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[SAS~Storebror]

What specs am I looking for?

You'd have to answer that to yourself, including your budget.
Any Nvidia x10 card isn't really suitable for gaming.
Take care not just to watch out for big number like "4GB RAM", it doesn't tell much on it's own.

As a rule of thumb, at the time of writing this, when you want to have a card really suitable for gaming (and I just bought one myself), the Nvidia list (ATI is kinda no-go for IL-2) boils down to three cards:

GTX 750 for budget / power consumption reasons
GTX 980 for the insane among us
GTX 970 for those in the middle

Best regards - Mike

[bomberkiller]

GTX 750 for budget / power consumption reasons

...or better: Nvidia GTX 760! Good enough for newer games too. 

With regards,

Gerhard 

[SAS~Storebror]

Of course the 760 is more powerful than a 750, but it's also approximately double the price.
If we compare price by performance, the 750 is unbeatable, hands down.
And the next reasonable choice (for it's way better performance) is the 970 then.

See this graph:
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html

Best regards - Mike

[rruff]

So does anybody know of a card that would improve my performance on a budget? What specs am I looking for?

The experts claim that '1946 runs better with an Nvidia card, so that narrows things down. For this game you don't need a great card to get good graphic performance, but if you play more modern games you will get a noticeable improvement the more you spend.

For ~$60 you could get a card that is ~4x faster than what you have (GT 640 or GT 730 with GDDR5 ram) and for ~$100 you could get a card that is ~8x better (GTX 750). I have a GTX 750 and it's well into the "diminishing returns" territory with this game. I have all the graphics on high and still get more FPS than I really need.

Like Mike said, don't pay a lot of attention to ram *quantity*. For graphic cards you only need to have enough, and for cards at this level 1GB is enough.

If you decide that a GT 640 or 730 would be good enough, then make sure you get one with GDDR5 ram. The other option would be GDDR3 or DDR3 which is much slower, and that is combined with lower TMUs and ROPs as well, and an earlier generation chip. Nvidia has this maddening habit of releasing low end cards with very different specs under the same name, but the performance difference can be as high as 2x. And they also rebadge old designs with new names... the 730 variants are identical to the 640s. The GTX 750s are all good, and they have Nvidia's latest and most efficient architecture... same as their 970 and 980 top end cards.

Also, check your PSU. Most likely you will be fine since these cards draw 38-55W max and none need auxiliary power. But I had an old Dell with a 180W PSU that might have balked at adding 55W.

An example of a GT 730 for $60: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125686&cm_re=gt_730_gddr5-_-14-125-686-_-Product

GTX 750 for $110, or $90 after rebate: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125503

[Danziger]

Great info. Thanks rruff, those are way closer to my price range.

[rruff]

For anybody looking for computer hardware upgrades this is the best time of the year to find deals. I don't see any killer prices on these cards right now, but you might want to keep an eye on the site below for the next week. Noticed some really good prices on ram, SSDs, and flash cards. If you need other stuff too, Tiger Direct has $30 off $150, $15 off $100, and $10 off $100 codes currently. Newegg has a 5% off code that is only active this afternoon.

http://slickdeals.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9&icon=23&order=desc&pp=80&sort=lastpost

[WindWpn]

I was thinking of moving off Vista Ultimate, to Win 7 to take advantage of things like the new DSR feature for Nvidia cards.  Though planning for an OS upgrade.....

~S~
wind

[rruff]

It looks like DSR is just a way to apply additional graphic improvement once you've maxed out the other options for AA... or am I missing something?

I used Windows 7 on the new computer, but I've heard that Windows 8 can now be customized pretty much any way you want, and it may have other benefits.

[SAS~Storebror]

I'd like to put some facts into dimension for IL-2.
I'm currently using a GFX 550 Ti with 1GB RAM and my experience with that card on IL-2 is as follows:
Yes, it is capable to run IL-2 with max settings FullHD @60FPS under the following conditions:

• Only moderate AA settings used (2xAA or 4xAA, any 8x is out of reach) OR FXAA used
• No transparent AA used
• No big effects mods
• No missions with masses of planes visible at the same spot/same time
• According to the above mentioned line: No online gameplay

Problems arise when there are many actors visible at the same spot, same time, and some amount of effects (explosion particles and/or smoke) have to be drawn.
This happens e.g. over big cities which have been bombed, or on crowded airfields.
When that happens, FPS drops below 60FPS.
The severity varies according to the circumstances.
If it's just an effects thing, FPS usually drops in the range of 30-60FPS.
If the textures don't fit into the 1GB GPU RAM anymore (hance the GPU has to swap textures into PC RAM), FPS drops below 20.

I've seen this happening while flying with the Flying Ass Clowns online a couple of times.
The only way to "fight" these types of issues is to reduce a couple of GPU "hungry" options like Water=4 or Effects=2, and use FXAA (which is rather a soft-focus than real AA).

Looking at the Passmark list: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html you can see that this is what you can expect from a 1GB card in the range of ~2000 Passmark points.

The GTX 750 is in the ~3200 Passmark points range, so it might or might not solve such type of issues. For instance with a GTX 750 you can expect still not to be able to use "real" AA features good enough to play online @60FPS. And if it "only" has 1GB RAM, you might not want to try High Res textures on crowded missions.

I looked at the GTX 770 (~6000 Passmark points) but the energy efficiency is too bad, that's why I opted for the GTX 970 (~8700 Passmark points).

Of course it's also a budget thing. Keep in mind that like rruff mentioned, the GTX 760/770/780 use the old "Kepler" architecture, that's why their energy efficiency is comparably bad.
The GTX 750 uses the same "Maxwell" architecture like the GTX 970 and 980.
Also beware when the card doesn't have GDDR5 RAM.
The GeForce GT 730 (DDR3, 64-bit) is a rebranded GeForce GT 630.
The GeForce GT 730 (DDR3, 128-bit) is a rebranded GeForce GT 430.
Additionally there are GeForce GTX 760 Ti OEM cards available which are rebranded GeForce GTX 670 ones, not too bad in itself, still I would be careful if such a GTX 760 Ti comes along "too cheap".

I personally won't opt for the budget options provided by rruff.
The GT 640 scores ~1300 Passmark points.
The GT 730 scores ~900 Passmark points.
That's way below my GTX 550 Ti (~2000 Passmark points) and I've hit the limits on IL-2 already.

Best regards - Mike

[rruff]

I'd like to put some facts into dimension for IL-2.
I'm currently using a GFX 550 Ti with 1GB RAM and my experience with that card on IL-2 is as follows:
Yes, it is capable to run IL-2 with max settings FullHD @60FPS under the following conditions:

• Only moderate AA settings used (2xAA or 4xAA, any 8x is out of reach) OR FXAA used
• No transparent AA used
• No big effects mods
• No missions with masses of planes visible at the same spot/same time
• According to the above mentioned line: No online gameplay

It's an interesting topic, what hardware is able to do what in '46. I don't have 1% of your experience and knowledge in this, but this is what I've seen so far...

I don't play online, and though the missions I play have a lot going on with explosions and tracer fire, I don't have hundreds of planes in sight at once (maybe 30). I'm also using DBW without any extra graphic mods, so maybe that is the difference. Come to think of it, I stopped adding "stuff" to the missions I made because they were already becoming unplayable on my old system (Athlon 64 X2 4000+, 9600 GSO). I still used "decent" graphic settings (posted on the 1st page of this thread) and 4x AA and would only get major slowdowns from explosions and cities... single digits (fps) at times for short periods. Else it would average 30-40 fps.

But the graphic card was never the limitation in any of these situations, rather the CPU. I verified this by running monitoring apps when I played the game. Are you sure that it is the graphic card and not the processor that is limiting your system? When I got a new system with a modern CPU (i3-4150 @3.5 GHz), those slowdowns disappeared and the game was decently playable at all times with the same settings. Adding the GTX 750 allowed me to use the best conf.ini settings, 16xS AA, and 8x transparency AA and still get higher fps.

The missions I'm talking about are roughly comparable to the Black Death track in how taxing they are on the system. I've been using the first 75 seconds of that track for testing my settings and performance. But I'm thinking that track isn't tough enough to be a good test based on what you've said. Do you have or know of a more taxing track that's available that we could use for comparisons?

Oh, and about the GT 640 and 730... I'd never recommend anything but the GDDR5 version. You can see the specs on the 3 flavors of GT 730 here: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gt-730/specifications  and some more details here on all the Nvidia cards: http://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/index.php?mfgr[]=nvidia&mobile=0&released[]=y11_c&generation=&chipname=&interface=&ushaders=&tmus=&rops=&memsize=&memtype=&buswidth=&slots=&powerplugs=&sort=released&q=or+type+to+Search...

The 640/730 with GDDR5 has much better specs compared to the other two versions, and also uses a newer chip. The weak models are more common and are also spec'd in OEMs, and the Passmark score will be some unknown average weighting of the 3. Even the "good" versions will be weaker than your 550 Ti, though.   

[SAS~Storebror]

Getting a valid test setup is likely the toughest part.
I'm not using any effects mod either (anymore), just plain UP3 for online gameplay.
What I'm doing is this:
I'm recording all missions by default. Whenever I face stutters during the online missions, I put a note (pencil+paper) when and where that happened for later review.
Then I pick that recorded mission and replay it to the point where the stutter happened on another day.
Here comes the catch: Usually I'd re-record the part where the stuttering happened, but in UP3 that seems to be impossible (re-recording while playing back the recorded track always fails).
So I pick DBW, replay the mission there, hope that the stutter occurs as well and re-record again.
Unfortunately using that trick you usually lose a few parts (mostly effects) but with a little luck this results in a very short track with just the reduced FPS.
I've gathered two tracks that way now, one of them I'm able to get 50 FPS with my GTX 550 Ti with FXAA enabled plus 8xAF, no other eye candy applied.
I've ruled out the CPU simply by overclocking it. I've got an i5-2500K with unlocked multiplier and due to a decent cooling system I can overclock it easily and stable from 3.3 GHz to 4.6 GHz.
However that doesn't change the FPS, not a bit.
Whatever additional GPU settings I use (4xAA, transparent AA etc.) reproducably lowers the FPS massive.
So that's clearly a GPU issue.

I agree that the CPU can be an issue as well, usually when the number of objects visible goes through the roof (large cities anyone? or large fleets?).
But that's not the issue I'm talking about.

Bottom line is that I think that some card in the Passmark range of ~2000 performs well for offline gameplay, for online play I'd recommend at least ~4000 Passmark points, the more the merrier, and I won't opt for any card below these ~2000 Passmark points at all.

Best regards - Mike

[rruff]

Thanks for the info!

Your processor should be better than mine, so that wouldn't be the issue. I made a mission last night with over 100 planes in the air at once, lot's of bombers bombing, loads of AA and tracer fire, on the Kauai map so water and trees, and still didn't see any point where it dipped below 30fps. That's with 16xS and 8x transparency AA. Many simultaneous explosions and smoke seemed to be the worst situation. There weren't a lot of buildings though, so I was missing that aspect.

Is there something specific to online gaming with other players that would tax the GPU? Are you using a 1080 monitor?

If you are interested, I'm curious to know what you'd get for fps in the Black Death track with different settings. The first 75 seconds should be enough to get a range of conditions.