Greetings all.  (first post here so please be gentle   )

 

Have been reading a lot of the forums etc, and am fairly new to flightsimmimng.

 

I have a new machine, but unfortunately I built the machine before I got well into FSX.

 

I got a non-overclockable chip and a motherboard designed for stability not overclocking (that'll teach me) but even so, I get reasonable frame rates except in areas with large add on airports.  As a guide, I am fixed at 30fps  and get that in most areas except the airports then it starts to stutter around 9 - 15 fps  (yes I have traffic down and settings down to compensate)

 

However, one easy change would be to switch from the ATI graphic card (AMD Radeon HD 7900 series + 3 Gb)  to an Nvidia card and from reading, the best bet would seem to be a 4gb GTX 680 series, but would really value some input as to would this be worth while and if so, which version of a 680 would be best.

 

I will consider a processer change later, but currently I am looking to do this in stages.

 

Your insite would really be appreciated.

 

Regards

 

Graham

I'll think you'll get more out of buying a overclockable chip and just stick with that ATI card....I had a GTX 480 1,5GB and switched to a GTX680 2GB, didn't see any performance boost. But when I switched the i7 950 cpu to a i7 3770k I really got a performance boost...

You'll see a huge performance and image quality boost.

AMD cards struggle with FSX's clouds. No problem for NVIDIA's latest cards.

See my post here about the GTX 660:

http://forum.avsim.net/topic/409415-testing-the-nvidia-gtx-660-sc/

Sounds like you can get a lot more out of modern AMD cards than what used to be possible, just need to set it up correctly.  That being said, Nvidia cards are still better for FSX but at least AMD is now usable.  You can read about it here.

A friend of mine uses an ATI card(comperable to the GTX480) and get just as good performance as me but he seems to get better AA with much less shimmering. I can't get that good AA even with 4x Sparse Grid Supersampling...

Many thanks for all the input.. I think what i am heading towards here is actually making a dedicated fsx machine and then the main machine can go back to what it was designed for, general use.

 

Thanks again for the input

 

Regards

 

G