March 24, 201214 yr Hi All:Recently I decided to 'downgrade' my video card and am surprised at the improvements I have seen.First a little background as to why I would even want to do this. I am a longtime flightsimmer, since the genre was born, so to speak. I currently am a 'tri-simmer', that is, I fly one of three flight sims, depending on what my main interest is on any particular day. For the best visual experience, I fly FSX and Orbx scenery. For general flightsimming, I still prefer FS2004. And for those days when I want a real challenge and fly an IFR approach down to minimums, with nothing visible outside the cockpit window, I fly FS2002! Microsoft seriously 'broke' IFR flying with FS2004 and FSX. Even 'inside' an overcast layer it is easy to see the ground looking to the side or downwards. FS2002 is the last sim they made that can still display a total 'whiteout' inside an overcast layer.I recently rebuilt my Sim computer for FSX. i7-2600K CPU overclocked now to 4200 GHz, ASUS P8P67 motherboard, and an nVidia GTX 560Ti video card. You would think this setup should run any of my three sims just fine. FSX was good. FS9, a few nagging issues from time to time with a video 'freeze' for several minutes. But the biggest disappointment was with FS2002. Slow and jerky! My old dual core CPU/8800GT video computer ran it much better! I found I had to turn off MIP mapping, cut down autogen scenery to sparse, etc. just to be flyable!I happened to have laying around another video card I had picked up cheaply that I was planning to use to rebuild another computer (non-gaming), an ATI Radeon HD6670. This is considered a 'mid-range' card at best,certainly not a gaming card. I figured FSX performance would suffer but I really wanted my FS2002 back to a playable state. So out came the nVidia card and in went the Radeon.The results have exceeded my expectations by far. FS2002 now runs as smoothly as it ever did on my old system, FS2004 seems the same as before (no video lockups so far). But the biggest surprise of all came in FSX: No noticable performance hit at all!! As a test I loaded up my most demanding aircraft (Flight1 Mustang) parked at a busy Orly X Airport, with low clouds and rain, all things that should make a 'slow' Radeon video card drop to it's knees and beg for mercy! But no, it reported framerates identical to what I had seem before with my nVidia card: 20 - 30 fps. In fact, outside panning around the aircraft always seemed to stutter a little with the nVidia card, but this little Radeon (which requires no power other than what it gets from the PCI-Express bus) pans even smoother!I don't know how to explain this. I have just done this 'downgrade' a couple of days ago so time will tell if this is genuine or not. I will also say I run fairly low resolutions. My monitor is 1680x1050 and I often run a window in a 4:3 aspect ratio to keep my 2D panels from being stretched. People who run HD monitors full screen or multiple monitors will likely need a more powerful card.I wil add the same doesn't hold for Microsoft Flight. That game stutters significantly now when panning around, whereas it was pefectly smooth before. But since I have pretty well abandoned that 'sim' it doesn't matter to me.But it is interesting that newer and faster video cards are not necessarily better for these 'older' flightsims.David David, CYXE
March 25, 201214 yr This is very strange, I upgraded from a GTX 320 (which is comparable to the 8800GT) and noticed around 50% performance increase! I can understand though, that FS2002 runs better with the 8800GT than with the GTX560Ti. This is obvious, FS2002 is a 10 year old game, designed for those older NVIDIA cards, and not for the GTX 560Ti. It simply doesn't know how to "handle" the GTX 560Ti. I heard that there's now a similar effect with LGA 2011 and FSX, FSX seems to run very bad on these systems (as far as I've heard). I'm afraid that there's gonna be a similar effect with the GTX680 unfortunately, especially because it's such a different card compared to the GTX 580. I'm afraid that graphics card wise, we aren't gonna get it much better than this... Arjen Vandervelde
April 16, 201214 yr Just a joke. Anyone get it? Easily... and I just happen to have 'passed' it - I don't know what's more interesting though; the performace claim or the fact that he's still using FS2002
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