ckyliu

The difference is that you can now buy the variant you want. Before if you wanted the 600, 800 or 900, you needed the 700 base. They are now standalone so it works out better value unless you decide to get more than 2 variants (most people only want the 700 and/or 800 I'd venture). For cash strapped simmers, $35 for the -600 is a great way to get in to a top "study level" airliner without breaking the bank. Makes perfect sense to me, simple supply and demand; the 600 and 900 are rarer in reality so there isn't as much demand for it from simmers. Technically speaking they're all equally competent in the sim, so if you're not bothered how much plane is behind your flight deck or what livery it's wearing, get the 600 and grab yourself a bargain. The previous PMDG sales model was to make a base product (usually a less popular variant, such as the 777-200LR) and make the most popular an expansion (777-300ER) as this would maximise sales revenue (basically all customers had to buy the less popular variant that many of them probably had little interest in). However, this base and expansion approach was not compatible with the MFS in-game marketplace so now all products are standalone and priced individually.

If you're just going to run MFS I'd give it a whirl on your existing machine (using Win 10 of course) because it will run better than P3D, you may find performance good enough to keep your machine for another 6-12 months until DDR5 and 4080/4090 have become more affordable. If you're doing the upgrade now, I say spec A simply because you run so many monitors and are considering VR, on a more conventional setup spec B would be fine for long term use.

My post was kinda directed towards Paul K and Gazzareth who had posted just before. @Jazz's credentials as an appropriately sweary Brit are not in question 🙂

I felt the same when they abandoned the J41. They never made an FSX SE installer for the J41 or got it compatible with their Ops Centre, they stopped customers using it in 32 bit P3D without offering any solutions, then when 64 bit P3D came along they got it working in v4 to some extent and showed it off, then just went radio silent.

Now come on Abrams, you're an old hand at flight simming you know better than to ask for or rely on a release date estimate from an FS addon developer! If they had said 1 year it would've been at least 3 anyway. Do we know what sort of complexity level the MS/AS/Hans Hartmann ATR72-600 is likely to be, will it be similar to the CRJ?

MFS is far more balance in requirements, but still tends to load the CPU a bit more than the GPU. It does also spread around CPU cores far better but I think you start to see diminishing returns past 6 cores. I have a 12400F processor that runs MFS well at 1440p with my GTX980, I think most of my settings are high? A GTX980 is similar performance to a GTX3060. Unfortunately graphic cards are still silly money at the moment so I am limping along with my GTX980 until the cheaper 4000 series such as 4060 become available later this year.

I think at this point (indeed, some time ago), the above is needed: Installing vanilla MFS on a fresh Windows install. That would answer a lot of questions.

@regis9 And once in the "roadmap" tab you have to keep clicking "View More" underneath each phase until you can click no more!

Roadmap says No VNAV or Speed/Alt constraints until Phase 2, consequently no MFD vertical profile or FMS / AP airspeed mode. Phase 2 might never happen. You don't even get landing gear aural warning in Phase 1! Which is scheduled for release on 10th Jan. When it will be missing HSI ARC and MAP modes (who uses rose more than occasionally?) Just remember kids, you buy based solely on how it is now, not how they're saying it might become. Early access might be the only version they ever put out. And then it'll be less FSS and more FFS.

That's many hundreds of thousands of lines of code and millions of transistors of engineering all interacting. If the logs (event viewer etc) aren't clearly pointing to a culprit, there are free stress tests such as MemTest86+ for the RAM, Prime95 for the CPU, Unigine Heaven or FurMark for the GPU and these software tools can rule a lot out but the weak point is they load up components of the system individually and not collectively so they don't stress the PSU or all the data buses. AIDA64 has some similar benchmarking tools too. These tools wouldn't rule out configuration issues but they would tell you component was probably causing the CTD so you know where to look in more detail. Preferable to the above though: could you partition your hard drive and place a fresh install of Windows and MFS on that to see if the problem persists? Don't put anything else on the install at all to being with. If this fixes it, then it is highly likely a configuration issue such as drivers, addons, software conflict etc and you would know the hardware is A-OK for MFS (assuming you run with the minimum of peripherals/controllers to start with) and that a worse case scenario is reinstalling everything should fix it. However, if you still have the same failure mode you can try some different graphics drivers, if that doesn't then fix it at that point there is some fundamental incompatibility with your hardware or it's failing/misbehaving so you can start to investigate things like setting BIOS to safe default settings instead of optimised stuff. Hope this helps. I know the above is an arduous pain in the posterior but sounds like the most time effective option at this point if you've "picked the low hanging fruit"

i agree with Ryan, that's a very solid upper-mid tier system that will run MFS nicely (it exceeds the specs of my build and I run MFS just fine)

There's a lot of "upto" and "max" listed on that link, but Googling the model code elsewhere the spec appears to be: 8 GB RAM which isn't enough, you want at least 16 GB and ideally 24 GB for MFS imo 512 GB SSD is rather small, a base MFS install will use up almost half of that before addons. I think you want at least 1 TB of storage if you plan on running any other apps! Graphics card and processor are okay, they will run MFS at 30 fps with mid settings on the 1080p resolution of the integral screen, I expect. Ideally you would want more graphics memory than the RTX3050 offers as 4 GB GDDR6 is really at the thin end. Are you are probably aware, gaming on a laptop is always a compromise and you will get better value with a desktop system. €1000 is a relatively tight budget for a gaming desktop, so on a laptop it's even more stretched.

Hardware errors are far more "graceful" these days, so it's quite rare to get a whole system freeze. For example a graphics driver can crash and restart and you will just see the screen go blank briefly. No blue screen doesn't mean no hardware issues (not saying you do have them, but they aren't ruled out). Overly aggressive memory timings often result in application CTD without an obvious cause, but the core system and OS remain running okay. MFS taxes different parts of your hardware more than P3D, so again; no P3D issues doesn't mean the hardware and drivers are flawless. A good first hand example I can give you of all the above is COD WZ and my overclocks; I can get the overclock on CPU and GPU to pass tests like Prime95, I can play various other video games without issue but COD WZ will Crash to Desktop (CTD) after a few minutes when things get busier on screen. Back off my overclock a bit and it fixes the issue and I have a stable game. There's something COD WZ is using that nothing else I have is. I do understand it's very frustrating and without good knowledge of the logs and diagnosis techniques it can be infuriating trying to find the cause; it could be a USB peripheral, incompatible addon, corrupted data or cache, faulty or loose hardware, driver issue, setting issue, pushing too hard on your system, lack of clean power, or just some rare and unfortunate compatibility issue. My point is just because other software works fine, doesn't mean your hardware is without fault.

nVidia recommend a 750w PSU for the 3090, so should be ok if you're not overclocking. 750w definitely won't run a 4080 though.

That doesn't add up, Gran Turismo for a very long time had no visual damage and yet still no Porsche. I think it was more licensing costs. It got Porsche after it got visual damage!

I might finally regret cheaping out on just plain old Deluxe

You would be best to stick with a desktop unless you need laptop portability. You get more performance and upgrade possibilities with desktop, for the same spend.

Right now the fastest DDR4 matches DDR5 performance, but at a lower cost and higher availability. The only reason to go DDR5 is future proofing, it's unlikely later Intel CPUs will support DDR4.

Icing conditions may not be what you think: flight in to visible moisture (cloud, rain, drizzle, hail or snow) at temperatures between -20 and +10°c SAT (also mist or fog with a visibility of less than 1000 metres). That means you can get icing conditions even in warm areas because 30°c at sea level is 0°c at FL150. The reason you need to worry about moisture above 0°c is because air pressure drops as it is accelerated in a jet engine intake, piston engine carburetor or flows around an aerofoil, causing a corresponding temperature drop; even though the ambient temperature is above freezing it may be below freezing around parts of the airframe and engine.

This sounds very similar to the WASM compiler issue affecting the A310... MFS has sometimes used fast compile to build the gauges on first launch of the sim after an update, resulting in poor performance for some users.

@ha5mvo I wish that were true. But you only need to look at the file library at Avsim to see that isn't the case; how many repaint downloads have there been for any payware regional jet vs 737 or A320 on the MSFS/P3D platform? Same goes for any non-current or niche aircraft (such as PMDG MD-11 and JS41, even the Flight1 ATR which is the probably the most common 50-70 seat airliner in service in the West will pale-in-comparison vs PMDG 77W).

I love regionals airliners as they represent my favourite type of flying; doing shorter legs between 45 mins and 2 hours means I'm kept busy. The smaller airports are more likely to have interesting approaches. The lower cruising altitudes (for turboprops anyway) allow more enjoyment of the scenery. Less automation makes for more challenging flying. Sadly it seems my thoughts are not shared by the majority of the study-level userbase, I think for a few reasons: Not as automated (most regionals lack autothrottle and some don't have VNAV); I think a lot "study level" users lack confidence/ability to fly without full automatics. Not as common place IRL vs an A320 or 737 and more choice in the size bracket leading to fragmented interest. Fewer people are familiar with E145, E190, Q400, DH8C, CRJ9, AT42, AT72, S340, JS41, Do328, AN-148, SU-100, A220 etc. Perceived to be "not as cool" compared to heavies like A380 and 747 Lack sufficient range to do longer legs where suer leave the controls to watch a film, cooker dinner, do work etc. Or others who want the thrill of going between continents. At the moment we've got the Aerosoft CRJ-200 and BAe 146 (soon to be joined by Avro RJ) all of which are being retired now. I think Carenado might port their Saab 340 if they haven't already but will likely lack an FMS. We really are lacking current generational regionals, especially turboprops.

Entitled much? You bought the first model in a just released new series of graphics cards you are using with beta software including an experimental DX12 implementation and you expected no issues? just because you spent £1500 on some hardware does not guarantee perfection in an experimental environment where everything is unproven. Step back from the beta and revert to DX11 and you should be fine. I wish I was in the position where I could just drop £1500+ on a card, my whole system didn't cost that.

I think the consensus is the 4060 and 4070 will be 2023 Q1 release, but it is dependent on nVidia selling old 30xx stock and that could shift it to 23Q2. I expect the RTX4070 to be the sweet spot in terms of price, performance, size and power draw but I could be lured by an RTX3080 if it was priced around £525 as I expect that would be similar performance, albeit foregoing DLSS3 (that would be a big drop though, even a 3070 Ti is £700 at the moment!). With an i5-12400F an RTX4060 could be a better match though? I have an mATX build (Define Mini C) so I can't have a card longer than 315mm and I have 3 slots spare. Hoping to get something with a quiet cooler since everything else on my system is already quiet. Most GPU coolers seem to be derived from hairdryer technology 🙄

Will 850W PSU be enough? There's talk of 1000W PSU being needed for 4080 and 4090, and to ATX 3.0 standard.