1. #1
    Beirut's Avatar Senior Member
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    CPU vs. video card question

    My buddy who uses his rig only for IL2 wants to upgrade. His machine is an i3-2100/Nvidia 8600. His screen is a 32' 720P television. His hardware concerns are 100% for IL2 alone.

    He wants to go to an i5, thinking it will give him better performance, which I'm sure it would, but I suggested a new video card would be a better choice. One good fellow at another site suggested upgrading the video card to a 560Ti would be the best idea, and get the i5 later.

    Any thoughts from the gurus here?

    Thanks.
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  2. #2
    Tully__'s Avatar Global Moderator
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    The game ran well on a fastish P4 with nVidia 5800 / 6800 cards, everything higher than that is just allowing you to run more and more complex user made missions.

    A few questions:
    What operating system is he using? Is it a 32 bit or 64 bit version?
    How much system RAM does he have?
    How much video RAM on the 8600?
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  3. #3
    Beirut's Avatar Senior Member
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    Hey Tully, thanks for jumping in here.

    IIRC, Win7-64bit/4GB RAM/8600 512RAM

    Also, he plays the DBW mod, and does his own skins with Photoshop.
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  4. #4
    Tully__'s Avatar Global Moderator
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    I'm not expert, but a couple of things spring to mind straight away:
    • IL2:1946 and earlier versions aren't programmed with multi core processors in mind, so you don't get a big boost from extra cores
    • The i3 appears to be clocked around 3.2GHz, even if the CPU is the choke point and there's heaps of performance left in the GPU, an extra 0.3GHz is less than a 10% boost


    Based on this and a quick glance at the specs for the i3 and i5, I'd guess a better vid card and an extra 4GB of RAM would see better results. The vid card wouldn't need to be top of the range either, I'm running a GTX460 with 1GB vRAM and the fps rarely drops below 60 at full screen on a 1080p monitor. It doesn't get over 60fps either, but that because I run with v-sync on.

    Best wait for someone who's more of a hardware geek than me before giving final advice though.
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  5. #5
    Bearcat99's Avatar Senior Member
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    Video and ram.
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  6. #6
    if its running fine why upgrade, he is well within the specs to run it. id tell him to upgrade to cliffs of dover, then updgrade the cpu and the gpu.
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  7. #7
    Beirut's Avatar Senior Member
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    He ordered the GTX560Ti. He went to the shop today to get it put in, if he's lucky he'll have his machine back as I'm writing this. I'm looking forward to hearing his impressions.

    Does IL2 really need more than 4GB of RAM? That one surprised me.

    Thanks guys.

    Saipan,

    He might be within specs to run it, but he spends a lot of time building big missions on the DBW mod and if you start upping the AA and AF, not to mention Effects=2, the slowdown can come pretty fast.
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  8. #8
    Tully__'s Avatar Global Moderator
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    Originally Posted by Beirut Go to original post
    Does IL2 really need more than 4GB of RAM? That one surprised me..
    Not really if you're running a clean, 32bit WinXP. With Win Vista/7/8 64 bit systems and the inevitable collections of stuff running in background it can often help, though not always. I think I remember reading somewhere that the game itself wont use more than 2GB, but in order to do that it needs 2GB not being used by other applications or core OS systems.
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  9. #9
    Beirut's Avatar Senior Member
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    I just got off the phone with my buddy. What a non-nerd, I have to walk him through every little thing.

    Anyway, he's up and running and likes the improvement.

    But now I'm thinking of getting anouther 4GB of RAM for my Win7-64 bit. Oh well, at least ram is cheap.

    Thanks all!
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  10. #10
    Win 7 x64 (including applications) will definitely run better on 8GB or 16GB RAM.



    The area just below the 4GB boundary is reserved space for PCI and PCIe cards and other hardware. If you have 4GB installed, this area can not be "switched" out of the way on most motherboards. with 8GB or more it can be.

    4GB on a Win7 x64 system does not make much sense. You will have about 3.2 GB free just like a 32 bit OS. You will have the benefit of the extra 64 bit instruction set and extra CPU registers however, but these are mostly used by things like video editors etc. Not by IL-2, which is a 32 bit application.
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