An 8 hour flight with the PMDG 777 means my PC is running hot for 8 hours straight. At the same time I have to turn on the air conditioner to prevent my PC warming my room. I feel guilty to do this just to see pixels moving pretending to fly a plane, it doesn't feel right.

Edited June 28, 20241 yr by cepact

Put some tomato plants in you pc case and grow some organic food.

Move to Canada. I am heating my room with flight simming during wintertime 😉

But more seriously: CPU temperatures drop significantly if you run MSFS in windowed mode and minimize the window while you are not looking at those pixels. 

Peter

2 minutes ago, qqwertz said:

CPU temperatures drop significantly if you run MSFS in windowed mode and minimize the window while you are not looking at those pixels. 

Is this a fact? I might try that as my temps sometimes spike into the mid 80s on flights, granted the ambient room temp is around 30c.

19 minutes ago, cepact said:

An 8 hour flight with the PMDG 777 means my PC is running hot for 8 hours straight. At the same time I have to turn on the air conditioner to prevent my PC warming my room. I feel guilty to do this just to see pixels moving pretending to fly a plane, it doesn't feel right.

I use an Nvidia card and set power managment in the control panel to 'Normal' Which popular opinion would say 'that will tanks your performance!' But it doesnt. It gives full GPU power to the game when it is either Fullscreen or Windowed (and in focus) When out of focus, the GPU only then reduces its power. So in the cruise, when nuclear fusion isn't needed, and the game is not in focus, my GPU draws alot less power. My CPU is also in 'Balanced' power mode. So I go from ~160 watts CPU+GPU while pre-flighting and taking off down to ~80 watts for those cruise sections of the flight and I am 'working' on other stuff. The performance of the game in windowed un-focused mode is still >30fps, too.

In order to truly appreciate the scale of the earth and time it takes for man to travel with today's technology one should not use time compression. But sometimes I just cheat, pretend to take a nap and turn an 8 hr flight into a 2 hr one. With BATC on auto tune and auto reply.

 

Fortunately some of us have 18KW Solar systems and actually give credits back to the power grid so power draw and heat aren't an issue as long as I fly on sunny days LOL!!! 

In the middle of a heat wave running a roughly 3,500 sq ft home that is used as a home office and a 48,000 gallon pool my last electric bill was $12 🙂  

If I get battery storage units now they are dropping in price I will be able to use the solar through the night as well...   No guilt here LOL  

 

It could be a lot worse, you could be flying a real one! YT Mentour pilot said the 777 burns ~130 kg of fuel a minute in cruise?

 

 

Edited June 28, 20241 yr by flyingscampi

Actually on PMDG so far I can go all the way down to 6 fps in cruise (limit frame rate) and flights work out fine. I'm sure one needn't go that low, but it seems to bring down temps a lot. Of course go higher during departure and arrival.

I do my flight planning (simbrief), prepare my cockpit and taxi to the runway. After take off I continue until I've reached cruise level. Then I end my flight. Later I'm using FSiPanel (a great program) to do the final part of the flight. FSiPanel puts my PMDG (or Fenix, ...) a/c to my chosen STAR transition and I take contol to continue my flight from there. Only disadvantage, I have to estimate the fuel what I expect to have on board at STAR entry. Works great for me. Currently, the PMDG T7 is not included in FSiPanel, but I expect that it will be added very soon (hopefully).

6 minutes ago, psolk said:

No guilt here LOL 

You mean, apart from the strip mining, huge diesel engines from excavators and JCBs to remove the rocks and contamination of the water table when extracting the rare metals for solar panels and batteries...?

In all seriousness though, I'd love for renewable energy sources to become less destructive in their manufacturing processes. I'm hopeful that research into sulphur(sulfur)-based battery cells may change things for the better.

 

47 minutes ago, cepact said:

it doesn't feel right.

It isn't. What I now do is fly to 10,000 feet or TOC. Then use FSiPanel to move my aircraft to the TOD or 10,000 feet again on a STAR and continue my flight without the 2+ hours of cruise.

When I run the Fenix A320 for my european flights, my CPU and GPU go over about 400w (5900x + 3080), but the real problem is to stay 8/15 hours like seated in front of your monitor like a mummy with an airplane like a 777. No long haulers for me.

In P3D, there is an option to render only the cockpit. I used that option all the time when doing long hauls while in cruise, which significantly reduced the load on the PC. I wish there was that option in MSFS, as my room turns into an oven lol

As per recent FS expo presentation in MSFS there have been 1 billion flight session since MSFS launched. Not all are 8 hours and some might be just 1 minute due to a crash of the sim.

But let's assume on average a session is 1 hour and a typical pc under load is about 300 to 500 watthour. So that is 1.000.000h * 400Wh = 400.000.000Wh  = 400mWh consumed playing MSFS over the past 4 years. 

You're 8*400Wh=3200Wh won't make the difference on 400mWh. 

Comparison to a country like Germany uses 500.000gWh. Your 3200wh is 0,00000000064% of total consumed electricy power per year. 

By the way the Azura Platform and all other servers that run on the background also consume power. 

Time compression / sim rate? Ever heard of that?