Hi Everyone,
Firstly I've passively lurked these forums on and off for years from aside - THANKS to the collective soul and knowledge of everyone!
I'm finally embarking on building a dedicated 172S Skyhawk NAV III sim based on FSX or P3D for primarily night flying, IFR, and procedural / workload management home training, which will have dedicated / separate G1000 panels / bezels and standby instruments etc. - basically all "external" instruments + a small side screen for miscellaneous controls and needs I can't mimic with hardware. Obviously since its primarily for cockpit tasks I'm not heavily concerned about the "prettiness" of the outside view, and actually would prefer a higher (smoother) frame rate versus pristine detail. For VFR night flying it would be important that runway lighting and beacons be reasonably specular in nature - but I don't really care about surrounding scenery.
Thus for the outside view I'm considering a simple setup using a 55" 4K TV panel at a short distance from the console (about 1.5 meters/5 feet). The 4k TV has a resolution of 3840x2160, which I hope in theory can be sufficiently driven by a single or dual GPU card setup. For the CPU I'm not sure of the exact configuration yet but I have resources to make it an over clocked 6 core at ~4Ghz etc.
I understand a large majority of people seem to prefer 3 dedicated monitors, versus a large TV, but most of those opinions seemed to be based on experiences with HD TV at 1920x1080 resolution. In addition, I've had some experience with the 3 monitor setups and for myself they seem "wider than real but vertically shorter than real" in comparison to my real life seat perspective view from a 172.
Any thoughts on using a 4K monitor would be greatly appreciated. It's a big investment obviously. And if someone has done this before could you please share with us how well it worked out..
Thanks in advance!
--Volt Man