I've purchased a z77 motherboard to compliment the Ivy Bridge CPU due for release on 29th April. So far testing with a Sandy Bridge 2700k (yes it is backwards compatible) on this new platform has been amazing, mainly due to the new GPU Virtualization technology embedded in the chipset. Now i'm not sure how the new Ivy Bridge will compare (supposed to be an overall 5-20% performance boost) but at present I am trying out this technology with FSX and Prepar3d with everything maxxed out, I mean everything! The results are amazing.
No Boyote fsx.cfg tweaks just an external frame rate limiter set to 30. What I have witnessed is that FSX picks up only the onboard intel graphics and somehow fools FSX and Prepar3d in thinking that there is only one GPU, the onboard graphics, but in fact this is not completely true. Although FSX and Prepar3d only see the intel graphics the chipset allows some sort of parallel communication between the intel graphics chip and my NVIDIA GTX 570 card via the chipset so both the Intel chip and my NVIDIA card is being used. So I put it all to the test....
I know for a fact that I could never run everything full as I would get crashes due to GPU memory loading issues and funny artifacts on the screen. This was just using my NVIDIA 570 card. So I installed the Virtu MVP software/driver and selected the following in the application, FSX.exe and added Prepar3d.exe.
I first loaded FSX and set every slider to the right and checked every box I could. Loaded up to KSEA and KBOS and KJFK sequentially to test with each one and the frame rates did not go below or above 25 and 40 respectively. It appears the framerate limiter was a little flexible and remain in this window. My gameplay was smooth with only the odd tiny microstutter that would dissapear with a blink of the eye.
Added a few pictures from around KBOS at MAX settings, look at all that traffic.
I can't wait to see how the Ivy Bridge works with the GPU Virtualization. Reports show at present that HD4000 graphics chipset will boost graphics performance by about 40%. i'm not sure whether this will boost performance any more than my current setup but we will see. I will report back about the Ivy Bridge when I have it.
One last thing, the performance of this rig with the Vitrual GPU tech compared to the performance of my 3930k rig there is no comparison in terms of how the Virtu MVP works.
, Derek , be looking forward to your new FS screens