M1330 Flight Simulator X Experience

In the tradition of my previous post, M1330 Bioshock Experience, I decided to continue pushing the limits of this ultralight notebook, and go all out with the gaming. Microsoft Flight Simulator X, the latest edition of this famed series, is notorious for sucking up every ounce of available power - and for good reason too. As the tagline proclaims, this is "as real as it gets". On maximum settings, it can even bog down a dedicated gaming rig equipped with a quad core CPU and a 768MB 8800GTX with enough air and ground traffic in the scene.

The recently released FSX service pack 1 claims to have significant optimizations resulting in a 10-25% performance increase, with stronger machines benefiting more. Since SP1 introduces CPU multithreading to the application, it does indeed feel like it speeds up FSX on the m1330 by about 15% or so.

Unlike a shooter such as Bioshock or FEAR, resolution is critically important in a simulator, as you need every available pixel to get a usable FOV and to render as many panels and gauges as possible. FSX only gave me the option of 1024x768 or native 1280x800, so there really wasn't much of a decision here - select widescreen and hope for the best.

After some serious custom tweaking of the in-game settings, I ended up with most sliders around their "middle" settings. Since I don't spend a ton of time looking AT my aircraft, I lowered those renderers to low-middle. I DO enjoy water flying and clouds, so I pushed those up to high-middle. From this quality level up, FSX uses Shader 3.0 to impart real-time reflections to water, which pushes the realism into another league, as you can see from the screenshots. It's worth dialing back some of the autoscenery levels and traffic densities just to get that water! Air and ground traffic affect performance in a big way, so I lowered those to the recommended 20% level.

With these settings and the target FPS set to 15, expect somewhere in the region of 10-15 frames under most situations; a little more in the high-altitude airways, a little less when approaching busy airports or urban areas. It doesn't sound very promising, but even with a big gaming rig, one tends to shoot for no more than about 25-30 FPS. In a civilian flight sim, things don't happen fast and furiously as in a shooter or combat simulator - things are a lot more leisurely - so 15 FPS ends up being very playable.

I can't say that I would recommend an m1330 or any 8400M GS machine as a primary flight sim rig! However, if you don't have an alternative, it is entirely possible to get a pretty decent experience. Putting this in perspective, I get about the same performance, and probably twice the realism of my previous setup, which was Flight Simulator: A Century of Flight (the previous version) on an Athlon XP/Radeon 9700 tower.

Once again, it's pretty amazing for a notebook that is physically lighter and more slender than the joystick/flight control setup plugged into its USB port!

Screenies (target 15 FPS, reduced from 1280x800 to 800x500)

1 - Sunset over Tokyo Bay, Air Canada a320 spot view
2 - Dusk over the South China Sea, approach to Hong Kong (VHHH)
3 - Cessna 172SP virtual c0ckpit, on approach to Sitka, Alaska.

 

Have you done any overclocking at all to assist your venture?

 

Because I'm happy with 163.44 for both Bioshock and general system stability, I'm loathe to switch drivers at the moment. Unfortunately, as this version is not OC capable (at the moment!) this means my hands are tied for now.

I'm sure at some point in the very near future, we'll see some variant of 163.44 that can be overclocked.

 

Awesome, and nice graphics but does 15 FPS feel laggy?

 

15 FPS is actually pretty common in the civillian flight sim world. As I said before, even those with huge gaming rigs don't really go much higher than 20-30 except in particular circumstances. If you're flying realistically, things don't happen all that fast in the game world, unlike in a shooter or combat simulator.

Helicopters, aerobatics craft and fighter jets aside, all civillian aircraft take on the order of up to 60 seconds to complete even a steep 360 degree bank; so 15fps is plenty of frame rate for flying a turboprop or commercial jet realistically.

 

Try playing a combat sim at 15fps.

 

Thats about the frame rate I get on my Inspiron 9100 with a ATI Redeon 9700, maybe a little more

 

i get 35ish with add ons on my macbook pro for fs 9, im scared to try it with fs x though