing your problems. Start by checking Task Manager to see memory and GPU usage. If your GPU is consistently hitting 100%, you can be quite certain that it should be upgraded. Show us your settings and maybe run a benchmark.

 

If it becomes clear that the GPU is the problem, get a 1070 or lower some settings. If not, investigate the CPU. 

[bubo942]

That's weird with GTX 970 what's your resolution ???? i'm actually playing on GTX 1050 Ti and having almost constant 60 fps on almost highest settings . 

[seafireliv]

4 hours ago, Noxos said:

I bought IL-2 BOS shortly after release but was unsatisfied with my PC's performance and kind of just forgot about it for a bit. My performance was decent, but it averaged like 45-50FPS and would sometimes drop into the 25-30 zone (especially when there were lots of planes on screen) which was kind of driving me up the wall, so I just set aside for the moment. I'm about to upgrade my GPU and add some RAM though and was wondering if that will be good enough upgrade to get 60 FPS consistently and never drop below 50. IIRC back when I quit playing the engine was about to be updated (I believe this was going to coincide with the release of the FW190 A5 -- this was a while back now) which was supposedly going to improve performance as well.

 

I guess I'm mainly asking if I need to update my processor as well to get the performance I want.

 

Current rig:

 

Intel Core i5 4690K Unlocked Quad Core 3.5GHZ/3.9GHZ Processor

GeForce GTX 970 4GB

8gigs of RAM

 

I was planning on just upgrading to a 1060 and adding another 8 gigs of RAM. Will that be sufficient?

 

I had the same cpu as you but had 16 gig instead of 8. The extra 8 makes a big difference and is a great way to boost performance without spending too much. You could probably get by just doing that.

 

However, if you intend and can afford it, upgrade your cpu before paying out on any extra gig. And if you decide to upgrade your cpu, make it a good one. This will likely mean you`ll need a new Motherboard too which will dictate what kind of ram you get (that`s why I said don`t get any ram for present system yet).

 

On the graphics card, I don`t know what the 970 is like, but I have a 1060 and it did the old system fine. To be honest the graphics card is probably the least improvement in this case and can stay on the back burner.

 

Ok, so to sum up:

 

Either:

 

1. Just upgrade your memory and stay with what you have. Perhaps go to a new graphics card, but a good one so you won`t have to change again.

or:

2. Go all out and get a better cpu, memory, motherboard. Get a decent graphics card later.

 

I myself recently upgraded to a Ryzen 2 7200X (probably a little overkill a 2600 would probably do the job). Now Ryzens are good if want a cpu that will do more than just gaming. If you want a pure gamer cpu go for one of the high Intel i7 jobs. But Ryzen does play games surprisingly smoothly even though the numbers indicate it should be worse. I also get a max 130 on BOS with it dipping to around 70-90 at worse according to BOS`s numbers. A new Motherboard for the cpu and  new DDR4 ram, which you`ll likely be needing if you upgraded big. I`ll bet you`re on DDR3 ram which won`t work on the new MBs.

 

Remember, you can sell your 4690k cpu (and maybe your old Mb and ram) for a reasonable price to offset your costs as I did.

 

Hope that helps.

Edited May 27, 2018 by seafireliv

[DD_Perfesser]

Still doesn't sound like he's getting the most out of what he has already.  I suggest opening up the windows search box and pulling up the resource monitor.

There are tabs there to view CPU, memory and disk activity. Under the "monitor" tab hit select processors, see that you're viewing all.

The sidebar shows activity as a graph for the last minute.  If you only have one screen I guess you can tab out of the game quick and look for things like disk activity maxed out, ram use maxed out .... maxed out or no activity on some of your CPU cores(parked cores).

 

Turned out my bottleneck was solved by an SSD.

[chiliwili69]

It is really good to have many people trying to help you here, each with their own recommendations based on their experiences with their own settings, CPUs, GPUs, RAM speeds, etc.

The intention of all of them is good, but in order to measure an improvement the performance should be measured before/after the upgrade with same settings and EXACTLY same scenario.

 

Since the VR is very demanding, we ellaborated a common track flight record to meassure the performance in VR, but it also was used for monitor (why not).

https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/29322-measuring-rig-performance-common-baseline-for-il-2-v3/

 

All these results were compiled in this public spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gJmnz_nVxI6_dG_UYNCCpZVK2-f8NBy-y1gia77Hu_k

 

There were several test of the i5-4960K in VR (none of them tested in monitor), but I don´t know why, this particular CPU is not performing in IL-2 VR as expected (based in the passmark single-thread performance).

 

I would not recommend to upgrade from 970 to 1060. Neither going from 8Gb RAM to 16Gb (we have demonstrated with tests that 8Gb is more than enough for IL-2), it could be better to go from a low speed RAM to high speed RAM.

 

Before taking any decision, please do the following:

1. Tell us your monitor resolution

2. Tell us your RAM speed.

3. Tell us your usual settings

4. Run the IL-2 benchmark (for monitor)

[dburne]

6 hours ago, Noxos said:

I bought IL-2 BOS shortly after release but was unsatisfied with my PC's performance and kind of just forgot about it for a bit. My performance was decent, but it averaged like 45-50FPS and would sometimes drop into the 25-30 zone (especially when there were lots of planes on screen) which was kind of driving me up the wall, so I just set aside for the moment. I'm about to upgrade my GPU and add some RAM though and was wondering if that will be good enough upgrade to get 60 FPS consistently and never drop below 50. IIRC back when I quit playing the engine was about to be updated (I believe this was going to coincide with the release of the FW190 A5 -- this was a while back now) which was supposedly going to improve performance as well.

 

I guess I'm mainly asking if I need to update my processor as well to get the performance I want.

 

Current rig:

 

Intel Core i5 4690K Unlocked Quad Core 3.5GHZ/3.9GHZ Processor

GeForce GTX 970 4GB

8gigs of RAM

 

I was planning on just upgrading to a 1060 and adding another 8 gigs of RAM. Will that be sufficient?

 

I suggest going with at least a 1070 card if you can.

Do you have a decent cooler on the that cpu? The K series processors are very easy to overclock, could probably get it to up around 4.3 to maybe even 4.5 GHz.

For this game, 8Gb of ram is probably fine. For some others more would be beneficial ( always better to have too much as not enough).

 

Have you tried the game lately? Noticed you mentioned it had been a while , you said the engine was about to be updated. If that was when they moved from DX9 to DX11 that really helped performance also, so if you have not yet you should see what you are getting now.

[ShamrockOneFive]

On 5/27/2018 at 9:08 AM, DiscoPhil said:

Especially in multiplayer I get choppy fps when there are a lot of planes around. On kuban map it is very noticeable. (WoL server with 84 players in prime time)

 

In sp career mode it runs good at 60 fps until I switch to high density setting. The ingame fps counter will show 60 fps all the time but it definately gets choppy when over the target area with a lot of stuff giong on. 

 

 

I think these seem to be issues with the game itself. Choppy in multiplayer? Yep, it seems to do something with multiple aircraft being around. Oddly, when I record it in a track file I get the same drag on performance. So very curious.

 

I don't think anyone has a computer right now that can handle the high density setting without a performance drop. If they do, I'd like to know what monster they have.