What should I upgrade first?

[cmorris975]

Hi all,

 

I've got an old-ish Dell XPS 8900 that can run IL-2 on a Rift CV1 fairly well, but it suffers from a fair amount of microstutters and ghosting too.  I'd like to reduce that but am not sure what I should upgrade first.

 

The PCs specs are: i7 6700k overclocked to 4.2 ghz, 24 GB of DDR4 RAM running at 2133 mhz, a Samsung PM851 M.2 SSD drive that IL-2 runs from (seems pretty old and slow), and a Seasonic 620W power supply that I installed to power a 1070 ti card that I bought that is overclocked quite a bit but runs stable and cool enough.

 

The easiest thing to do I think would be to upgrade the graphics card.  I worry that the rest of my 4 year old hardware would still get in the way though, so I am thinking about upgrading the whole system first and then just putting the 1070 ti in it for now.  I would try to get away from the big PC manufacturers as their proprietary connectors and motherboard forms can be annoying.  I'm not a full on computer nut, but I did grow up with them and have some IT experience, so I can work with the nuts and bolts if I have to.

 

I don't really want to spend a ton of money, if I can help it, but IL-2 is a pretty great game and I will make some sacrifices to get it running better.

 

Thanks for your time and thoughts!  The game *does* run pretty well already.  A lot of the time in career missions I am getting 80-90 FPS with medium settings (shadows low, 4k textures on, medium clouds, distant buildings on, etc.).  As long as I don't turn the in game map on or icons - it's pretty good.  Big furballs in the career missions will cause some limited ghosting though, and the microstutters are ever present if you look out the windows and watch the trees pass by at low level.

 

Chris

Edited May 6, 2020 by cmorris975

[Alonzo]

You should get the PC to tell you what the bottleneck is, rather than guessing (please read this in some tone of voice where it doesn't sound like I'm being a dick, if at all possible!).

 

To do this, install Oculus Tray Tool, then set "Visible HUD" to "Application render timing" and fly some stuff. This will show you the CPU frame time and the GPU frame time. For the CV1, you need 11ms or under on both (both individually, not added together) to hit 90 FPS. Play with the settings a bit and you'll see which things affect CPU and/or GPU frame time.

 

I strongly suspect that your CPU is holding you back from hitting 90 FPS, rather than the GPU, but it could be both. In terms of upgrades, I'd probably do the CPU/mobo/RAM first, then later the GPU. Drive speed doesn't matter as long as it's an SSD (ignore people telling you NVMe does anything for IL2, it doesn't).

 

For IL2 in VR, you want the highest Intel CPU clock you can get and the fastest Mhz memory that will all run nice and stable. That means a decent motherboard that supports overclocking and fast RAM. On a budget I'd suggest 9600K, 240/280mm AIO cooler, 3600 Mhz CAS 16 RAM, and a motherboard where the reviews say "overclocks well".

 

Zero cost options include installing OpenComposite to replace SteamVR if you have not already done so, and tweaking graphics settings by looking at Fenris' guide. If I were using your rig, I might try putting up with a constant 45 FPS ASW and force-enable ASW in Oculus Tray Tool, then I'd be getting a constant framerate. That might be less jarring than the framerate shifts that the auto mode does. It would also enable you to increase the settings a bit, as the CPU and GPU will have headroom to enable more eye candy.

[chiliwili69]

As Alonzo said, I think it would be good to know at game play what are frametimes for GPU and CPU.

There is also a cheap tool (4$) called fpsVR which nicely displays frametimes and many other information while you play in VR. You can run that with IL-2 and see when and why you are below 90Hz.

 

Before buying a new MoBo/CPU/RAM/Windows I would give a last chance to your CPU.

Running a 6700K at 4.2 GHz is not considered overclocking. It is just the Turbo freq. OC is when you go beyond.

There is people in this forum running the 6700K at 4.8GHz with an AIO water cooler.

Since the AIO cooler can be reused for your future PC (whenever you upgrade) I think it could be worth to buy first a good AIO cooler (which fits into your case).

I was doing that 2 years ago with my 4790K and my kraken x-52 240mm cooler is doing a great job. Zero problems.

This was my OC story: https://forum.il2sturmovik.com/topic/29881-overclocking-a-4790k-for-better-bos-performance/

Remember also to set AVX offset at zero in BIOS.

 

Whatever CPU you buy it is worth to invest some time to do simple OC since IL-2 VR greatly benefit from it.

 

[Gomoto]

(Regarding the low level tree stuttering)

Look out the side window of a fast car or train and watch something very near to the vehicle. There is some stuttering in real life as well ?

 

At least it is a nauseating experience in both cases ?

Edited May 7, 2020 by Gomoto

[cmorris975]

21 hours ago, Alonzo said:

You should get the PC to tell you what the bottleneck is, rather than guessing (please read this in some tone of voice where it doesn't sound like I'm being a dick, if at all possible!).

 

To do this, install Oculus Tray Tool, then set "Visible HUD" to "Application render timing" and fly some stuff. This will show you the CPU frame time and the GPU frame time. For the CV1, you need 11ms or under on both (both individually, not added together) to hit 90 FPS. Play with the settings a bit and you'll see which things affect CPU and/or GPU frame time.

 

I strongly suspect that your CPU is holding you back from hitting 90 FPS, rather than the GPU, but it could be both. In terms of upgrades, I'd probably do the CPU/mobo/RAM first, then later the GPU. Drive speed doesn't matter as long as it's an SSD (ignore people telling you NVMe does anything for IL2, it doesn't).

 

For IL2 in VR, you want the highest Intel CPU clock you can get and the fastest Mhz memory that will all run nice and stable. That means a decent motherboard that supports overclocking and fast RAM. On a budget I'd suggest 9600K, 240/280mm AIO cooler, 3600 Mhz CAS 16 RAM, and a motherboard where the reviews say "overclocks well".

 

Zero cost options include installing OpenComposite to replace SteamVR if you have not already done so, and tweaking graphics settings by looking at Fenris' guide. If I were using your rig, I might try putting up with a constant 45 FPS ASW and force-enable ASW in Oculus Tray Tool, then I'd be getting a constant framerate. That might be less jarring than the framerate shifts that the auto mode does. It would also enable you to increase the settings a bit, as the CPU and GPU will have headroom to enable more eye candy.

 

Thanks Alonzo and everyone else.

 

I tried loading up OTT and looking at the GPU and CPU frames.  They were more or less the same hovering between 6.5 and 13+.  Mostly they were in the 8-10 range with spikes above.  Enroute to target the GPU was around .6 FPS higher.  Once the fight started the CPU started to exceed the GPU by around the same amount.

 

Going by that, it seems the best bet would be to upgrade both.  Not that surprising.  I think I will try that AIO cooler first - assuming it will fit in the Dell XPS 8900 case (I think it will) and then work on a new graphics card next.  Maybe the 2080 Super card prices will come down a little.  The 2070 Super looks good too but I have a habit of being cheap with purchases and then I just end up having to replace things all the time as they get outmoded or I just wish I had of gone for the pricier model.

 

Weirdly enough, going to 45 FPS locked in OTT did not really help anything.  Changing graphics options to the lowest settings did not do much either.  

 

Thanks for ideas though guys!  I think you got me on a feasible upgrade path that won't break the bank.

 

Chris

[Alonzo]

16 hours ago, cmorris975 said:

 I think I will try that AIO cooler first - assuming it will fit in the Dell XPS 8900 case (I think it will) and then work on a new graphics card next.

 

Weirdly enough, going to 45 FPS locked in OTT did not really help anything.  Changing graphics options to the lowest settings did not do much either. 

 

Definitely try OCing the CPU. I didn't realize that it had more headroom, like Chili pointed out. It doesn't seem like an extra few hundred Mhz would make that much difference but our benchmarking shows it *really* does. Every 100 Mhz gives an improvement. Same with RAM, actually, if you can push that a little higher it will help. 2133 RAM might run at 2400 with no issue. Overclock both separately, though, so you know if you're pushing CPU or GPU too hard. To test stability, I recommend an overnight run of Prime95 using the "large" FFT preset. This exercises the memory and the CPU and seems (for me) to be an accurate test for IL2 stability.

 

The 45 ASW lock won't really help anything other than giving you a more consistent experience. 45 interpolated to 90 is always going to look bad when things are moving fast past your field of view (looking down at trees for example) but because you can tune the settings for enough headroom, you'll always be getting that rather than sometimes 45 interpolated, sometimes 90. Even after playing the game for 18 months I still flit between those two settings because OMG eye candy if I only need to make 45.

[Barnacles]

23 minutes ago, Alonzo said:

 

Definitely try OCing the CPU. I didn't realize that it had more headroom, like Chili pointed out. It doesn't seem like an extra few hundred Mhz would make that much difference but our benchmarking shows it *really* does. Every 100 Mhz gives an improvement. Same with RAM, actually, if you can push that a little higher it will help. 2133 RAM might run at 2400 with no issue. Overclock both separately, though, so you know if you're pushing CPU or GPU too hard. To test stability, I recommend an overnight run of Prime95 using the "large" FFT preset. This exercises the memory and the CPU and seems (for me) to be an accurate test for IL2 stability.

 

The 45 ASW lock won't really help anything other than giving you a more consistent experience. 45 interpolated to 90 is always going to look bad when things are moving fast past your field of view (looking down at trees for example) but because you can tune the settings for enough headroom, you'll always be getting that rather than sometimes 45 interpolated, sometimes 90. Even after playing the game for 18 months I still flit between those two settings because OMG eye candy if I only need to make 45.

Is there any way of overclocking an Intel CPU that isn't a 'k' model?

[Alonzo]

8 hours ago, 71st_AH_Barnacles said:

Is there any way of overclocking an Intel CPU that isn't a 'k' model?

not usually. You can sometimes set the bclk to 102.9 MHz to get like 3% extra out of it, and some motherboards let you set “multi core performance enhancement” which will run the cores all at the top speed (rather than just one core). 

[cmorris975]

Tried some new things today that definitely helped.  No hardware changes yet, but I've got it so I can play the big stock missions with 24+ planes in them with much less of the plane ghosting.  Maybe 80-90% less, which really makes a difference.  I've done so many tweaks here and there that it gets hard to pin down what helped, but one thing definitely added a few frames per second and sadly it was the "sharpen" option in IL2's graphics settings.  I say "sadly" because I am sorry to see it go, but it really did help my frames quite a bit. 

 

I was playing some very busy missions low to the ground over airfields with a tons of planes furballing all around.  There are still small instances of ghosting, but they are really quick and not enough to worry about.  The planes aren't splitting in two the vast majority of the time, just the occasional little "smear" of a plane's image.  Most of the time it is butter-smooth.  It's very playable.

 

I've still got some quality settings going too, such as medium clouds and shadows, 4k textures, 2x aliasing, etc., so it still looks pleasing, if a bit blurred, from the CV1 and the lack of using "sharpen".  

 

The three other things of note that I did was to turn off distant buildings, change OTT supersampling from 0 to 1 and setup my Oculus again as I was afraid that my CPU might be getting hit from Oculus tracking errors possibly.  Not sure if any of those did anything as I did not test them.  The "sharpen" is easy to test as you do not even have to restart the game after you toggle it.

 

The game works much more smoothly in VR now though, and that's the point.  And my specs are less than impressive too, so I'm happy. 

 

I still am going to put a new fan on my CPU and play around with that as I've never done it and it sounds like a fun project.  Hopefully I will get some more MHZ out of it and maybe even be able to turn sharpen back on.  I was very close to buying a 9700k system today with 16 GB of 3200 RAM but I just didn't want to end up buying a new computer for one game when I already have a quite fast system by most people's standards (not gamers, haha).

 

I'll let you know how it goes with the fan once I get it and install it.

 

Chris

 

EDIT:  I guess I can't do the new CPU fan because of the Dell motherboard.  Apparently the BIOS looks for the Dell fan on startup and will throw an error if one is not connected.  That'll teach me to buy computers from these major manufacturers without researching them for upgrade-ability.

 

 

 

Edited May 10, 2020 by cmorris975

[chiliwili69]

talking about graph settings, here you have a table with the impact of every option in monitor for a PC which is not constrained by GPU. So the impact is on just CPU.

This could be then used as a guidance for IL-2 VR in CPU limited PCs.

 

[cmorris975]

1 hour ago, chiliwili69 said:

talking about graph settings, here you have a table with the impact of every option in monitor for a PC which is not constrained by GPU. So the impact is on just CPU.

This could be then used as a guidance for IL-2 VR in CPU limited PCs.

 

 

Awesome chart, Chiliwili69.  Thanks for that.  It lines up with my experience.

 

I have to wonder if the resetting up of my Rift sensors might have been a big part of what helped me.  I didn't test before and after though, and I'm not going to mess with anything now that I got everything working well!  Time to just enjoy the sim now :).

 

One thing though - my processor is running hot now.  Saw spikes up to 86F on MSI Afterburner.  Since it appears the Dell BIOS needs the stock fan in place to start up properly, what are my options?  I could clean everything out well, but how about re-applying thermal paste?  I have no experience with this heat management stuff.

Edited May 10, 2020 by cmorris975

[SCG_OpticFlow]

On 5/6/2020 at 2:41 PM, cmorris975 said:

Hi all,

 

I've got an old-ish Dell XPS 8900 that can run IL-2 on a Rift CV1 fairly well, but it suffers from a fair amount of microstutters and ghosting too.  I'd like to reduce that but am not sure what I should upgrade first.

 

The PCs specs are: i7 6700k overclocked to 4.2 ghz, 24 GB of DDR4 RAM running at 2133 mhz, a Samsung PM851 M.2 SSD drive that IL-2 runs from (seems pretty old and slow), and a Seasonic 620W power supply that I installed to power a 1070 ti card that I bought that is overclocked quite a bit but runs stable and cool enough.

 

The easiest thing to do I think would be to upgrade the graphics card.  I worry that the rest of my 4 year old hardware would still get in the way though, so I am thinking about upgrading the whole system first and then just putting the 1070 ti in it for now.  I would try to get away from the big PC manufacturers as their proprietary connectors and motherboard forms can be annoying.  I'm not a full on computer nut, but I did grow up with them and have some IT experience, so I can work with the nuts and bolts if I have to.

 

I don't really want to spend a ton of money, if I can help it, but IL-2 is a pretty great game and I will make some sacrifices to get it running better.

 

Thanks for your time and thoughts!  The game *does* run pretty well already.  A lot of the time in career missions I am getting 80-90 FPS with medium settings (shadows low, 4k textures on, medium clouds, distant buildings on, etc.).  As long as I don't turn the in game map on or icons - it's pretty good.  Big furballs in the career missions will cause some limited ghosting though, and the microstutters are ever present if you look out the windows and watch the trees pass by at low level.

 

Chris

 

IMO first replace the RAM with faster one. Slow RAM would bottleneck the entire system and cause stutters under heavy load. You could also reuse it later when you move on to more modern CPU/motherboard. DDR5 is not coming to gaming computers for at least 2-3 more years.

 

PS Just looked up your Dell and it seems like the RAM speed is fixed to 2133 even if you put faster modules

Edited May 10, 2020 by OpticFlow

[chiliwili69]

2 hours ago, cmorris975 said:

One thing though - my processor is running hot now.  Saw spikes up to 86F on MSI Afterburner.  Since it appears the Dell BIOS needs the stock fan in place to start up properly, what are my options?  I could clean everything out well, but how about re-applying thermal paste?  I have no experience with this heat management stuff.

I suppose you mean 86 Celsius.

 

I think you can replace the stock fan (intel or whatever) by a better large aircooler or better a water AIO. 

All motherboards has connectors to power and also control the CPU cooler.

There are many videos explaining how to apply thermal paste, it is a simple thing as far as you don´t put too much.

[cmorris975]

6 hours ago, OpticFlow said:

 

IMO first replace the RAM with faster one. Slow RAM would bottleneck the entire system and cause stutters under heavy load. You could also reuse it later when you move on to more modern CPU/motherboard. DDR5 is not coming to gaming computers for at least 2-3 more years.

 

PS Just looked up your Dell and it seems like the RAM speed is fixed to 2133 even if you put faster modules

Yeah, I wanted to upgrade the RAM as a cheap option but got the same impression about Dell effectively not allowing it.  I didn’t realize all these issues as far as upgrading when I bought the Dell.

6 hours ago, chiliwili69 said:

I suppose you mean 86 Celsius.

 

I think you can replace the stock fan (intel or whatever) by a better large aircooler or better a water AIO. 

All motherboards has connectors to power and also control the CPU cooler.

There are many videos explaining how to apply thermal paste, it is a simple thing as far as you don´t put too much.

Yes, I meant 86C.  I have read posts in the Dell forum stating that you cannot upgrade the CPU fan because Dell’s BIOS will “fault”.  Not sure if that would prevent booting or just be an annoyance.  I see videos of people installing new CPU fans in my exact system on YouTube though.  It’s confusing.

Edited May 10, 2020 by cmorris975