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yankeegolf3

Do I need a new computer, What am I missing?

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Hi,I have a 6 year old computer with a pentium 4 at 3Ghz, cache memory 1Mo, FSB 800Mhz, windows XP. Believing what I read about performance increase , I installed an additional 2 Go Ram which gives me a total of 3 Go and a Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT 512 M0 GPU, only to find out that only a small fraction of the RAM and GPU memory are used by FSX. Maybe those upgrades were not justified...My configuration is ridicule by today's standards to say the least especially in terms of CPU. The fact of the matter is that I get acceptable results with my computer at the cost of no autogen, which I don't mind because I fly over photoscenery, air traffic at 15%, every other traffic at 0. My FPS is between 15 an 25, nearly no stutters and blurries even though I use two displays, and I fly with active sky real weather and aircraft such as the A2A B377, b17 or the DC3C.I've been thinking about buying a new computer, impressed by the raw power of the latest intel CPUs.But I've read on this forum that FSX still wins over monster PCs. People still feel the need to tweak FSX, windows 7, Nhancer, overclock their CPUs, an so forth. I expected that with those PCs, FSX would run smoothly and not with FPS still in the thirties when the sliders are on the right.It seems to me that the problem is that today's CPU frequencies are not high enough and that the multicore architecture is not the solution to making FSX run smoothly. I have the feeling that we are on an aymptotic curve where a huge CPU power increase only yields a small performance increase. I am amazed at how my old computer handles FSX. So I am wondering if buying a new computer is worth it because it does not seem that the gain is attractive enough. Am I wrong?

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Well is your FP/S are fine for you and you are willing to fly like that for however long than I can't see what's wrong with your PC. But... if you ever want high sliders and auto-gen then that won't do at all, you need at least a quad to get descent results with High settings. Remember FSX is CPU dependant so that's very important. And you can always overclock to get speeds in the 4GHz range.

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Guest Hondabuff

FSX has been conqured many times with many computers. The only thing that holds you back is money. You can build a FSX rig for $2000 that will run with all settings at max with frame rates above 30FPS. FSX has to be tweaked because the code was written before quad cores with large caches and low latency DDR3 where invented. The developers wrote the program with the thought in mind that computers would advance greatly in the following years. The problem happened when Microsoft pulled the plug on ACES and stopped developement of FSX. Now we are left with a 5 year old piece of software that has to "be tweaked" in order for it to work with todays hardware. Who saw that one coming.

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HI,Money is an isue but I also fear that I could be disapointed by getting only minor improvements not worth 2000$. I've been told the story of a guy who bought a new computer with a I7 hoping to get a huge performance increase with his favourite "old" game, I don't remenber what game, and when he installed it, he got an error message telling him that his CPU was not powerful enough to run the game. His explanation was that the game saw only one core!!!

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Don't worry you don't need 2000$ to build a great PC, check out my specs in my signature. My rig cost only about 1000$ Canadian.

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