I'm an avid military flight-simmer, was into FS2004 and FSX some years ago.  I'm thinking of getting back into it but have many questions, mostly about performance.  Turns out I still have my old FSX install.  

So heres what I currently have:

AMD Phenom II X4 965 overclocked to 3.8 ghz
8 GB RAM
Geforce GTX 1050 ti 4 GB
Thrustmaster Flight Stick X

FSX acceleration 
Orbx terrain
some carendo addon planes

I have no issue running any military flight sims, DCS, Falcon BMS, IL-2 Sturmovik etc.  My issue is FSX still runs pretty poorly.  With a stock plane in a low traffic airport, I can average about 30 FPS.  If I use an addon plane and/or goto a busier airport I'm lucky to get 15 FPS.  

My question is, do I want to consider something like Xplane 11 or Prepar3d?  Are they at all better optimized or is it a case of "if you can't run FSX well, don't even think about it on your current hardware"?

FSX is more than 10 year old code and DX10 is broken... You could say that XP11 and P3D V4 plus are better optimised as they are both 64 bit programs... You can even try a demo of XP11 should you wish to see how it stacks up.

Welcome to the forum(s). If you're going to consider P3Dv4 you'll have to add another 8GB of RAM. The VAS usage by P3Dv4 alone will exceed 8GB. As far as which sim will run the best, there is really no answer as they all are system-specific. But, in addition to the X-Plane demo, LM has a 60 day money-back guarantee on P3D so you can try them both with no risk..........Doug

vyrago,

I dont think there is any doubt, as others have mentioned, that you would be better off, albeit only slightly, with the 64bit platforms. However, should you ever want to stock up on add-ons there is even less doubt that you will ultimately need an upgrade in the hardware department.  Sooner rather than later, would also apply I think, as I can not imagine that after seeing screenies and youtube videos here and elsewhere, that you are going to be happy for very long with your current set up.

In the meantime, again, a big welcome to the forum and the many people here who will be able to assist you with any questions. I dont think there is an end to the learning process here as in many other forms of life LOL The great thing is that the learning curve here is a joyous thing. Play with all the platforms, particularly those with a money back guarantee or a demo period. In the end, you may find you want to keep both (all) and that is NEVER going to be a wrong decision.  Money, as always is the big limiter here.

Good luck with your choices

Regards

Tony

Both Prepar3D 4 and X Plane 11 want an 8 gig video card too.

 Sue

It is nice to have lots of memory, but P3DV4 will run OK with 8GB RAM and 4GB VRAM.

Your current CPU may well turn out to be the real bottleneck, but by all means, try P3DV4 and do not move all the sliders to the right, or you'll find it running worse than FSX on your system..

You can run FSX and P3D side by side if you have the harddrive capacity.. so you can try it out and compare..

A simpler option is to stay with FSX, until you do a full system upgrade, in the future..

 

4 hours ago, W2DR said:

If you're going to consider P3Dv4 you'll have to add another 8GB of RAM. The VAS usage by P3Dv4 alone will exceed 8GB.

I am successfully running P3DV4 on an 8 GB system... so that is not quite as absolute a requirement as it would appear here..

I get twice the performance in P3Dv4 than I get in FSX. It's much better optimized.

Can't really answer for X-Plane 11 as I don't have it, but I do have X-Plane 10. It's nice, and screenshots look amazing. I guess if you're already pretty heavily invested in FSX (like I was) then P3D is the more logical step, but I do keep a very close eye on what's going on with X-Plane!

I can give my personal opinion on XP11 performance. Given similar image quality settings and add-ons (aircraft complexity, weather app, AI traffic package and ATC) XP11 and P3d4 will perform just about the same. At least that's how things work for me.

Others will obviously disagree with me on this, but the hardware, OS and video driver collectively are what control performance. The developers of 3D apps are pretty much stuck with with those constraints and as a result, no flight sim has a monopoly on great performance. Of course, a legacy flight sim like either FSX or FS9 that is out of development won't be able to take full advantage of new hardware and platform technology.

21 hours ago, Bert Pieke said:

I am successfully running P3DV4 on an 8 GB system... so that is not quite as absolute a requirement as it would appear here..

You're right Bert, it's not an absolute requirement but.....P3Dv4 routinely uses 9+ GB of VAS. And that means available RAM is exhausted and Windows is moving pages to virtual memory on either the HDD or SSD. In either case performance will be degraded to some degree - more so on the HDD and less so on the SSD. Some folks see the difference and some don't but, for sure, performance will be less, especially if there is anything running besides the sim. Just my NSHO..........Doug