Greetings all!

 

I need your help in recommending what to upgrade to get FSX running smoothly with the NGX and upcoming 777.

 

Currently with my setting nearly maxed I can get roughly 45-50 FPS with a default c172. As soon as I switch to the NGX it drops to a mere 12-14 FPS.

 

Here are my specs:

 

Intel i7 920 @ 2.67GHz

EVGA X58 motherboard

6GB(3x2GB) RAM DDR3 Tripple channel at 2122.6 MHz

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti 2GB

 

So, I have a Newegg account and plenty of credit to spar with them. What needs to be upgraded in order for me to have a steady 25-30 FPS with the NGX?

 

I run REX, TacPack and the Warthog GUI software in the background.

 

Thank you all in advance.

 

Best,

 

Kurt Collins

FPS is almost completely driven by CPU speed. If you're not overclocking, 2.67 is rather low if you want the NGX + scenery in the mid to high 20's on frames.

 

I would suggest either buying an aftermarket CPU cooler (a good one is anywhere from around $70 to $100) or if your chip can't OC high enough for your needs, get an i7 2K provided it's compatible with your motherboard.

I have an i7 950 myself, which has a stock speed of 3.06 GHz. I bought a Noctua cooler for $70 from newegg, and I was able to overclock up to 4.02 GHz.

First of all try playing around with the settings. There are a lot of topics here describing that. Yours are probably to high and not optimized.

 

If that doesn't help you should overclock your CPU as much as possible - to at least around 4GHz. What FSX cares most about is the CPU clock. A good non stock cooler (like Noctua) might help with that. You have a rather high end motherboard so there should be no problems with that.

 

You could also try upgrading your graphics card to something better. The 550Ti is rather low-end. Maybe a 660Ti or 670 with 2GB of V-RAM. Although I would try with the CPU first. As I already said it's what matters most.

Thanks for the responses.

 

I had no idea that my video card was low-end. I paid a decent amount of money for it just last year.

 

As far as overclocking, I am completely clueless how to do that.

 

Best,

 

Kurt Collins

As far as overclocking, I am completely clueless how to do that.

 

Plenty of online guides to OC the i7 series Intel chips. It's not hard at all. Just need proper cooling.

Kurt,

 

I have a Q9550 with 6GB RAM and a 768MB 480GTX, and I get about 30-35 fps on the ground. I don't overclock either. What I do is use the venetubo configuration for my fsx.cfg file and I put my scenery settings to medium high. This does the trick for me. I do also have to add that I do not use a lot of add-on scenery, instead I simply get the latest AFCAD files, sometimes some freeware scenery. For me the actual aircraft performance is more important that the visuals of the airport.

 

I do know that this is personal preference, but I have found that you have to find that balance between a good setup performance wise and also visually. I do have to mention that I am getting these frame rates flying online with the NGX. You just have to play around with it until you find something that hits the sweet spot for your system. There are many tweaks for sure, but when you come right down to it, it becomes system specific :-).

 

Good luck!

 

Kind regards