Alright. I get it.

Concerning link: I see the link on the FSX forum has been removed. The one in the hardware section is also older version. You may however, if you like, visit my blog for the most recent version:

http://#####...hardware-guide/

While I can agree with what Dr Vesuvius has said, Word Not Allowed also has a valid point and one I was trying to get across myself.

 

FSX can be phenomenal but it definitely isn't out of the box, especially not years after it's release. I'm a PC enthusiast, I spend a lot of time tweaking and testing for the best possible experience in whatever software I may be running. Dr Vesuvius is correct in saying, "...if you want to simulate flying, then you have to know when to stop the tinkering and just enjoy the actual flying.", but trying to simulate flying when frame rates are all over the place and visuals come and go, can be grating. It is for me anyway.

 

Now I don't want to sound harsh (although Word Not Allowed wasn't mincing his words, so here goes...) but you have bought a high-end "gaming" rig, so you should at least have some basic knowledge of what that rig does, and can achieve. Like Word Not Allowed has said, FSX isn't yet another iteration of CoD or some other generic title, it's a complex simulator that only truly comes alive after some time is spent on it. If you want out of the box flying then buy a console, and then be bored in no time. Overclocking is very simple these days and not like it was when I started out. Within minutes you can attain a huge OC with your processor allowing for far better performance, something that definitely adds to a flying simulator.

 

Once you've realised that your GPU isn't exactly working for it's money in FSX you can play around with AA settings in NV Inspector to rid FSX of aliasing and shimmer, again adding to the immersion of simulating a real flight. Like I said, I can appreciate what Dr Vesuvius and others have said, but for me FSX needs attention before you can get the best experience from it. How much attention you want to give it is up to you, but I can tell you one thing, tweaking your hardware to get the best out of FSX will teach you a lot about your PC.

 

Of course, these are just my opinions, nothing more.

 

Good luck mate.

but trying to simulate flying when frame rates are all over the place and visuals come and go, can be grating. It is for me anyway.

 

I'd agree with that too. That's part of what I meant when I said "Get FSX running good enough." Contrary to popular belief, you can run vanilla FSX straight out of the box. It's just that it won't look terribly good by the standard of modern games. the more time, effort and let's face it, money that you spend on it, the better it'll be. At some point though you'll hit a point of diminishing returns, where more effort leads to smaller and smaller improvements.

 

There are those who'll tell you that getting anything less than a constant 60FPS is a fail. There are those who say FPS is the be-all-and-end-all, and you should sacrifice everything else, turning down eye candy, traffic etc, towards that end. There's even one fellah I've heard of saying that you should only use 2006 vintage graphics cards with all the details turned down in order to get the sim to run "as the developers intended". Personally I disagree with all that, but we may just have differing priorities. What gives the best experience for a tubeliner sim pilot may not work so well for a low & slow GA pilot.

 

Now Word Not Allowed's guide is an excellent piece of work, please don't anyone think I'm criticizing it in any way. But it's not the only approach. You can spend countless hours trying to optimise your system to the last decimal point, or you can decide when things are good enough and get on with the flying.

 

Empathica - you have pretty much the same spec PC that I have, except you have a better graphics card. The good news is that overclocking you processor is a relatively simple process these days, essentially being a matter of changing a number in your PC's BIOS settings, then running a stress test for a while watching for overheating or crashing. If all is well, repeat the process until things start to go screwy, then dial the setting back down a couple of notches to a stable setting. I'm a techie, but a complete newb to overclocking (it's not really the done thing in corporate IT) and with a fairly modest third-party cooler (no liquid cooling or anything fancy) and a googled online tutorial, I got my processor overclocked to 4.5GHz quiet, cool and stable, in an afternoon's work. Don't be afraid to give it a go - Intel advertised that processor using the tagline "Overclocking so easy, even your grandma can do it!"

 

Dr V

Hi Mark

 

I don't want be harsh either. But we have given you the broad strokes, all the advice above are good entry points to get where you want.

 

Now all you need is TIME. As Word Not Allowed pointed out, there's no free lunch to be had when it comes to great visuals.

 

The best way to help you now is for you to ask specific questions for specific problems you have. But not in this thread. Start a new one.

 

But not before you have made decent search for the answer here on AVSIM or other places. That is good forum etiquette. Members who don't put in this effort, are easy to spot. And many here will not feel inclined to help if this the case.

 

You have already asked a specific question:

 

I'm unsure also of how I can choose to run DX9 or 10..

 

Good! Do a proper search on it, and see what you find.

 

Happy flying Mark