Hey guys hoping everyone is having a good day. With Black friday coming up and Christmas around the corner. I would like to upgrade my PC to get the most out of P3D V4. I currently have a GTX1060 6GB dual fan, I7-7700 at 3.6ghz (with very good CPU cooler), 8gb of ddr4 ram, 700 watts PSU, a H110M PRO motherboard and one 256gb ssd for the system and a 1TB ssd only for P3D V4. i am currently looking to buy maximum a GTX1080TI 11GB (is a 'used' buy from somewhere such as amazon ok?) paired with an I7-9700K. Any suggestions, I'd love to hear them 🙂

aspeedbirdpilot,

What you propose is adequate, I would guess.

I would certainly be looking at upgrading your DDR4 to 16gb.

At the risk of being an AMD troll, I watched a horrible (Sound quality) XPlane Q & A on Wednesday and a very interesting thing cropped up, for me at least.  Vulkan. As everybody knows, currently,  an AMD and XPlane combination is not one made in heaven. This is due to the utilisation of very few or, only one core. AMD clock speed is still significantly slower than Intel on single core usage.  However, they stated categorically that Vulkan brings to the table full utilisation of as many, or all cores available. (up to 60% FPS increase) That is great news for XPlane and AMD users.

However I would point out that P3D are allegedly working on new engines for their next release too, and they, I would imagine,will utilise multicore much more efficiently.  Given that MSFS is on the horizon, P3D and Xplane (given advance knowledge of the competition) are going to have to significantly lift their game in order to compete, it may well be that 8 cores will eventually, become a thing of the past fairly rapidly.

I acknowledge that you rule out MSFS2020 in your topic title but P3D and Xplane are going to be taking, in my opinion, giant strides forward in the very near future, and I think that you would be wise to take this into consideration. It will definitely increase your budget somewhat though.

If, however, you have absolutely, and definitely no plans to do anything in the future, other than to stick with your current version of P3D, then my only recommendation, is to increase your RAM to at least 16 and the fastest RAM you can for your budget.

I really hope this is helpful to you.

Regards

Tony

Furthermore since MSFS has a new architecture it will for sure run faster and smoother than FSX/P3D at comparable visual settings.

Even P3D runs already noticable smoother than FSX on identical PCs. 

Thanks guys. Apologese for the late reply. I have decided to go all out and go for the GTX1080TI and I7-9700k along with the suggested above of 16gb of DDR4 ram. Thank you so much for your time. Merry Christmas