I have been playing Flight on a daily basis since it was released. However, I seem to be almost on my own in that it does not play well on my less than 2-year old hardware. I have an off-the-shelf system that meets the minimum requirements except for the video card, an ATI Radeon HD5450. This will only allow me to play the game on low graphical settings (pretty awful), or, if I up them to medium I get very bad shimmering and jerky performance.

 

Some excellent, formerly pay ware, New Zealand scenery has recently been uploaded to Avsim as freeware, RealNZwgtn and RealNZmarlborough. So, after installing these sceneries I fired up FS9 for the first time in several weeks and then experienced that wonderful, smooth as butter, performance that others are claiming for Flight.

 

Hey, I am not knocking Flight. I am impressed with what I have seen but it does not play well on my rig and FS9 does. I will likely come back to Flight when I can afford to upgrade my video card and, hopefully, I will then have a much more varied selection of sceneries and aircraft to choose from.

 

But, in the meantime……

This clearly shows that Flight is a LOT more GPU dependant then FS9 or FSX are!

 

Happy flying in FS9 and hopefully we'll meet again sometimes soon here. :wnk:

fs9 is allways a good alternative! A friend of mine never even gave fsx a try, although now he is enjoying FLIGH a lot...

 

FM-wise fs9 is better than FSX... Strange, but true :-(

+1

 

Before the release of Flight and for the reason that I wanted My FSX with tons of extras to run better.

Have the latest, and I mean he latest (3 monts ago) in my computer.

Running Flight in the highest settings and get a little tiny bit of stutter (do not kow if it´s the right word)

at the sides of the screen at higher speeds, the same as I get in FSX with all to max, low altitude and high speed a/c.

A minor problem, love both Flight and FSX.

I'm the opposite. Flight runs perfectly on my 3 year old PC (albeit with a 4 month old graphics card). However I find myself a little bored of the limited area and aircraft available. I'm trying P3D now, as FSX really doesn't run well at all now for some reason. I think it's time for a reinstall!

However I find myself a little bored of the limited area and aircraft available.

 

The amount of planes is fine with me (I am used to flying one airplane for months) but the limited area is also becoming a problem for me. Or better said, the huge amount of water is. The amount of airports to fly to is not too bad, but to do a flight that takes a bit longer then 10 minutes you HAVE to fly over the water and I hate flying over the water.... I wouldn't mind if Alaska was released today!

fs9 is allways a good alternative! A friend of mine never even gave fsx a try, although now he is enjoying FLIGH a lot...

 

FM-wise fs9 is better than FSX... Strange, but true :-(

 

What do you mean? FM? Flight model? If so what do you base that on?

Even with an i5-2500K overclocked to 4.0GHz, SLI GTX 460 1GB (roughly equivalent to a single GTX 580), and 8 GB DDR3 1600, I had to reduce a couple options to get a consistent 60 FPS at a resolution of 1920x1200. Unlike most games (and more like prior MS flight sims), the CPU is definitely where Flight bottlenecks (once any initial GPU bottlenecks have been taken care of, obviously).

 

More specifically, the highest settings for Scenery Quality (water reflections at Maximum), Shadow Quality, and Weather Quality (soft clouds at High) are the real framerate killers. Changing Scenery Quality from High to Max alone halves my framerate from 120 FPS to 60 FPS, yet the GPU utilization continues to hover around 80% and the framerate stays consistent even at lower resolutions which definitely indicates that the problem lies with the 100% utilization of Core 0 of the CPU. Shadow and Weather Quality have a lesser, but still rather significant impact. Weather Quality oddly affects framerates even on the Clear Skies setting without any obvious change in image quality; I'm not really sure what's going on there.

 

Scenery Density seems to mainly rely on the CPU as well, but really becomes an issue when Scenery Quality is set to Max. I can have either High Density / Max Quality, or vice versa, but setting both to Max drops framerates into the 40s.

 

Texture Quality and Sharpness seem to rely almost 100% on the GPU, and have little effect on framerate, given that the GPU is never hitting 100% utilization regardless of settings. If the GPU is maxing out (and a single 460 will at the resolution and settings I use), then that becomes the primary bottleneck, and would need to be resolved before addressing the CPU bottleneck.

 

So to wrap all that up, I've settled on High Shadow Quality / Max Sharpness / High Scenery Density / Maximum Scenery Quality / High Texture Quality / High Weather Quality for a framerate that stays steady at 60 FPS (VSync on, screen tearing is incredibly obvious when off) for the most part and dips into the low 50s when in densely populated places such as Honolulu. I could get higher framerates if I swapped Scenery Quality and Density, but I feel that the water reflections add a lot more visually than a slightly extended draw radius does.

 

Realistically, there's not much that can be done at this point to improve performance. The i5-2500K could be easily overclocked further to 4.5GHz (for a perhaps 10% increase in performance, so around 5-6 FPS), and a little less easily to 5.0GHz. Even with that high of an overclock, the gains would likely be only about 20%, so around 8 FPS with all the eyecandy at Maximum, which would still only get me to the low 50s.

 

Short of Microsoft optimizing Flight to utilize multiple CPU cores, there doesn't really seem to be any feasible way to set everything to Max and still get a solid 60 frames per second at all time. Fortunately Flight still feels rather fluid at 50 FPS, but much below that and the responsiveness and smoothness start to become very obvious.

 

All that said, knocking a couple settings down from Maximum doesn't bug me in the least, and I'm having a blast with Flight. I've probably spent as much time out of the game flipping through the Airport/Facility Directory, perusing the sectional chart, reading up on ILS procedures, etc and whatnot. I can't remember the last time a "game" made me want to learn.

Yes, Flight Model...

 

Based on the records truncated between fs9 and fs10, and of course I am not only referring to the "wing incidence" which can somehow be overcome with a tweak of the corresponding lift and drag tables using a shift (in radians) corresponding to the amount of incidence on the original aircraft model... I am referring to important entries affecting propwash on the tail surface, and a few others I can't remember now - it's been a long time since I last played with MSFS airfiles :-)

 

What do you mean? FM? Flight model? If so what do you base that on?

Yes, Flight Model...

 

Based on the records truncated between fs9 and fs10, and of course I am not only referring to the "wing incidence" which can somehow be overcome with a tweak of the corresponding lift and drag tables using a shift (in radians) corresponding to the amount of incidence on the original aircraft model... I am referring to important entries affecting propwash on the tail surface, and a few others I can't remember now - it's been a long time since I last played with MSFS airfiles :-)

 

I prefer the overall flight model additions to FSX. I thought the default 172 is also better than FS9......as it didn't need Rob Young's refinements as much. As to propwash on the tail, and defaults, forget it. They've pretty much been eliminated for a number of versions (due to frame rates, as I remember). Was much better with MS Combat 1 & 2. Third parties have got around much of it, though. I like the subtle mountain waves in FSX, as it's quite believable.

 

L.Adamson

They're rough, believe me... and not really mountain waves :-)

 

Try CumulusX! for rather acceptable ridge flying...

 

The propwash records were still there on fs9, although unused by many (including the default) aircraft...

 

;-)

 

I like the subtle mountain waves in FSX, as it's quite believable.

Even with an i5-2500K overclocked to 4.0GHz, SLI GTX 460 1GB (roughly equivalent to a single GTX 580), and 8 GB DDR3 1600, I had to reduce a couple options to get a consistent 60 FPS at a resolution of 1920x1200. Unlike most games (and more like prior MS flight sims), the CPU is definitely where Flight bottlenecks (once any initial GPU bottlenecks have been taken care of, obviously).

 

This is the reason why there is no fps-counter in Flight. Why the heck do you need consistent 60fps? Either it feels smooth or it doesn't. No need to count frames.

 

My hardware is worse than yours but I can run Flight perfectly at max settings.

The reason 60 FPS is optimal when VSync is on (to prevent tearing) has to do with how frames are delivered to the display. With VSync on the screen can only be sent a new frame at fixed intervals of 16.67ms (1 sec/60) on a 60Hz display (the majority of LCDs). So when the FPS reads less than 60, for example 45, it is not a true 45 FPS, but a 30/15 split of 60FPS and 30 FPS. The constant switch from full rate refresh to half speed refresh is incredibly annoying, hence the "need" for a consistent 60 FPS when using VSync. Obviously this does not apply if VSync is off since a partial frame will be sent from the buffer, but this causes tearing, which I personally cannot stand.

So what's wrong with having constant 30fps then?

So what's wrong with having constant 30fps then?

 

From my perspective nothing at all.

I run full screen with vsync on.

Flight for me is very smooth and fluid, even if the fps gets down to the mid to upper 20's which only happens occasionally over very dense terrain/populated areas.