Worries about the NGX

[tjh87 9]

Yeah, just to add on, I have a laptop, 2.4ghz i5 and a 512mb ATi Radeon 4570, and I get about 15-20 with medium settings. Not bad, but not great. With FSX being a CPU intesive instead of a GPU intensive, and indivdual core speed being more important that the number of cores, you should not have an issue at all. With a i7-2600 (not k), nVidia GT530, and 8gb of ram I get about 30 tops with medium settings. You should not have an issue at all.

 

Just some things that I have read and recommend to abide to. Watch the size of your graphics card in terms of Vram. I know PMDG has made remarks about higher Vram cards actually hurting performace. FSX will not utilize more than 4GB of combined RAM, whether it is on your motherboard or your video card. I think 2GB is the upper recommended limit before you start encountering issues. Your card should not have any issues, just watch if you ever plan to put in another one and SLI, as you may encounter a performance drop. With also the 4GB max considered, 8GB may be all you really need, and although you are welcome to go higher, if this rig will mostly be playing FSX, the extra RAM won't buy you much more. Also, good idea to put FSX on a seperate SSD, as your read/write speeds will be faster, and loading things like scenery will not be an issue, even though it appears you are not really out for amazing scenery.

 

Do not expect task manager to have every core pegged in usage, but instead 2 at most, more likely 1 though. FSX usually will use one core to the max, and all the others sparingly. It's engine was written before multi-core systems were mainstream, and although Acceleration and the service packs (don't forget those) helped to allow multicore, it is not optimized. That is why Core speed is more important than number of cores.

 

Finally, some FSX recommendations. Run as an admin if you don't know that already, it will solve any aircraft issues. Do not run in compatability mode though for any other OS, it will cause issues, especially with PMDG aircraft. Like I said before, avoid using shadows if you can, same goes for traffic, although you seem to have that covered.

 

I wish you the best of luck, maybe even give an opinion on your system once you have it dialed in for maximum performance!

[Kerlix 99]

I have an i-5 2500k with a GTX 470 vid card and with the recommended nVidia Inspector settings I'm locked at 30 fps on pretty much every add-on plane I fly, which isn't juts PMDG.