COD questions | Forums

[rfap]

Have fallen behind a little on this, still stuck in OstFront in IL2 so forgive me if these have been asked before.
Can anyone pm me a link to a place where I can buy a boxed copy for my IL2 collection, I have them all from original IL2 to forgotten battles to aces to pacific fighters to 1946 and I even burnt a cd with my bounty download...
Is COD multi treaded? would a fast dual at 4.4 be better than a Hex @ 4.2?
I am leaning towards an AMD 6970 for graphics duty but have a sneaking suspicion that Oleg is more geared to Nvidia, anyone care to comment?
I have a TrackIR 4, is the ver 5 a worthwhile update?
Lastly... , My HOTAS is all CH Products (Fighterstick, Pro Throttle, Pedals), how does the FFB Logitech 940 compare with regards programability, precision and build quality.

TIA
S!
Robbie

[TX-Gunslinger]

My advice is to wait the 13 days till release and see:

- How your current rig handles it. A Russian reviewer with a dual core and older graphics card had reasonable performance while testing the Press version a few weeks ago. Also, Oleg has been better imho, about building scalability into his products. You may have to give up a little eye candy at first - but it's pretty gorgeous at lower resolutions.

- Just how "Threaded" CoD actually is. We know that it will take advantage of multi-core's, however some multi-core software only scales across so many cores. A good example is RoF. Rise of Flight will scale to 4 cores, but not 6. Hopefully we'll find that CoD scales to 4/6/8/12/16 or more cores, but we don't know that yet.

- Exact details of graphics configuration. Will we have Nvidea only water/textures/shadows/reflections and other settings for ATI? Will Dual GPU's function (my guess is that it'll be SLI before Xfire - but nobody knows yet)? What is the page size of the scene? In some sims you buy yourself nothing by small increments of VRAM. Some products scale in 1GB/2GB segments vs odd numbers like 768.

- At what point in display resolution and graphics settings does a particular system become GPU bound? What is the CPU limiting point? With what CPU's.

- Does RAM past 4GB have an effect on performance? 64bit O/S vs 32bit O/S.

Anyway, there are a million reasons to wait a little to make sure you are getting the "right stuff".

About the G940 versus CH. First thought is stick with the CH. I picked up a G940 which I kept for about a week before returning it. I did not like the feel of the FFB. I could always feel the "grinding" of the gears within it. On the other hand I tested the G940 with Rise of Flight. Maybe CoD will be different. In any event, if you have CoD on your system and use your current controllers - you can better assess a G940 if you buy one. If you don't like it as much as your current set up - you can return it. I personally think this sim will feel quite a bit different under many circumstances than Il2. Best to get used to the new software's quirks/feel with controllers you are used to - before throwing a new controller in the mix.

I'm currently running a Core2Duo Quad @ 4.00Ghz with ATI 5870 in Win7-64. I feel pretty good about at least having reasonable performance. I may upgrade, but not until I understand exactly what I want to achieve.

Sims are wierd - they don't scale like FPS - which unfortunatley all hardware testing on the web focuses on. With sims you can spend a lot of cash and not realize much of a performance improvment. This is particularly true of Graphics cards. CPU performance is the typical bottleneck.

Again, we really won't know until we get this product - and people have time to observe it's performance across platforms.

The good news is that the CoD user base will be enormous, for a sim - which means a whole bunch of posts across the web on performance consideration and experiences - rapidly.

Hope this helps,

S!

Gunny

[M_Gunz]

Oleg is more geared to nvidia and intel.
If you have CH then why on earth would you be looking to buy Logitech? That would be a biiiiig step down!

[rfap]

Guys, thanks for your replies. Plenty to think about.
Last question answered first, looks like my CH stuff will carry on. I had mentioned the precision and build which I have always raved about but was curious as to how others found FFB which CH lacks currently, seems the perfect solution would be a CH FFB Hotas
I'm currently running a Phenom II X6 @ 4.2 but also have a Phenom II X2 which will pull 4.6, should be enough hopefully. Will be interesting to see how Olegs crew have programmed the engine. I'll put some tests up for sure. I will be migrating to Bulldozer in July / August
I've been running 64bit since it came out with XP, i'm sure I posted here years ago about how I felt performance actually seem smoother even back then with beta drivers, CH products actually had one of the earliest 64 bit drivers available IRC I've migrated to Win 7 64 and 16GB so reasonably confident on that front.
I like the idea of having a unified driver set for cpu/chipset/gpu so have settled on the 6970 2GB, as you have pointed out Gunny, i'm sure the driver teams of both Nvidia and AMD will be concentrating some resources on this new engine. Crossfire and SLI, I will abstain from, still hit and miss IMO and I'd rather use the other PCIE channels for my 4 * SSD R0 / 4 * HDD R10 setups (LSI 9240-8i). My max resolution is 1920 * 1200 so cossfire / sli is overkill for me.
As you may notice I have been quietly building up the rig for this , its all water cooled (1 * XSPC RX360, 1 * 240 Feser Xchanger, 1 by XSPC RX120, 2 by DDC 3.2s, Dual EK Top, EK Supreme, and EK blocks for the mb (mosfet, nb & sb, its an old Asus M4A79T that holds its own when the pressure is on)), even notified the Mrs that I will be unavailable for anything from the 23rd March for at least a few weekends

[TX-Gunslinger]

After seeing your system - I'm very excited So much for all my cautionary advice - cores is cores.

My guess is that Oleg's code is fully threaded and the barnburner chip you have is the lower clocked Phenom II X6.

Even in Rise of Flight that X6 would smoke the dual-core.

Man, you are in good shape for this already.

What I want to see is your rig clocked against an I7/I5. Send me a PM when you get your first benchmarks

I've worked with partially and fully threaded software for more than 15 years and have experience with the idiosyncrasies of such. If Oleg was able to fully thread - the results will be pretty amazing.

I think a fully threaded application would reveal the limitations of Hyperthreading once and for all.

S!

Gunny

[rfap]

We're both on the same page I think Gunny

I would say the i7 would still wipe the floor with my Phenom IIs, I agree with your assessment about Flight sims especially, being more CPU dependant than the typical fps, wonder how long before there will be CUDA and Eyespeed optimisations available for the engine. Hyperthreading is good for benchmarks, I personally believe that GPU offloading for parallel tasks will give a better return, better that hyperthreading for sure. i5? , believe my setup could trade punches with one of those easily enough, i7? still the King, no 2 ways about it. Crazily expensive platform once you add in the cpu, matching mb and ram + gpu to do it justice. My rig is broken down this way:
CPU, MB, RAM = €450
GPU (will spend €300 + €85 for water cooled block, currently served by a clocked 4850)
Storage, 4 * 80GB SSDs = €500 (most impressive speed up that €500 has ever given me, like going from a 486 to a Pentium II)
4 * 1TB HHDs = €220
LSI Raid Card? = €50 - ebay bargain
Cooling was another matter, radiators, pumps, blocks and fans (13 Noiseblocker PL2s , probably came to €600 over the course of 2 - 3 years but its all housed in a nice elegant Lian-Li A70B with a quiet 650W psu so it does not draw too much attention to itself. I got into photography a couple of years ago and 600-700 raw files @ 15MB+ each from a gig in not unusual hence my storage fetish.
I see you have the TIR5, how you rate the TIR 5 verses the TIR4? or did you skip to the TIR5 from the TIR3?

S!
Robbie

[TX-Gunslinger]

Heheh - yeah we are thinking alike

I went from TIR4 to 5. I believe it seems a little smoother to me - not enough to justify the cost. In reality, a friend loaned me one that was provided to his company for software development. I used it for maybe a year then had to return it. My previous TIR was a TIR2 and between that and the 5 there is a large difference + 6 DOF.

I love the 5's mounting/magnet - etc....

If I owned my own 4 however, I don't think I'd buy it.

S!

Gunny

[rfap]

Sound setup????
Oleg is a bit of an audiophile, from what I can gather. Anybody know or can point me to which sound chipset is the best for COD? Is it Asus with their Xonar range or Creative with the everlasting Soundblaster?