Looking for help to fix my setup mistakes

[Dave_JK]

Hi all, noob here and noob to driving sims as well, apologies for the long post...

I started off flight-simming a year ago on an X-box, got hooked and then built a PC, got in deeper and added triple screens and more hardware, then tried driving and this is where it all fell apart.

My hardware:-
Intel i12900K, RTX3080ti, 32Gb, M.2 NVME's
Screens - triple 50" HiSense 4K 60Hz panels
Thrustmaster t248 wheel, pedals and TH8A shifter (plus yoke, HOTAS etc for flight)
ButtKicker shaker
Two 1080p touch panels used for flight cockpit instruments connected via USB-HDMI



In flight it is set up as a 2K - 4K - 2K triple and just about holds 30FPS which again is just about ok for flight. However in driving, even in BeamNG it's not smooth enough and gives me a good amount of strain and motion sickness feeling when cornering etc, BeamNG.Drive reports FPS between 15 and 50 on "low" graphics setting!

Clearly I have made some mistakes somewhere in my purchases but want to fix it, trouble is I'm not sure where to start.

Should I have gone for say 32" triple screens at lower resolution or something else? I just thought "bigger is better". I can run the panels at 2K but being so large the pixels are easily visible and looks pretty bad.

Any suggestions welcome, I just want a capable system that I can enjoy in my retirement

 

[Dave_JK]

From a whole day of digging about it seems i should be looking at 3 x 2560x1440 144Hz monitors like the LG Ultragear 32GP850 and move them a bit closer to my seat position.

 

[Neilski]

From a whole day of digging about it seems i should be looking at 3 x 2560x1440 144Hz monitors like the LG Ultragear 32GP850 and move them a bit closer to my seat position.

Can you estimate the kind of performance that'll give you by just sending that resolution to your 4k monitor now? (Edit: for sure it won't look nice.)

 

[RasmusP]

What's the exact resolution of the 2k-4k-2k setup?
The two side screens 2560x1440 and the center screen 3840x2160?

Even normal triple 2560x1440 is very heavy for a 3080ti if you don't use low settings.

You could try to set the side screens to 1920x1080 since that's an even multiplier for 4k!
2160/1440 will always look bad in my experience since the gpu needs to filter the pixels and basically no original pixel will perfectly match any monitor pixel.
At 1080p though, each pixel is displayed 4x.
Sure, you now use 4 monitor pixels to display one render pixel, but at least it will basically look like a 1920x1080 monitor instead of some blurry filtering mess.

If that looks alright for your eyes, you could try to put the center screen back to 4k while keeping the side screens at 1080p.

You can also play around with the desktop size and scaling settings in the nvidia control panel.
Afaik you can choose between the gpu or the monitor to do the upscaling.
Depending on the TV, it might look better one way or the other

 

[Emery]

Should I have gone for say 32" triple screens at lower resolution or something else? I just thought "bigger is better". I can run the panels at 2K but being so large the pixels are easily visible and looks pretty bad.

Any suggestions welcome, I just want a capable system that I can enjoy in my retirement

FPS are essential for racing games, especially if you want to run in rain/night. I didn't attempt triple 4k until I had an RTX 3090 FTW from EVGA (it runs a few fps better normal RTX 3090) and you have to turn down some graphics to stay above 60 fps in dry/daytime while rain/night is, well, a challenge because fps typically drops 50% under those conditions. An RTX 3080ti will nicely run triple 1440p regardless of rain/night.

Your options at this point are downgrading the monitors to 1440p and that probably means swapping them out for 32" -OR- spending for an RTX 4090 (which might mean upgrading your power supply).

The drawback to triple 32" monitors is the decrease in FOV even when they're brought very close as the steering wheel doesn't let you get them as close as would be ideal. In some cases, the FOV is no better than triple 27" due to the steering wheel interfering.

Cost-wise the choices might be a toss-up. Depends on how many $$$ you can recover from the TVs to offset new monitors $$$$ vs. $$$$ you have to spend to get a 4090.

 

[Dave_JK]

Thanks all, some good stuff here. I'll try to answer...

I did try today lowering the 4K triple to next lowest Nvidia surround option, something like 5760x2160 IIRC, I then started up BeamNG and cranked it to Ultra, doing the same tests as before I found the results much better, the performance graph was pegged at 60FPS as that is the limit of these screens. Apart from the poor image quality/resolution/size combo it was totally usable.

Using the Nvidia surround limits you to having all screens the same setting so you can't do a mix of 2K-4K-2K on apps like BeamNG etc that use surround, MS Flight Sim uses individual displays so I can set different resolutions and that does work, reasonably well on medium graphics settings but the side screens are noticeably worse than the main 4K one..

I think offloading the 4K tv's and getting the correct 2K high speed monitors would be my way forwards here. I might have to give up a little FOV due to mounting the wheel/yoke etc but my setup is totally flexible and I would surrender a little FOV to get smooth action.

Upgrading to a 4090 is not a current option - it wont fit in my chassis, it costs way too much still, and i would still be restricted to 60Hz/FPS max as the screens will not go higher, I know 60 is a good amount but would like some overhead? Plus the response time of these panels is around 18ms whereas the gaming ones are 1ms - i'm not sure if I would notice that difference though or how it manifests.

 

[Emery]

I know 60 is a good amount but would like some overhead

75 fps is noticeably better and 90 fps is where the general population (99+%) stops noticing improvements. The 144 Hz monitors with adaptive refresh rates are definitely a help; no need for a higher refresh rate.