Classic British Flight Sim

Ok I am moving out of Dino land and have installed FSX acceleration plus Orbyx textures, its looking pretty good on my modest PC ideal for VFR only I think will hang onto FS9 for the heavies
Now I run a GTX260 card works well but having upped my RAM to 8gb I think the next move is the video card, not wanting to spend a lot just yet until I revamp the PC I am looking at a GTX560TI on eBay, what do you knowledgeable guys think, will this give me a boost on the graphics side, will I notice much difference??
Cheers Tony

A 560 should generally be fine for FSX, although it may struggle a bit if you crank up the anti-aliasing, especially with a lot of cloud. I used to run a 460 and was quite happy with that.

Hi Tony,

Try this with your existing setup:

With FPS displayed in a window (shift and ZZ), resize it to a very small window size (note that the FPS text will appear to shrink also as you're resizing, but will then revert back to a readable size once you've stopped resizing the window). If the FPS value goes up as you make the window smaller, you're GPU-bound and a better/faster graphics card will be of benefit. If the frame rate does not go up, you're CPU-bound and a higher-performance graphics card won't do you any good.

Nev

As usual some good advice, thanks guys for your thoughts so far, I will try the screen test

Did the test and I am GPU bound it would seem

On the strength of that test.. you'll still be GPU-bound with a 560Ti Tony. I've run a pair of 560's in 2 pc's for years (1 in each) and they were good in their day giving good performance for the money. There are still a lot of them being used they're not what you'd call cutting edge these days.
ATB
DaveB

I ran FSX (Accel and Steam) for years on a GTX 460 with no issues so you should do OK on a GTX 560 TI. I recently upgraded to a GTX960 (OC'd from the factory) and I saw a little improvement in FSX but a big difference in other sims (mostly driving sims and ARMA 2 and 3).

I've found this helpful in the past when trying to get through all weird and wonderful naming they use....

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/

HTH, Paul

Tako_Kichi wrote:I ran FSX (Accel and Steam) for years on a GTX 460 with no issues so you should do OK on a GTX 560 TI. I recently upgraded to a GTX960 (OC'd from the factory) and I saw a little improvement in FSX but a big difference in other sims (mostly driving sims and ARMA 2 and 3).

FSX is very heavily CPU dependant, so powerful GPU's are not likely to make much difference. Things like anti-aliasing will improve with a better GPU, but frame rates are unlikely to change.
Lockheed Martin have moved a lot of processing for P3D from the CPU to the GPU, so a greater improvement would be seen here.
Very recent games/sims are heavily GPU dependant and therefore this becomes more important than the CPU.

Regards

Kevin

Kevin Farnell wrote:

Tako_Kichi wrote:I ran FSX (Accel and Steam) for years on a GTX 460 with no issues so you should do OK on a GTX 560 TI. I recently upgraded to a GTX960 (OC'd from the factory) and I saw a little improvement in FSX but a big difference in other sims (mostly driving sims and ARMA 2 and 3).

FSX is very heavily CPU dependant, so powerful GPU's are not likely to make much difference. Things like anti-aliasing will improve with a better GPU, but frame rates are unlikely to change.
Lockheed Martin have moved a lot of processing for P3D from the CPU to the GPU, so a greater improvement would be seen here.
Very recent games/sims are heavily GPU dependant and therefore this becomes more important than the CPU.

Regards

Kevin

Hi Kevin,
I'm very ignorant when it comes to these things, but Nev's tip seems to counter what you feel.
Are you going on what you thought, or on solid evidence?
I'm not arguing with you, simply admitting confusion over what's being put forward.
I would certainly like to know the real answer myself, as I've been known to throw money at "improvements" which don't actually help me.