Impressive video and FPS. Could you tell me what upgrades you made?

Sure. It was an expensive past couple of weeks though.

Intel i7 4770K currently OC'd to 4.3Ghz
16GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1866 Mhz (not overclocked yet)
ASUS Z87-PRO motherboard
EVGA 780 GTX TI Superclocked
plus a new black tower to put it in.



Still using my Intel 80 GB SSD for a boot drive.
Western Digital 300 GB VelociRaptor drive for sims / games
1TB Western Digital Caviar Black for standard file storage, etc.

I plan to get a G-Sync monitor once they become available in at least 28" size. That will kill screen tearing issues without needing vertical sync turned on...which seems to cause micro-stutters at the high end sometimes. I will see what the reviews say first though.

Hellshade we have very comperable systems so I have a few questions.

I have a new Asus 144Hz monitor arriving tomorrow which I can't wait to test but I noticed that you were getting a lot of FPS above 60 and was wondering if you had disabled VSync or were using a faster than 60Hz monitor?

Here is my system:

Windows 7
Intel i5 3570 OC to 4.3Ghz
Asrock Z77 Extreme4 Mobo
EVGA GTX 780 Ti Superclocked - (and I Overcloked the GPU even further to over 1175Mhz base!)
16GB of Corsair Vengeance 1866 DDR3 RAM
2 - 256GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD's (one for OS and one for games)
2 - WD 300 GB VelociRaptor 10k RPM drives running in RAID 0+1 (for my older games, apps etc...)
1 - 2TB Storage Drive (for Porn)
2 - Samsung 27" Monitors (one which is being replaced tomorrow with a Asus VG278HE 144Hz 3D LCD monitor)
CMStorm Case with lots of cooling and LED's!

Even with this powerhouse of a system, I don't think I have ever gotten some of the frame rates I see you getting. While it does run for me pretty much locked at 60, I saw yours spike to over 100 and I don't think I have ever gotten that high.

I am going to do some more testing because I think you and I have about the two fastest systems here and would like to get some good head to head benchmarks numbers. If you are interested, lets chat about coming up with a baseline of video and game settings so we can get a true apples to apples compare.

Thanks!

Madmatt

Shame on you for that "rats nest" of wiring.

I bet your mechanic would get really pissed at you if you kept your kite in that condition

Excellent flying.

plug_nickel

Here is an interesting tidbit of info for any of those with Nvidia cards. While doing some benchmarking tonight I was playing around with different Nvidia settings in their drive control panel and oddly, I could never get my FPS over 60, even though I had turned off Vsync in my global profile. On a hunch I decided to check to see what my specific game profiles showed.

While I did have a profile created in the past for CFS3.exe, I had been told recently that for WOFF at least, it didnt work. That seemed to make sense because I always did all my graphics tweaking with Nividia Inspector and modified a custom base profile that I had been using. Too be honest, I never really checked to see if what I had been told was right.

Well, it looks like that was incorrect, because I have tested this and shown that if I have Vsync enabled for my cfs3.exe profile under Program Settings (see pic), the game will in fact use this setting even when its turned off as a Global setting. This means that for me, all this time I was locked in at 60Hz (and 60-FPS) while playing.

When I disabled this setting and selected Vertical Sync to "use Global setting" (which was already set to OFF) I had FPS's jump to over 120 when looking at empty sky.

Now, this is good news for those that were using Nvidia Inspector in the past to create custom profiles. It looks like we may have a way to make a specific graphics profile for WOFF that Windows will use automatically when you laucnh the game without modifying the base profile.

I am about to do some testing of this and will report back what I find.


I had always thought the settings in this profile were being ignored, turns out I may have been wrong...

Madmatt

Heh!
HS, your wiring DOES make a difference with heat and air flow.
Here's a pic of the system I built about 5 months ago. (the case has a pushed out side for behind the mb wiring)



back on topic, good point MadMatt. I was wondering about my fps as well.
I've got 4xSGSS working to take care of the shimmers, and that limits my fps down to between 40-60 or so. Interestingly, with the application of the SweetFX conversion tool (and using FlightFX), my FPS actually went up to 70 or so.
Checking my control panel (and I mainly use Inspector) I did see that Vsync is off).
I do get the white triangles when zooming in/out quickly....wish I could get rid of those, or be able to use a slider for that.

I havent OC'd my rig yet...didnt see a need to, but I'm wondering if I should bump it up to 4.5 to get some better fps...

Yeah I need to finish the wiring. Just built it today though and was excited to get everything loaded and working before work tomorrow. Probably take care of it this weekend.

So, I have been messing with settings for WOFF most of the day to try and get rid of BOTH micro-stuttering and screen tearing. Always seemed like I would have one or the other, never both gone. Think I just finally found the solution. At least its worked the last few flights very well for me. No screen tear. Extremely rare micro-stutters and even when it happens it's barely perceptible.

The big key was to turn pre-rendered frames all the way down to 1, instead of 8. Turn on V-Sync, Standard, AFR Smoothing, Triple Buffering. WOFF settings are all maxed. 1920 x 1200. 5,5,5,5,5. High resolution planes and terrain. Silky smooth 60 FPS, no input lag. No screen tearing. Virtually no micro-stutters. Try it and see how it does for you. Here are all of my settings in Inspector.

Were these settings with the sweetfx optimizations all on as well?

Thanks Hellshade

I've tried your Nvidia-Settings and this helped a lot. Microstutters are just gone now. Well, not completely, but it's much better now. Will tweak it a little more...

Well done, Sir

Yes. You can have SweetFX on or off and, for me at least, it works great. I do prefer the original WOFF color scheme though, so with SweetFX, the only things I turn on now are LUMASHARPEN, BLOOM and CURVES. Couldn't say how it will work using various other options in SweetFX.

All I want now is a smooth zoom in / out from the pilot view and a way to kill cloud popping. What is weird about the virtual cockpit pilot view zoom is that it does it in steps, say 1x, 2x ,x3, 4x zoom, etc. However, if you are looking at your plane from an external view and zoom in or out onto your plane, it is as smooth as silk! No stepping at all. It would be great if that external zoom view were somehow able to be translated to work the same way for virtual cockpit pilot view zoom as well.

Yup, I get those too myself. Been playing with various settings all morning (working from home so I could play with my new 144Hz monitor, its awesome!) to try and get rid of them. No luck yet...

Madmatt

Matt, I don't think there is anything we humble users are likely to be able to do about that. Probably is going to need to be coded by OBD in order for that to happen and they have plenty on their plate right now. If you come up with anything, please let me know but I think cloud popping and white triangles when "unzooming" from the virtual cockpit view are cooked into the stew.

My guess is that after technical support and patches - which have been coming out at a very impressive rate, thank you OBD - if they get any free time it will be devoted to pushing out an expansion for planes. I'd be okay with that too. I really, really want to attack a flight of Gothas (at least I do until they start shooting back!)

Well folks, this is all very interesting and it seems like you are getting your Nvidia well tuned Hellshade, but for me I need a way to apply these concepts to my ATI card :

Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 7870 Video Card - 2GB GDDR5, 1000MHz Base Core Clock, 4800MHz Memory, PCI Express 3.0, Dual Link DVI, HDTV, HDMI, Dual Mini Display

Anyone who is working with this kind of card or has suggestions it would be appreciated. I should be able to improve my game performance some and that is my current goal.

Tnx

Robert,

I am running my 7870 at these settings with an AMD Quad Core @ 3.7 MHz, 8 mB of 1600 RAM in Windows 7 64 bit. Nothing special about my rig, but am able to run WOFF at 55555 with all Workshop settings on highest settings. Am getting 40-60 FPS, depending on whether I am near front or n a furrball. Supersampling gives me the best appearance overall.



Your mileage may vary.

I thought I stumbled on a magic combination of settings within Nvidia Inspector that gave me zoom in's and outs without any artifacts but then I noticed that the sky was dark and overcast.

You see, when you zoom in and out and you get those triangles appearing on the far edges of the screen, they aren't really white. After looking at them very closely, what they appear to be is part of the sky texture showing through. Therefore, if you play with the Thunderstorm or Thunderheads sky, you don't notice them as much because they are very dark, and blend much better into the ground. If you play with a bright blue clear sky, they are much more obvious.

Here are some other interesting details I have managed to make note of:

* This graphics artifact occurs whenever the virtual cockpit view (c) or any fixed view (F6) is zoomed in or out using the [ and ] keys.
* It is not caused by a TrackIR zoom (by leaning in or leaning back).
* This is not the same issue as panning quickly in TrackIR and getting triangles. In WOFF, that issue does appear to be resolved.
* The artifacts ONLY appear over the top of the landscape. They will not appear on the screen where there is any sky or plane textures. (What this means that if you change your view so that you just have a small section of ground displayed, and the rest of the screen is cockpit and sky, the artifacts will only appear in the area where you can see the ground!).
* The problem occurs with or without TrackIR running.
* The problem occurs regardless of Workshop or video card settings. I have tried dozens upon dozens of different settings and combinations of settings.
* The problem is not affected by framerate. I have it occur when I get +100 FPS and at times when I was in the low 30's.
* The artifacts seem to take the primary color of the sky horizon. For example: blue on clear days, white when there is a distant haze, dark grey during overcast days.
* Issue occurs with and without SweetFX installed.
* They are EXTREMELY hard to capture in a picture! But I managed to get a few pics to show them off. Notice they only occur below the sky, and never on the plane texture itself.
* The triangles are obscured by trees if they are in the foreground (you have to look closely at the pics below but you an see that the triangles don't seem to cover up trees. This would seem like it's related to a ground tile issue...Perhaps some sort of alpha channel thing?)
* Issue does not appear to be VRAM or resource availability related. The specs of my computer are about as high as you can buy right now. I run various monitoring utilities on a second display and WOFF is not nearly as resource hungry as other apps and games I run.
* I seem to recall that this same or similar issue occurred in OFF and I was on a completely different cpu, memory, OS, video card and computer back then.





I'm hoping perhaps the devs might be able to shed some light on this issue at some point as it is very distracting while dogfighting!

Madmatt

BirdDog;

I tried out your settings in a quick combat session (very basic one on one) and it worked great. Tomorrow I will try upping the # of combatants and see how things go. Hopefully no stutters and jaggies. I'm going to do an indepth test on these settings. I think you have something there. My first test was with sliders all the way up :all 5's".

Interesting. I kept all of the other settings in Nvidia Inspector the same and switched the Antialiasing - Setting to 32x [32x CSAA (8 color + 24 cv samples)]. Still runs like a champ. V-Sync is on so I don't go above 60 FPS (my monitor refresh rate) but most of the time I spend either in the high 50s or right at 60. Landing at the airfield at the end dropped me a bunch of FPS but there wasn't any noticeable lag so it still looked good.

I think the clouds looked exceptional good with those settings too, along with the aircraft and the terrain, of course.

I recall reading that this generation of gfx cards runs BETTER when with a full load.
I've got mine at 16xQC IIRC...dunno about 32x, but it seems reasonable considering your new rig settings.

BTW, thanks for making/posting the videos HS. That's very thoughtful of you. You do good work!

Have you tried using different drivers? Not all drivers are equal, especially for older programs....

My driver set (in my sig) is quite good. I dont have stutters, and I have super high FPS (my rig is streamlined and beefy), especially considering the MASSIVE amounts of AA and SS that I'm using.
Just a thought...

Hey Broadside, thanks for the tip. I'll try 314.22
So, I just need to install them over the newer version? Is it enough?

Upd: Yup, that's it. Will test them later.