133 replies to this topic

[Thalamus]

Who knows what the future will bring. Just recently there is the pinup player ... potentially 3-5 video streams playing on top of the other stuff. Then there is VP. It could happen the devs found a bug that all of a sudden made the GPU usage go down ... or the other way around, introduce something new that demands even more. If I could look into the future I would afford that GPU I want long long time ago

 

I would guess a 1060 would be good enough for a long time if you don't care about small jagged edges and still be running on 1080p. There is a whole different thing if you some day go for a 4k setup. Many factors. Too many to be able to give you a clear answer I'm afraid.

[nFozzy]

It's about $3,000 on the street, but it would do the job. Think of it as future-proofing.

 

https://www.theinqui...rushing-monster

As a bonus it'll heat your house for the winter

[ludovids]

I haven't seen much discussion in these forums about overclocking the CPU, so think it would be helpful to add to this topic my experience with overclocking.

 

First of all, if you are running your playfield at 4K, it appears to me that you need as fast a CPU as you can get. I base this belief on the observation that my tables usually run at about 180 FPS, but regularly dip down to just over 60 FPS for short periods of time. This tells me that my video card is more than capable of delivering the performance needed for a good Visual Pinball experience, but that there is a bottleneck somewhere in the software (the COM interprocess communication perhaps). If the bottleneck can't be eliminated, then the best we can do is tweak settings and increase CPU speed to reduce the bottleneck.

 

So I proceeded to overclock my i5-7600K from its stock 3.8-4.2 GHz speed up to 5 GHz. I was able to do so while maintaining a CPU temperature around 73 degr C. However, using the HwInfo app, I saw CPU speed throttling events happen, and something called AuxTin1 hitting temperatures around 175 degr C.

 

After doing some research, I found that AuxTin1 could represent the voltage regulators. The voltage regulators depend on air being blown onto the motherboard for cooling, as happens with stock CPU coolers. The CPU cooler that I am using (Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO), and probably most non-stock coolers, does not blow any air down onto the motherboard.

 

The motherboard that I am using has a heatsink near the CPU and voltage regulators, which I assume is meant mostly to cool the voltage regulators. So my solution was to position a small fan over the heatsink. Doing so caused the max AuxTin1 temperature to drop to about 107 degr C, and the CPU speed throttling events to cease, allowing me to enjoy an excellent 4K Visual Pinball experience.

 

I hope some other members find this post to be helpful.

[DemoMan]

Hi,
Now that I finally have my setup running smoothly, I guess it's time to share my experiences..

I rediscovered VP early 2018 (after messing with in 2005 or so) and was amazed by the progress made when I played a VP cab. So then I decided I also wanted this :-)
So I started out building a cab where I could slot in my laptop (which has an i7 CPU and NVidia 650m GPU), which then could be also used as a backglass display (and for running VP on a 2nd screen of course).

VP ran fine on just my laptop (no need for tweaking), but with a 2nd screen attached, framerates dropped and play was choppy.
The 2nd screen is a Benq 27" 1440p monitor, so that's a relatively high resolution (1/3 more than full HD - which is 1080p).

 

So although the laptop idea was nice (I still think it's an option if you have a modern laptop with an N-Vidia 10xx GPU) I then decided to switch to a dedicated computer and 2 screens (the new backglass screen being a 2nd hand 19" monitor with a 1280x1024 resolution).
A friend of mine had some spare parts and I used these for the computer part of the cab. Specs : AMD-A8, 4GB, 120GB SSD and N-Vidia GTX750.

This was an improvement, but I still had problems with ball stutter and framerates below 60FPS. I used this guide (many thanks everyone) to tweak and improve things and learned a lot about this subject (you learn the most by trying to fix problems ;-).
I finally concluded VPX really (yes I know) needs a quad core CPU (the AMD-A8 has 2 and is a bit old anyway).

So in the end I just decided to buy some new hardware and ended up with Gigabyte B360 mobo and an Intel I3-8100 CPU (and still 4GB, 120GB SSD) - total cost around 250 euro's.
This solved all my problems and I'm amazed how smooth and responsive some tables play. Lots of them play better then the PBA tables (which I also have) and also look better. I'm also using B2s without any problems.

 

Note that due to Intel's weird marketing, the I3-8100 is really a renamed I5 - it has 4 cores and runs faster than most older I5 CPUs (https://www.cpubench...449vs3103vs2929) - so a pretty good and affordable solution in my opinion.

As for tweaks and settings : I more or less follow Terry's strategy, but use most settings at a low or medium level (can't see the difference anyway).
I found that setting Vsync to -1 is useful to see how much actual frames you can get and/or what the effect of some settings is on the frame rate, but once it is clear that FPS is well above 60, I set Vsync to 1 - this results in very smooth play AND doesn't max out the GPU - which would otherwise run at 100% producing frames (and heat) you don't need.

So hope this helps someone !




 

[Armyaviation]

Any advice for ball stutter only when the flashers on the table go off.  I have 5 dof flashers in the back and those are bright enough so I wouldn't mind disabling them in the table. 

[smithy001]

Exactly what Armyaviation is asking.

On most tables only when the flashers go wild.

My gtx 680 should be able to handle it, it runs average over 180+ fps, but when the flashers kick in, the $#!+ hits the fan.

 

Please anybody?

[Namco51]

I have a similar problem. Flashing lights near the pop bumpers on T2 cause tons of ball stutter for me and I'm not sure how to fix it. Otherwise it plays everything else just great. GTX 660ti with a 2500K Core i5 processor. Was going to overclock before I found this thread. Will read through it and try to tweak settings first. 

 

Exactly what Armyaviation is asking.

On most tables only when the flashers go wild.

My gtx 680 should be able to handle it, it runs average over 180+ fps, but when the flashers kick in, the $#!+ hits the fan.

 

Please anybody?

[Armyaviation]

Man it would be great to get an answer on this

[Outhere]

Are you Using default settings in your video card - Another thing I did was turned off ddraw in the registry for each rom

 

+ More Info on location

http://www.vpforums....als&article=136

[gtxjoe]

Try exclusive full screen. Or setting FPS to 1 or 60 or 120

[teisen]

Hey guys,

with the new version of VPX, do these tips still apply?

 

I believe there are other resources that could be addressed to enrich this topic...

 

could have a topic like this fixed for beginners, with the extremes, informing the configuration to have the best possible performance using the smallest resources and the other end showing how to extract the maximum performance and definition from the VPX.

 

this helps a lot to not have recurring questions on the forum.

 

hugs

[licwip]

Is anybody willing to update this for 10.8? 

[Drybonz]

Is anybody willing to update this for 10.8? 

 

It would mostly need to be re-written.  This one was from 2016 and there have been too many changes.  I would consider this mostly obsolete.  If anyone wants to write a new one I would encourage it.

[spisi69]

OK guys, I have a tip to possibly fix ball stutter. Make sure you get rid of your textboxes and comment them out in the script! I had a stubborn table that was driving me nuts!!! Deleting all my textboxes that I was using for testing did the trick. I hope this helps someone else! Cheers!