Graphics improvement with CPU upgrade

[Strewth]

Okay. For anyone interested, this may help a bit.
I built a system at the end of last year to get back into the IL2 series after years of working away.
The specs were:
Gigabyte B550 Aorus Master AM4 ATX Motherboard.
AMD Ryzen 7 3800XT 8 Core AM4 3.9GHz CPU Processor.
Corsair Hydro Series H100x Liquid CPU Cooler.

Corsair 32GB (2x16GB) Vengeance LPX 3600MHz DDR4 RAM.

Asus GeForce RTX 3060 Ti TUF Gaming OC 8G Graphics Card.
Crucial P1 1TB 3D NAND NVMe PCIe M.2 SSD "C" drive.
Western Digital 2TB Green 2.5in SATA SSD "D" drive.
ASUS Monitor 1920 x 1080 x x60Hz.
TrackIR-5 system.
Second Hand Oculus Rift VR headset.

The moment I got the Oculus working, the poor old (new) TrackIR-5 got shelved.
The Oculus was great but some "screen door" effect was noticeable. So after researching, I ended up with a Reverb G2 headset.
This system was great and seemed to sit around 60 to 80fps with most settings on ultra, but with a couple such as distant buildings and grass lowered. It did drop to 45fps or occasionally a bit lower over cities or on the ground.

Now, some of the things that made a difference for me personally and I may not be 100% accurate on my knowledge or philosophy.
Turned off Anti Aliasing in game settings, as from what I have read, it really only smooths edges if you are using pixel settings larger than the generated pixel settings. If the graphics generate at the required pixel ratio, then AA will do extra processing to achieve nothing.
I run the game graphics on my desktop screen at 800 x 600, as it seems to make a slight difference in fps. Maybe because the card is not trying to put a "top quality image" on a screen I am not looking at.
I restart my computer and only activate the game and VR settings most times, so that I minimise background processes. This appears to make some difference.

So. I still wanted to improve my performance and GPU cards were and are a crazy price now for an upgrade, so I started reading a lot about processing and "bottle-necks", not just in the GPU, but other components such as RAM and CPU. My RAM is good without being great and the CPU was also pretty decent. Due to cost comparisons for a hopeful performance upgrade and the info on hand, I decided to upgrade my CPU and hopefully gain something here. So I bit the bullet and purchased an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16-Core 3401 Mhz, Processor.
I installed it and instantly went up to a reasonably steady 90fps with occasional drops to 85fps most times and sometimes temporary drops as low as 60 to 45fps in a complete furball. Bear in mind, I have also cranked up all of my graphics settings to ultra and max selections on everything except canopy reflections, as I am just not a fan of it. Personally I have found the CPU upgrade to have made a noticeable difference for a lesser cost than a GPU upgrade. And from what I understand about data bottle-necks, even a better card with a lesser CPU would struggle.

Another interesting thing I have noticed, is that the fps appears to vary slightly depending on aircraft type I am in and map I am playing. I have not got all the bugs out yet, but as many others have stated in the past, it is not always just a case of jamming in a bigger graphics card. Between the rest of the hardware, such as CPU and RAM, as well as tweaking in-game graphic settings, WMR (Windows Mixed Reality) settings and Steam graphic settings, amongst a heap of other things, plus every system is different, it is a challenging process. But as I said, for me personally and in my situation, the CPU upgrade was worth the time and money.

Cheers all and I hope this may assist someone else in the community.

 

 

 

Edited October 31, 2021 by Strewth

[Jaws2002]

Yep. Going from Zen2 to Zen 3 is a big performance jump in gaming. That's why i jumped to the newer one as well.

 I got over 40 fps boost in SYN_Vander's benchmark going from 3950x to 5950x. Major boost.

 

Congrats.

[Strewth]

6 hours ago, Jaws2002 said:

Yep. Going from Zen2 to Zen 3 is a big performance jump in gaming. That's why i jumped to the newer one as well.

 I got over 40 fps boost in SYN_Vander's benchmark going from 3950x to 5950x. Major boost.

 

Congrats.

Cheers Jaws2002.
I have found it strange how people still go on about GPU's, which are valid to a degree, while forgetting the CPU's.
Once the "bottle-neck" theory is acknowledged and understood, it becomes a new game.
I was also once a "GPU is for graphics" person for a long time, but after a heap of research on the subject of data having to be passed to GPU via the CPU, it all started making sense. Even the best cutting edge video card is only as good as the rest of the system feeding it.