Making a new custom PC, BaseCamp graphics, help?

[w2ge]

Has anyone made a desktop pc recently for handling BaseCamp? When in higher Detail, full map screen re-draws are graphics intensive and takes a bit of time. Has anyone recently built a pc with an upgraded graphics gaming card that really helped with screen draws?

My current pc I have a Nvidia GeForce gtx Card but still it isn’t super fast and it’s having some issues. I’m thinking of building a new pc and looking for any recommendations.

Probably AMD cpu, SSD drive and some external GPU card.. maybe the new RTX lowest version card? (3070?). Ain’t cheap

PC gurus? TIA

[Stu]

I installed a graphics card in the hope it would make things better.

It made a difference but its still not perfect

Having an SSD installed helps a bit too

It still waits for it to load but doesn't freeze like it did on my PC

[MSTOCK27370]

Pretty much any recent PC should handle BaseCamp without a problem. I've got an inexpensive Dell Win10 laptop. SSD drive, 8 GB memory. BaseCamp response is instant. I didn't think anyone was custom building PCs for personal use anymore.

[w2ge]

Omg, it’s still huge... you can’t believe money gamers spend. New top Of the line video cards... $3000. Crazy money spent

[jfheath]

Yes - at the highest level of detail it takes a long time to redraw the map. What I do is use Medium detail most of the time and then when I want more, I reduce the map area that it has to draw, by zooming in, and then set it to the highest level. It has a much smaller map area to fetch and draw and it becomes much more usable.

The other trick is to go to Edit -> Options -> Display and alter the sliders to reduce certain categories of information.

I've recently upgraded my PC and now have 16Gb Memory and a core i5 2.9GHz processor and 64bit WIndows 10 Pro
I reckon all of these gave some small gains over my previous internals - especially the memory, as it doesn't have to spend time shunting contents onto hard disk and reading it back again. (I still buy the components and build it myself).
But I reckon the biggest change was the SSD drive that I put in - which stores the OS and programs. It is so quiet now, and so fast to start up and load programs.

[w2ge]

Yep. Pretty much how I do it... lower the detail level then increase it as I zoom in...

PC is hanging in there, if it starts to make me crazy I’ll build something new and definitely will be SSD, and 16gb of RAM.

Price of these gamer video cards can be daunting... on my current pc my video card was under $200 IIRC, these new gamer cards are up to $3000. I’m curious if the program itself has something to do with taking advantage of theses high end video cards ability? That is... is it wasted on say i.e. BaseCamp as it’s programming language can’t take advantage of the cards ability?

[jfheath]

I'm a bit out of touch with modern graphics cards, but I believe that they take a lot of processing away from the main PC. In the same way that a satnav is given point A and point B and it goes away and plots a route, a graphics card is given some information about some shapes (where they are, what they are doing, what direction they are travelling, where the light source is, where the viewer is .... that sort of thing) and the graphics card goes about rendering the image with all of the necessary shading. It has to do this so that the complete scene is drawn ready for the next time the screen needs to be refreshed - say 100th of a second later. But for a powerful processor running at billions of clock ticks every second, they can handle this.

But they need the computer software to send the basic information in the right format. So the computer programs are written specifically for a graphics card that is operating to a certain set of standards. Basecamp isn't that sort of program.

Although a graphics card has a much better processor to be able to handle standard display, a standard graphics card will still do a pretty good job. In fact, I don't have a separate graphics card now. I just bought a different motherboard and it has a better spec graphics facility than the dedicated graphics card that I bought years ago for my old setup. But it isn't a gaming card.