Not Vanilla Any More: Recommended System Requirements

[Fly Swatter]

Back in the day when vanilla was the only flavor CFS3 came in, MS issued their recommended requirements to run the sim. Of course, many of us found out the hard way that they were being a little conservative. Thus a multitude of tweaks were born in order to get this thing to run smoothly.

Now we have the extremely delicious flavors of MAW, PTO, Korea, OFF and ETO to enjoy to our heart's content. Not to mention a lot of other very cool mods, missions and add-ons (whipped cream?).

What system specs do you think are needed to get very good performance and very good graphics? What tweaks do you use to help increase the play and stability of the sim?

[hairyspin]

As ever, as much hardware as you care to throw at it! I'd suggest with the speed of modern processors that plenty of memory and fast hard disks would be especially important. Properly fast video cards are relatively inexpensive these days, so if you're building a new rig (like I just have) you can ignore what was a 'budget' video card only last summer and get a real flier now.

I've only played briefly with ETO so far before this holiday, so the following is tentative:-


Intel Core 2 Duo such as E7400 - quad-core would be nice if you also intend to run FSX, but I'm pretty sure CFS3 can't take advantage of this.
4GB DDR2 memory - as fast as your motherboard (and wallet) can reasonably support. Yes, I know XP is not efficient in the way it uses memory above 2GB, but this gives ETO/CFS3 all the memory space it can use and leaves the OS room to run as well.
nVidia 9800GT video card, 512MB video memory. Last year I had ambitions for a 7600GT, this spring the same money gets the aforementioned: no contest! It also should be nVidia to get all the eye candy in CFS3 - ATi don't do the specular effects AFAIK.
A fast-spinning, large hard disk with plenty cache memory, but not Seagate unless they've sorted out their firmware issues, grrr!
The funny thing is, none of this is high-budget any more. The processor is about £100, memory £40, 500GB drives around £40 and the video card about £78. Okay it's not bargain-bucket, but if I wanted el cheapo, I'd buy a Dell ready-made on one of their periodic special offers. But add just about anything non-standard to their budget machines and it gets silly imo

On the tweak side, turn off dual-pass render and turn on high-resolution Z buffer.

The above drives a 1680x1050 32-bit display effortlessly so far, but I daresay someone can tell me of a mission which is going to crawl down to slideshow on this spec!

Any more thoughts, chaps?