Flight Sim x

I am purchasing a new Dell 1705 with a 7900gs. I would like to play flight sim x. Would it run well or would I be better off with the 2004 flight sim?

 

My friend ran it with 2x 7900 GTs in SLI, it didn't run very well,

 

depends on how high settings you want. i played it on medium wiht an athlon 3200+ 1gb ram and a 7600gt.

 

i played it on medium with a 3dmark05 of 2700

 

Well, I guess you probably ran it at 1920x1200

 

I run it on an HP dv9000 which is a:
Core 2 Duo T5500 1.67Ghz
2GB of System RAM
Nvidia 7600 Go w/ 256Mb of dedicated VRAM

I play it using both the built in 17" 1440x900 laptop screen for the in game GPS and use an external 1680x1050 Viewsonic LCD for my virtual ****pit view. I get around 20-30 fps in most circumstances with most sliders set at about 60-50% of max. The Deluxe version of the game comes with 3 aircraft that use the GARMIN 1000 "glass ****pit" and when using those the framerates take about a 10fps loss when making banking turns. In level flight over Vancouver, BC with all the buildings and detail the G1000 gets about 2-3 fps less on average. I play using a CH Products Yoke system and have no problems playing the game in the non-glass ****pits(3 planes) at graphics settings on dual monitors that is acceptable.

I will say that while 20fps in a first person shooter game would be a slideshow in FSX it is hard to tell it is at 20fps unless you turn on the fpsm display. It is much smoother that the fps would indicate. There is a large ~600mb demo you can download that is limited to I think 10 or 15 minutes before it times out and you have to restart it. Even though the demo does not include the SP1 updates to support multicore processors better you can get a good feel for how it runs.

Also the game is not designed to use SLI video card configurations since it is designed to be split into many windows over multiple monitors so don't sweat any SLI comments. During play my machine has FSX and WinXP using ~1.2GB of system RAM and 150-200Mb of VideoRAM. It is a very tweak sensative game that will require editing of the config files and lots of testing on your hardware to run at its best on your machine. Right now even quad core machines with 8800 nvidia cards cannot run it at full settings.

In short it runs acceptably well on any recent (last 6 months) PC that has at least 1GB of RAM, Win XP and a 256Mb graphics card that supports the proper shaders. It is a CPU hog and will eat up any and all cycles you let it so while multicores help in loading textures and with some aspects they've redesigned it is still primarily going to run on a single core so get the most Ghz you can.

In the future I plan on building a dedicated desktop system for it once I see how the it handles DX10 and the newer Intel 45nm chips. It is certainly not a game you can just load onto a new computer and expect to turn all the dials to max and be amazed. There is simply not a hardware setup out right now that will handle it all.

 

Vancouver Area at Dawn (If you look closely you can see the arc in front of the plane which is the prop being "caught" in a snapshot and to the left a tad above the acceleration gauge, just above the water, you can see some of the real time reflections of the interior of the plane.


Inlet near Vancouver during afternoon


Area 51...nope no aliens, shux

Here are some "reduced in quality for the web" snapshots I took to show what I mean. The framerates are shown in the upper left. The format is lowest/avg/highest with the low and high being on some sort of timer because they change as well, just not anywhere near as fast as the average. The "V" to the right is the variance in the framerate. You get the smoothest play when you can maneuver and this number stays under about 10% since more than that is a pretty hefty difference in the framerate over short intervals.

If you notice the first framerate, which is the recent low, in a couple of shots is like 0.3 fps. This is because when you open the GPS and drag it onto another monitor the game pauses, without actually pausing officially, until you get it placed. So basically you get a couple of seconds of pause which shows up as the 0.x fps. An open GPS on the laptop monitor only makes maybe a 1 or 2 fps difference on the main view, which is the Viewsonic 2025wm widescreen LCD.

 

So your FPS was 26 or above?

What settings/Res were you using, because that makes me want to go and buy the game.

 

This game is heavly cpu bound they released a patch a few weeks ago that added support for multi-core cpu's.

People reported 50-100% increase in frame rate with that patch.

I say if you have a C2D and a semi decent video card you will be good to go.

 

Here are the settingsI was using last night. I am still in the process of testing out various combinations of settings to get results I like. I would recommend that with current hardware you'll get the best results if you save 3-4 different settings that are each tweaked for the various types of areas you'll be flying in. The settings you will likely want for high altitude commercial jet vs a bush pilot flight will be different as you allocate resources more to AI traffic with the former.

I also don't play in "fullscreen" mode hence the unspecified setting for the resolution in the graphics tab. I play in windowed mode since it seems to give the game an extra 4-5fps and lets you drag windows among the various monitors. I stretch the main view window on the 1680x1050 display to fill the screen and then "detach" other components like the GPS, radio stack, etc and drag their windows over to the laptop display. The 1680x1050 LCD is right in front of me, just behind my CH Flight Yoke and the laptop sits to the right of the that so that the display edges basically touch. I have run the game in horizontal span mode at 2880x900 and the result is pretty immersive but unfortunately it places the center of your view in the split between the two monitors so it is very distracting. I plan on going with the 3 forward monitors when I build the desktop since 19" 1280x1024 LCDs can be had so cheap now-a-days.

 

i can play with ultra high settings on everything grahpics its mint

 

WHat GPU do you have?

 

anyone installed SP1?

 

i can play ultra high all setting is fsx i have 2 x radeon hd2900 xt. with 8 gb ram in my desktop

 

Yes, I installed it.

 

sounds like I'll spend as much time tweaking the settings as I will learing to fly. Thanks for all the great info. I think I'll give it a shot. Would the 2004 version perform much better?

 

Make sure you install Flight Simulator X Service Pack 1.

 

I don't have FS9(FS2004 Century of Flight) so I can't compare exact performance.

However you should be able to pick it up for around $20 and most of the newer add-ons being released for FSX are coming bundled with FS9 versions since so many people still use FS9. So in that regard buying FS9 will not stop you from getting newer add-ons. There are currently FAR more downloads and payware for FS9 so you will have alot to choose from.

I have seen add-ons that make the graphics in FS9 look amazing but I am sure they come with a fps cost. From what I've read people who run FSX in the 20's typically were running FS9 in the 40s or 50s with maxed settings.