Take a look at my setup in the signature. This runs 737NGX like a charm, admittedly sliders are not all the way up in display settings but almost, gives a real pleasurable smooth and picturesque experience and I built it for less that £750.

I don't get this. I run FSX on a dual core 2.66Ghz laptop with an NVIDIA 230M card, 4Gb RAM and a slow hard drive. It runs the PMDG 737NGX, REX, FTX SP4 and traffic at 15% just fine , It never falls below 20fps irrespective of weather, never has any CTDs but does not have any payware airports. It is as smooth as you like and the Orbx scenery detail is more than good enough for me with most sliders out to the right

 

How come a 3 year old machine seemingly runs it all better than the latest i5/i7 machines?

 

Gerry

 

 

I'm going to guess your screen resolution is not 1920 x 1080, or 5760 x 1080 but Perhaps 1366 x 768?

The affinity mask indicates which cores you would prefer FSX to use. FSX is not written to be multi-tasking, so it only uses additional cores for texture loading.

 

You mean apart from Flight? Well, there was Aerofly, two versions of X-Plane, Virtual Pilot 3d, Pro Flight Simulator, Lock-On (Modern Air Combat and Flamming Cliffs), and quite a few others that probabley aren't as well known. However, I don't think any of software houses involved became rich.

 

As for there being a customer base for a new flight sim of "thousands of thousands"... Lets be realistic and say 10,000, no, lets be generous and say 100,000. How much does each spend on Flight sims in a year? $100? Now lets say that every possible fan spends $100 on this wonderful new flight sim that you are hoping for, that is $10 million dollars which sounds like a lot.

 

But it has to have 20,000 airports. If it takes 1 hour to do an airport, (buildings, taxiways, runways, radios etc.) then at 1500 man hours a year, that takes 13 man-years. At a not very well paid $50,000 a year, it costs over $600,000 to do the airports. If your average goes up to 2 hours, you have spent over a million dollars and you haven't started on the scenery yet. (Now you know why X_plane doesn't have airports yet). This is why I think there will never be a new 'full' flight simulator on the market,it is just too expensive to do all the details from scratch. About the best we can hope for is that Microsoft/Lockheed Martin release FSX as open source and a team of volunteers convert it to 1) 64bit, and/or 2) multiprocessing, but use the existing database of details.

 

Well, I disagree.

 

You mentioned flight simulations done in a cheap and bad way.

 

Take MS Flight for instance. If it wasn't for the damn Joshua Howard that ruined it all since the beginning, Flight with few sections like Europe, USA to be sold later on and few jets would have done the trick ! In fact Mr. Randazzo was contacted in early Flight stages but then Joshua Howard close the discussion with third parties software house like PMDG and he eventually sunk Flight with his supreme idiocy.

 

If only Flight had a SDK it would bury for ever FSX but it doesn't take a miracle and neither a huge amount of money to produce a good Flight simulation, it is only a matter of knowing what to do and in which way.

 

Now we are here unfortunately fiddling for ever with the FSX.cfg trying to obtain the gold from the lead using CPUs like we were using an hammer to tweak a precision clock.

John

 

Yes, you are right - it is 1366 x 768. Does it really make a big difference at higher screen resolutions? I imagine it does but is it worth the expense of an i7 with all the bells and whistles?

 

Gerry

...Joshua Howard that ruined it all...

Sorry Mark, but you really haven't displayed enough knowledge about flight sims in general, or even just FSX, to be able to 'name and shame' and blame some individual for your disappointments.

 

Where do you get the right to suggest "You mentioned flight simulations done in a cheap and bad way." How many of them have you tried? How many of them did you even know existed? You claimed that there was a business opertunity for a new sim and were clearly not aware of all entries already trying to fill that gap.

 

And when you come out with foolish statements like "If only Flight had a SDK it would bury for ever FSX" your credibility is severly challenged. Of course Flight had an SDK. Whether or not it was publicly published is a different question. And as for burying FSX, just ask yourself, which one is still for sale?

John

 

Yes, you are right - it is 1366 x 768. Does it really make a big difference at higher screen resolutions? I imagine it does but is it worth the expense of an i7 with all the bells and whistles?

 

Gerry

 

Huge difference, more pixels to push. Just like any game, as the resultioj increases, the FPS drops.

 

As for is it worth it, that's really a personal decision. If you like what you have now, no reason to change.

 

Personally I run three 60" plasma's at 5760 x 1080, after experiencing that for some time, I would find it hard to go back. But as I was saying everyone has that sweet spot that is valuable to them. Some love high def plane textures, real photo scenery, detailed airports, etc... For me, I fly a hardware cockpit, like real weather, clouds and don't care what the outside of the plane looks like because I never see it, don't care about ground resolution much as I'm up in the flight levels quickly and only have a few detailed airports as I don't fly into many. Some fall somewhere between those positions....

Sorry Mark, but you really haven't displayed enough knowledge about flight sims in general, or even just FSX, to be able to 'name and shame' and blame some individual for your disappointments.

 

Where do you get the right to suggest "You mentioned flight simulations done in a cheap and bad way." How many of them have you tried? How many of them did you even know existed? You claimed that there was a business opertunity for a new sim and were clearly not aware of all entries already trying to fill that gap.

 

And when you come out with foolish statements like "If only Flight had a SDK it would bury for ever FSX" your credibility is severly challenged. Of course Flight had an SDK. Whether or not it was publicly published is a different question. And as for burying FSX, just ask yourself, which one is still for sale?

 

Well, the flight simulation knowledge may be influenced on personal opinions but if this opinion is shared among the mass it can be wrong but it is a fact that XPlane X and AeroFly represent a niche compared to FSX.

 

Then, I have been involved enough within Flight betas ( like many of us I guess ) to point Joshua Howard as the main guilty man to have sunk Flight, a horridus arcade plenty of potential. You didn't even mention Joshua in your remark, am I supposed to believe your Flight background knowledge is poor ? Not at all, because I do not point to you like you did with me, I am simply reporting the general opinions among Flight beta testers and if Mr. Randazzo described the initial relationship between him ( PMDG CEO ) and MS Flight members you would have noticed that his opinion is pretty much the same of mine, between the lines. Do I have to assume that you didn't carefully read that post of Mr. Randazzo against MS Flight team ? Maybe you missed that.

 

Told that, MS Flight is a buried arcade now, the SDK has never been published so it doesn't make sense to think if it would have been published.

 

I am happy with Flight but the reason why it is the only platform available since so many year maybe stays behind a way of thinking like your. We, idealists, think that this situation can change.

 

It is only thanks to gorgeous products like PMDG ones that FSX is still surfing the wave. This has to be taken into consideration.

You guys need to define "minimum" better if you want a true answer - when we come up with minimum specs, we're thinking of it as "Will the product actually run?", not "Will I get 40FPS and everything looks awesome visually?" and stuff like that. If you're asking what you need to run it really well and smoothly, that's the "Best Performance" specs and it'll basically be our recommendation for a computer at the time of release. I come up with that basically by looking at the most reasonable system an average person is likely to be able to acquire - you may be able to get marginally better performance by spending a ton of extra money on stuff like Core i7 Extreme CPU and crazy video cards like this new GTX Titan thing, but you're way past the point of diminishing returns there and it isn't going to net you much gain versus the cost.

 

For a good number of years now, the main requirements for good performance in FSX with a lot of addons has been something involving an overclocked mid to high end Intel Core i5 or i7 K series CPU, 4GB+ of RAM (I'd personally go 8 or 16GB right now since RAM is so cheap), and a recent GTX-class Nvidia GPU from the x60 Ti (ie 560, 660 etc) series or higher. (excluding the dual GPU cards like the 590 and 690 because FSX doesn't really take advantage of multi-GPU). This isn't a super computer you have to spend $4000 on - you can easily build a good core system from parts in the $1000-2000 range depending on what you get exactly (mostly dependent on the exact CPU and GPU model you choose).

You guys need to define "minimum" better if you want a true answer - when we come up with minimum specs, we're thinking of it as "Will the product actually run?", not "Will I get 40FPS and everything looks awesome visually?" and stuff like that. If you're asking what you need to run it really well and smoothly, that's the "Best Performance" specs and it'll basically be our recommendation for a computer at the time of release. I come up with that basically by looking at the most reasonable system an average person is likely to be able to acquire - you may be able to get marginally better performance by spending a ton of extra money on stuff like Core i7 Extreme CPU and crazy video cards like this new GTX Titan thing, but you're way past the point of diminishing returns there and it isn't going to net you much gain versus the cost.

 

For a good number of years now, the main requirements for good performance in FSX with a lot of addons has been something involving an overclocked mid to high end Intel Core i5 or i7 K series CPU, 4GB+ of RAM (I'd personally go 8 or 16GB right now since RAM is so cheap), and a recent GTX-class Nvidia GPU from the x60 Ti (ie 560, 660 etc) series or higher. (excluding the dual GPU cards like the 590 and 690 because FSX doesn't really take advantage of multi-GPU). This isn't a super computer you have to spend $4000 on - you can easily build a good core system from parts in the $1000-2000 range depending on what you get exactly (mostly dependent on the exact CPU and GPU model you choose).

Hey Ryan

My I5 2300 With GTX460 is running the NGX on about 20-25(VC...) in areas that have lots of complex sceneries(The Airport Scenery+A huge Photoreal of the city).

At this momment of development,what's the expected performance from the T7? well it be the same or maybe even better?

i asked this question like 5 months ago,but i only got Hypothesis answers (hope you understand it right ),i think 5 months later i can get clearer answers about this

 

Can't wait to this T7,im really getting crazy here

I don't want to say anything definitive until we have a late beta/release candidate version running, but it should be on par with or better than the NGX. The cockpit is less complicated in terms of polys and clickspots than the NGX is, so that should help it.

I don't want to say anything definitive until we have a late beta/release candidate version running, but it should be on par with or better than the NGX. The cockpit is less complicated in terms of polys and clickspots than the NGX is, so that should help it.

 

Thanks for your replies on the forums Ryan.. It really does help the excruciating wait. :-)

It would be great if you could say a estimated time of release at least so we can set ourselves ready for it. I know you can't give an exact date but an accurate date like Q1 etc. is ok. I hope the wait will satisfy us in terms of performance.