FSX

[Barrington]

presently I have the following setup...
nVidia nForce GA-7N400-L1 Motherboard with AMD Athlon 3200+ CPU
ATI Radeon 9600PRO Graphics Card with 128 on board
1 Gig Memory
160 HDD
FSX is running but nothing to write home about, so...............
before I go to big expense to delve into 64 bit, Intel dual core etc....
I have been advised that if I upgrade to a GeForce 7600GT (AGP) and add another gig of memory, the framerates will improve and FSX will run much better generally.
Now I know from postings on the Forum that the answer is more than likely to go the expensive way, but i just wondered if anyone has a similar system or experience, could they give me some feedback.
I don't want to spend good money for a poor result - but rather save it for a new system................
Would appreciate some help/advice !!!!!

[ZK-Brock]

What's good about your setup:
Good CPU
Big HDD

What's okay:
1gb RAM

What's bad considering your circumstances:
Radeon 9600 Pro

You should certainly invest in a new GFX card (the 7600 sounds fine, just make sure its AGP not PCI-E), and consider getting another Gb of RAM.

Remember when you buy RAM not to get RAM with a slower clock speed than your present memory.

Check out Pricespy.co.nz for the best prices.

Brock

[Barrington]

Hi Brock
Many thanks for your input - it's much appreciated.
Do I understand that you may have a similar setup or had similar problem?
I so, can you suggest what I would expect to gain from the upgrade?
Cheers

[JonARNZ]

Heres my 20 cents worth, it is worth noting that opinions on this topic vary widely, as does the experience of different uses.

One of the key learnings to date with FSX is that the graphics card more than the processor is the key. Personally I'm not convinced that any AGP card is going to give you the performance you want, so not sure if Brock got the card types around the wrong way or not. The last thing you need is to spend money, as youve said, and be disappointed with the result.

FSX relies heavily on CPU power, ram and most importantly the GPU. If you want to really get it going anything less than a dual core, 2GB ram and a Nvidia GT card and/or the Radeon equivalent with at least 512 ram is going to leave you feeling flat, or at the least having visuals you might as well stay with FS9 to get and save the money.

FSX is a resource hog, yes you can pull sliders back to get better performance, and thats fine if we are sticking with our current system and not thinking about investing hard earned cash. If you want to upgrade, and live with the upgrade for the next two years, I would suggest you wait and get a powerful new system that will do the business for you, rather than mess around spending many hundreds of dollars and still not get the performance you want. Also remember DX10 is coming, so I would wait for the time being and see what happens with that. Short term maybe more ram and a better card from trademe to get you through.

[Barrington]

Thanks a lot for your input and I shall certainly take the information on board when making decision.

[ZK-Brock]

One of the key learnings to date with FSX is that the graphics card more than the processor is the key. Personally I'm not convinced that any AGP card is going to give you the performance you want, so not sure if Brock got the card types around the wrong way or not. The last thing you need is to spend money, as youve said, and be disappointed with the result.

Well the way I see it is that he's already got a great system - it itself would run FSX on Medium-low settings. Even now the difference in terms of pure performance between AGP and PCI-E are not huge.

FSX relies heavily on CPU power, ram and most importantly the GPU. If you want to really get it going anything less than a dual core, 2GB ram and a Nvidia GT card and/or the Radeon equivalent with at least 512 ram is going to leave you feeling flat, or at the least having visuals you might as well stay with FS9 to get and save the money.

I would also like to point out that even on low settings the default FSX visuals far surpass the default FS9 visuals, so you may as well make the switch. I have 512 Mb of RAM, and I know fully well that this is not enough. 1gb should be fine, but if you have money to spend 2gb would make the performance jump much bigger.

From what I have read, the CPU is the most important component in FSX. However you may also want to think about other games you want to play in the future- are they CPU-heavy (e.g. FSX), RAM Heavy (e.g. BF2) or GFX card heavy? (or a mixture of the three).


Jon also mentioned DX10. FSX will likely look better in DX10, however from what I know DX10 is PCI-E only, and you have an AGP motherboard. Converting to DX10 (and therefore PCIE) would realistically mean just about a whole new computer, which seems a waste of money when your current one is so good.

[Barrington]

Hey You guys.................
I am new to the forum platform so don't know my way around as yet, but hey what a great way to get information direct from the people who know what they are talking about, instead of hoping that someone in 'sales' knows!!!!
Thanks again for great input - would much rather make a decision based on input from the Forum - the information is invaluable.

[kiwiarcher]

Well for us we will stick to FS9 for a while yet, have spent condsiderable time adding extras in and tweaking, to get the same quality would require considerable dollars to gain the same with FSX with new hardware.

Our latest addon is Ground enviorment Pro, its awesome and with NZ mesh and topo absolutely fantastic.

Rob

[ZK-Brock]

I've never owned any Payware environmental packages, so I'm basing my comments on the default versions of both Simulators. However, in FSX it is so much easier to get good screenshots, it's just presented so much better.

[Charl]

This month's PCWorld:
Scott Bartley tried the latest from Nvidia, the DirectX 10 GeForce 8800GTX with more RAM and faster clock speed than many PC's from a few years back.
His conclusion?
"...FSX...seems to like RAM above all else...tell the truth the 8800GTX wasn't the panacea I'd been praying for to get FSX running sweetly"
He felt happy with 17fps but implied settings were not maxxed.
$1,299

[JonARNZ]

I read that as well Charl, interesting about the RAM, first time I have heard that opinion presented, but given the card in question its interesting.

Do need to remmber the card was running in DX9, not 10, so be interesting to see if he re runs the tests in Vista

[Zöltuger]

i read a review (can't remember where, it was NZ tho) of FSX- listed under cons was "you can't crash, it just bounces you back into the sky"

people like that don't deserve to play flight sim at all

[dharris]

Heres my 20 cents worth, it is worth noting that opinions on this topic vary widely, as does the experience of different uses.

One of the key learnings to date with FSX is that the graphics card more than the processor is the key. Personally I'm not convinced that any AGP card is going to give you the performance you want, so not sure if Brock got the card types around the wrong way or not. The last thing you need is to spend money, as youve said, and be disappointed with the result.

FSX relies heavily on CPU power, ram and most importantly the GPU. If you want to really get it going anything less than a dual core, 2GB ram and a Nvidia GT card and/or the Radeon equivalent with at least 512 ram is going to leave you feeling flat, or at the least having visuals you might as well stay with FS9 to get and save the money.

FSX is a resource hog, yes you can pull sliders back to get better performance, and thats fine if we are sticking with our current system and not thinking about investing hard earned cash. If you want to upgrade, and live with the upgrade for the next two years, I would suggest you wait and get a powerful new system that will do the business for you, rather than mess around spending many hundreds of dollars and still not get the performance you want. Also remember DX10 is coming, so I would wait for the time being and see what happens with that. Short term maybe more ram and a better card from trademe to get you through.

A few months ago I upgraded to a 4800 dual core cpu, 7900gt video card, 2 gig of ram, MSI diamond plus motherboard, 540 watt power supply. You would think that this would be capable of runnine fsx with all the sliders up. Wrong. With all the sliders to the right in county settings I get about 15-20 fps. At a large airport I may get 6-9 fps on the ground. Not exactly a screamer. I found this info from Phil Taylors blog.

Hi, Let me introduce myself. I am Phil Taylor and I am Senior PM for Graphics and Terrain in Aces Studio. I joined Aces during the end-game of FSX and am now involved in all the studio projects moving forward.

I am seeing a lot of threads and a lot of thrashing on this forum, and I thought I would try to address some of the discussions and draw a line in the sand. One big topic of discussion is performance (FPS) and DX10.

DX10 by itself isn't a magic bullet for the real performance issues that become evident as you move the sliders to the right. It was a conscious design decision of the studio to load the sliders so that, on day one, no one can run the sim at full slider levels. We did that so the sim will still have life in it three years from now. For better or worse, that is our design center. It is what it is. It will be that way in FS11, and it was that way in FS9, so this conscious design decision should not come as a surprise

If you like you can read more here.....http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/default.aspx

So, according to him we have a long wait until there is equipment out there that will run the sim like we would like. Had I seen this first I would not have bought fsx. Fs9 works great with my system now. Good luck on your upgrades but don't expect that throwing 1500 dollars at it will cure your fps problems.

[Zöltuger]

DX10 by itself isn't a magic bullet for the real performance issues that become evident as you move the sliders to the right. It was a conscious design decision of the studio to load the sliders so that, on day one, no one can run the sim at full slider levels. We did that so the sim will still have life in it three years from now. For better or worse, that is our design center. It is what it is. It will be that way in FS11, and it was that way in FS9, so this conscious design decision should not come as a surprise

If you like you can read more here.....http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/default.aspx

So, according to him we have a long wait until there is equipment out there that will run the sim like we would like. Had I seen this first I would not have bought fsx. Fs9 works great with my system now. Good luck on your upgrades but don't expect that throwing 1500 dollars at it will cure your fps problems.

i completely agree that you shouldn't be able to run FSX on full tilt on day one. i think it's naive and unrealistic to think otherwise.
what people are really objecting to is the 'scalability'- that is that they're not getting good frame rates on their current generation machines, without comprimising graphics - especially with no percieved increase in graphical quality over FS9. i would too be annoyed spending a few grand on a nice new PC to only get 6fps on the ground (heck, i get 6fps on the ground and my PC is nearly 3 years old!).

maybe ACES set the bar too high in terms of hardware requirements? at least FS11 is less than 3 years away

[Charl]

Actually...might be interesting to see some early sales figures.
I heard some advertising for FSX, and I can't ever recall MS doing that before.
Maybe the voters have voted with their wallets about waiting 2 years for the product to mature

[firefly]

Just an aside, the guys at fs2004.com seem to have been doing a bit of playing when it comes to FSX on various types of hardware. They have some very good advice on hardware in the forums, though is not what I would call budget options

http://www.fs2004.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=94816 Is a good link showing that 4gb of ram and a rather serious graphics card help, though apparently his bottleneck is now the processor.......

The more I think about the sliders, the more it makes sense (to me anyhow). If the settings were simply fixed and we could not change the traffic, clouds etc - it would certainly limit the amount of PC's any version of flightsim would run on. At least with these sliders, I can tweak the settings and get FS2002 running at 15fps on my machine (with no AI and a low detail airport). Without the ability to tweak I think I would still be running FS2000! As I see it, its a way MS can hedge their bets and allow for users with differing computer specs to enjoy the product (which ever version) - which is better than the bad old days of an exit program screen saying your PC does not meet the standards reqd for the package to run.

I agree with Charl, it would be very interesting to see the sales figures for this product, though the advertising could be in time with Christmas shopping.

[Jimmy]

Personaly I don't know why everyone is wroying about performace, I wouldn't go out and buy a new pc just to run it now, Like when I first got fs9 and ran it on a 600mhz machine it looked absolute crap, now its getting better and better as good hardware gets cheaper and cheaper (therefore I buy it lol), we expected this when we brought FSX.

I have it installed on my h/drive but I don't expect to use it much and enjoy it for at least a year.... Just imagine it hasn't been relesed yet but its nice to have there for when ya win that 12k pc lol

Once you have all the good fs9 add-onns the only good thing fsx has over fs9 is that your head bobs up and down when you move!

[ZK-Brock]

I don't think that FSX is really as hard on performance as many people make out - I have a mid-range computer (Athlon 64 3000, 512 RAM, Radon 9600XT) and I can run it ok. Once you apply the tweaks that can be found in the AVsim forums, performance can be much better. I'm also very impressed with FSX in general, especially the scenery rendering (apart from the desert textures, hehe).

[Zöltuger]

the only good thing fsx has over fs9 is that your head bobs up and down when you move!

that's such a pain! whenever you're banking or decelerating, you can't use the autopilot!