PC Graphics Card Advice

Discussion in 'TSW General Discussion' started by hightower, Jan 11, 2020.

  1. hightower

    hightower Guest

    Hey all.

    I’m after some advice if I may.

    I’m looking at buying a new graphics card, mainly (alright, entirely) to run TS & TSW. I’ve got an i5 7600K which I can’t really change, and currently have an RX580 which is ok but isn’t really cutting the mustard. TS runs like a total dog on it.

    I’m totally out of the loop with cards...I want one that will be able to take anything TSW can throw at it now and in the future, but don’t want to spend money on something that’s way too powerful for TSW. I’ll be running it in an eGPU.

    Any ideas where to go?

    Many thanks
     
  2. Callum B.

    Callum B. Well-Known Member

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    What resolution do you play at? What's your budget? Can you hold off until Nvidia announces Ampere?

    Regardless, my recommendations would be a GTX 1070ti or RTX 2070(S) given their relatively alluring eBay prices. But in all honesty, I'd be more worried about your 4C/4T CPU than about your GTX 1060ti-esque GPU if you only play at 1080p.
     
  3. hightower

    hightower Guest

    Hey

    I play at 1440p on TSW, and as high as I can get away with on TS, mainly because any AA kills the FPS.

    I find in both games the CPU is being about 30-40% utilised whereas the GPU is often completely maxed out. That makes me believe the GPU is the issue.

    I was considering the GeForce GTX 1080 ti which seems to be available 2nd hand at reasonable prices. My budget can be whatever, but I’m well aware TSW doesn’t require a RTX 2080...and I only really use my desktop for these two games.
     
  4. Callum B.

    Callum B. Well-Known Member

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    Yes, a RX580 would definitely max out on TSW at 1440p. My recommendations still stand for the sub-$400 range, however yes the 1080ti is going for a relatively nice price. I would still hold out if you can bear it for the new GPUs coming this year. Hopefully either the new ones will suit your needs accordingly for a nice price or they will help to reduce the cost of Pascal/Turing cards.
    Unfortunately I can't recommend anything from AMD like the RX5700(XT) simply because the software capability and driver stability is not there yet.

    Cheers!
     
  5. TrainSim-Daniel

    TrainSim-Daniel Active Member

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    Hi Hightower,

    Not all external GPU solutions are able to make use of a GPU's maximum performance so I'd recommend checking with GPUZ to see how much bandwidth your getting as upgrading your GPU may result in only limited gains without first upgrading your enclosure.
     
  6. hightower

    hightower Guest

    Hi Dan,

    Thanks very much. I’m in a bit of a quandary, because I only use my desktop (aside from admin, music, video editing etc.) to play TS & TSW.

    The issue is that it’s an iMac and I play through bootcamp. As a result I’m very limited in how I can upgrade it. I could go and buy a new PC but I don’t know where to pitch it spec wise to give me a future proof & high FPS TS/TSW experience without buying a power overhead that I’m never likely to use. It’s also the more expensive option.

    That leaves me the option of an eGPU. I’ve been looking at the Thunderbolt 3 Razor Core X with a 1080 ti which I could get for around £550 but as you say, I’m not 100% certain how much performance I’d lose using the internal screen. A fundamental issue is that TS just runs appallingly on the current machine, and as soon as I add AA the FPS dies. I’ve been playing it in 4K with the AA dialled down but I’ll only ever get 35fps max. It’s mostly in the 20s.

    TSW sits between 30-60FPS but as time goes by I expect that to get more demanding and my machine to fall further off the pace.

    It’s a toughie ;-)
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 14, 2020
  7. TrainSim-Daniel

    TrainSim-Daniel Active Member

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    Hi Hightower,
    Whilst a GTX 1080TI would certainly power through the game you'd then find the bottleneck moves over to your CPU.

    TSW, as well as other upcoming simulators, are likely to become more CPU demanding in the future as well as working better across multiple cores so you may want to look at a dedicated desktop with something like a Ryzen 5/i7 CPU as these have 6/8 cores 12/8 threads for games to work with compared to the 4 cores you'll be limited to within your Mac.

    For now, however, I'd benchmark your system and compare it to other RX 580 benchmarks to compare just how much you're able to extract out of it with your current build:
    https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/AMD-RX-580/Rating/3923
     
  8. hightower

    hightower Guest

    I've used that before...i'm not sure what's going on but I've just reinstalled Windows onto the main drive to use my SSD for the Steam Library and just run it. My graphics card is performing way down on where it was before with the exact same driver. I thought I was going mad...so I appear to have actually made things worse!
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 14, 2020
  9. kalteVollmilch

    kalteVollmilch Well-Known Member

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    I honestly believe something of your setup is going funny.
    I am currently using a RX480, and can run the game quite fine in 2560*1080. While it has less pixels than 1440p, it is not that significantly less.
    Even more interesting probably is the fact, that I can run TSW on medium settings on a Surface Book 2 with a GTX1060 (mobile version) in 3240*2160 (close to 4K).
    And if that GPU is capable of this, your RX580, which is more powerful, should run TSW on 1440p just fine.

    If you are sure your system is running as good as it can, I too would suggest waiting. AMD is probably releasing its big Navi GPU sometime this year and nVidia also will be releasing a new GPU generation, thereby dropping prices of older graphics cards or releasing some good budget cards.
     
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  10. TrainSim-Daniel

    TrainSim-Daniel Active Member

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    The first thing to try would be to install something like HW monitor so you can monitor your CPU and GPU clock speeds to ensure both are running at what you'd expect and that your GPU is hitting something like 100% usage:
    https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html
    It could just be that Windows has installed the basic driver for your GPU so make sure to download the latest one directly from the AMD website just incase.
     
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  11. hightower

    hightower Guest

    What settings are you using?

    I’ve got it running in Ultra, 1440p & 100% screen size with only very minimal .ini changes.

    Dan, I use the latest AMD drivers from bootcampdrivers.com - he alters the latest AMD drivers for use with bootcamp because the AMD / Apple offering is woeful. ps Userbenchmark has my GPU performing in the 99% percentile.

    I know I dropped the ball a bit buying this thing. I’d been out of PCs for so long I got sucked in by it wanting the best of both worlds. It’s great in many respects, the 5K screen is awesome and MacOS eats Windows for breakfast for everything but gaming, but at ~ £2200 I could have bought a pretty serious PC. I won’t make the same mistake again!
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 14, 2020
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  12. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    If the GPU is the dog then it most likely is the culprit as I held off for ages changing my Nvidia 980 which was a powerhouse, I changed to AMD, RX590 MSI cooling, with the similar specs to a 1080 or so, 256bit memory bandwidth and a decent amount of clock speed.

    I run TSW on max settings, resolution is same as yours and after a little fiddling with the screen percentage and overall adjustments to a new GPU it ran, and is running fine. I can see now that the HDD although slow, didn’t help matters, but, my i74GHZ with 32GB RAM works a charm. All I need now is an SSD M2 for the boot drive and a dedicated HDD for games, was told to steer clear of SSDs for games (not open for debate, take it up with my mate)

    Good luck but I will never go back to Nvidia again. I haven’t once had any silly errors in the event viewer and its as silent and anything, all less than a fortune for bells and whistles
     
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  13. LastTrainToClarksville

    LastTrainToClarksville Well-Known Member

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    Since LT586 has mentioned the Screen Percentage adjustment, I'd like to know exactly what that is and how it affects fps before I just start "playing" with it. Thanks.
     
  14. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    I think, it’s the amount of detail shown on screen at any given time (probably) as it caused the motion blur to freeze in a blur when panning around the scenery, as I like to play with it on, as with it off its not as smooth for me. Someone else will probably know better than me, bur when I adjusted it it resolved that issue
     
  15. hightower

    hightower Guest

    It’s pretty straight forward, you’re artificially changing the resolution on your screen. If you have a 4K monitor for example, and your computer can hack it, you can play in 4K. If you only have a 1080p monitor then you’re snookered, unless you increase the screen percentage.

    So in theory you can obtain a 4K resolution by setting the screen resolution to 200% with the resolution at 1080p. 1080 x 2.0 = 2160. Similarly, 1080 x 1.33 (133%) would give you roughly QuadHD at 1440. It works the same way should you wish to lower the resolution. It upscales the picture to the higher resolution then squashes it back down to fit your screen. I think it’s pretty harsh on performance.

    You can tinker away all you like. As long as you put it back to 100% when you’re done everything will be as before.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jan 14, 2020
  16. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    Any decent 4K monitor manufactuers out there (Sorry to go off topic but while it's in discussion) ASUS I know of but in terms of monitors, I'll need one that if you sit away from the monitor you can still see it.
     
  17. kalteVollmilch

    kalteVollmilch Well-Known Member

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    Please open a thread for this. Then peoeple will know about the existence of your question and this thread does not go offtopic
     
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  18. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    I didn't know you were a Moderator, apologies.
     
  19. LastTrainToClarksville

    LastTrainToClarksville Well-Known Member

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    What is this rant supposed to mean? My OP did not ask about monitors, much less about opinions of them. Your apology is not acceptable.
     
  20. LT586

    LT586 Well-Known Member

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    LastTraintoClarksville I know you like to argue so I'm not here for that. Chill please. Thanks
     

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