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Graphics card for p6-2133w

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Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby shawnzirconiumn » Thu Dec 03, 2020 12:24 am

I'd like to max out the modest specs of this old office tower. It's a HP p6-2133w with A6 3620 2.2 GHz 4 core procesor and radeon hd 6530d onboard graphics. I've already maxed out RAM at 16gb and installed a SSD and I'm running Linux Mint 20 and flying fgfs 2020.3.4. I'm having trouble figuring out what graphics cards would work/ make sense in this machine, but here's my best guess:

GeForce GT 730 Zone Edition 4GB DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16

or maybe:

GeForce GT 710 2GB GDRR3


These seem to make sense for my system but I have no idea how much overhead I'm working with. I assume enough for these cards with a 300 watt stock power supply and no longer having optical drive and spinning HD (not sure if this makes much difference)

Please let me know if I'm on the right track here, thanks!
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby V12 » Thu Dec 03, 2020 10:38 am

As GPU try to find GTX750 with 2GB RAM, I have very good experience with it. My old config i5-2550K @3.4GHz and GTX750 was enough for decent framerate on almost all airports and situations with graphics on maximal settings, except overlay shader for volumetric grass and similar effects. I affraid that You will have problems with CPU, 2.2 GHz is not enough for FG. If You can, avoid ATI/AMD GPU. They are good known as troublemakers.
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby erik » Thu Dec 03, 2020 11:44 am

I'm still using the GTX750 on a daily basis and even the volumetric grass works with a decent frame rate with the latest drivers.
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby Johan G » Thu Dec 03, 2020 2:54 pm

You might have figured this out, but here is a quick key for the GeeForce graphics cards: <less important number><more important number>"0". :wink:

Looking up specs on older cards might be of use as a second hand card with a higher <more important number> might be better even though it have a lower <less important number>. The <more important number> give a good hint on how fast it can shuffle pixels to the display.
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby erik » Thu Dec 03, 2020 3:22 pm

There's also the case of GT vs GTX:
http://games-n-graphics.blogspot.com/20 ... s-gtx.html

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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby shawnzirconiumn » Thu Dec 03, 2020 11:13 pm

Thanks for the replies everyone. You've all led me to one big question about the GTX750:
Is the 750 going to be limited by my 2.2ghz processor to the point that it doesn't do much better than a 710?
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby erik » Fri Dec 04, 2020 12:51 pm

Looking at passmark it's about twice as slow as my CPU:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... +APU&id=26
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... GHz&id=793

This means you at least have to turn off AI traffic (as I do).
But without testing it's hard to tell how much of an impact it is.

Update:
And alternative is updating to the AMD A6-3650 APU as it seems, which is quite valuable:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... +APU&id=27

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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby V12 » Fri Dec 04, 2020 1:23 pm

For FG is important singlecore passmark index, because FG is not multithread optimized and for rendering can use only 2 CPU cores.
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby erik » Fri Dec 04, 2020 1:24 pm

True, at least up until now. Maybe things change when switching to Vulkan.
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby shawnzirconiumn » Fri Dec 04, 2020 2:03 pm

Yes, unfortunately this old hp pavilion is what I have to work with. I don't expect anything amazing, but I want to push it to the limit. Using onboard graphics I'm able to fly with minimal graphics settings at around 20fps. Can't really fly complicated planes or congested areas, but it's very much flyable otherwise. 172P is my favorite plane anyway, and I love flying in remote wilderness areas. I normally fly with AI traffic off but recently I've been experimenting and it seems to be not so bad in desolate areas just causing the odd hang or two once in a while.
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby V12 » Fri Dec 04, 2020 3:20 pm

erik wrote in Fri Dec 04, 2020 1:24 pm: Maybe things change when switching to Vulkan.

It will be loooong wait :(
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby Johan G » Fri Dec 04, 2020 3:28 pm

Indeed.
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby erik » Fri Dec 04, 2020 4:16 pm

V12 wrote in Fri Dec 04, 2020 3:20 pm:
erik wrote in Fri Dec 04, 2020 1:24 pm: Maybe things change when switching to Vulkan.

It will be loooong wait :(

Maybe, maybe not. We now use OpenSceneGraph and de main developer of that is also developing VulkanSceneGraph and in fact is using FlightGear data to test things.

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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby Hooray » Fri Dec 04, 2020 4:22 pm

Vulkan isn't going to be relevant for people on old hardware like this - and looking at the time frame of the OSG migration (which really never was completed over the course of the last 15 years), it's pretty safe to say that the stars would really need to align for vulkan to become relevant in the context of FlightGear, even just over the course of the next 3-5 years.

Even today, there remains a fair share of legacy FlightGear rendering code which isn't using any OSG coding patterns, modernizing that code (or absent that, phasing it out) is likely to have a larger impact for people with such "old" system rather than suggesting to "wait" for vulkan.

And even if FlightGear were to use pure OSG, the scene graph it builds is infamous for being fairly inefficient, it's long been pointed out by senior contributors like Mathias, Tim and Fred that FlightGear builds a rather heavy scene graph with tons of redundant nodes.

Addressing these issues is going to have a more noticeable impact on performance for people on legacy systems compared to adopting Vulkan - either way, for Vulkan to be adopted, the FlightGear code base would need to change, too - and in fact, James and others have been pointing out for years that the existing SGSubsystem structure isn't even widely used by legacy subsystems, i.e. pseudo subsystems - but for a vulkan based re-implementation, you would want to have a subsystem design where rendering and simulation are separated (think the whole headless idea).

Even today, FlightGear provides plenty of optimization potential depending on the use-case/target hardware - vulkan or a multi-threaded renderer are not exactly the lowest hanging fruit.
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Re: Graphics card for p6-2133w

Postby erik » Sat Dec 05, 2020 9:53 am

There is work underway to phase out a number (actually most if not all) of direct OpenGL code in favor of Qt, OpenSceneGraph and/or shaders. So I'm a bit more optimistic than some of you but it will be a matter of years, not moths.

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