FSX: what does it REALLY need to run properly?

[Navy Chief]

The retired Master Chief who took me on a tour of the aviation museum restoration hangar, sent me the specs of his system:

Gateway 2000, E-4600 with XP home SP/3
1 GB RAM
80 & 40 GB internal HD
150 GB WD External HD
NTFS on C, Fat 32 on the others
NVIDIA GeForce 6200

Correct me if I am mistaken, but I do not think FSX is going to run on his system. And with that in mind, what would be considered a good setup? Suggestions?

Thanks

NC

[stansdds]

That's not likely to run it well and his 40 GB drive would have to pretty much be FSX only. Odds are, with drives of that size they are IDE and turn about 5400 rpm, slow by today's standards. My computer (see my signature) will run FSX pretty well at 28-30 fps, but it drops to 15 in really dense, urban areas with lots of traffic.

Oh, my hard drives are Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA 3.0 with 16MB cache.

If building a new system, the word is to avoid the Green Caviar drives.

[Navy Chief]

That's not likely to run it well and his 40 GB drive would have to pretty much be FSX only. Odds are, with drives of that size they are IDE and turn about 5400 rpm, slow by today's standards. My computer (see my signature) will run FSX pretty well at 28-30 fps, but it drops to 15 in really dense, urban areas with lots of traffic.

I figured as much. I will ask him if he can afford to upgrade to a newer setup.

Thanks.

NC

[letsgetrowdy]

I've got all of these, (apart from I have Vista, not XP" and my bl***y FSX still doesn't run. :frown:

[Brett_Henderson]

I'll throw out what I've found to be a generic minimum:


-Intel quad-core (their architecture and cache are unbeatable) running at 3.5+Ghz

-4GB of fast, high-qaulity RAM (allows for overclocking)

-High-end, DX10 capable video-card (8800GTS as a minimum example)



That's pretty much the system I run (Q9550 at 3.8Ghz), and it's a good start... can handle mid-high settings, medium traffic, high-autogen..

[Navy Chief]

Appreciate the suggestion. Forwarded it on!

NC

[Lionheart]

3 Gigs of Ram are almost a MUST for FSX, even with sliders all the way down.

Also, that is not alot of HD space, even for the external drive.

This looks like it might be a laptop computer?


Quad Cores are the way to go now. They are getting high ranks in the gaming reviews. This is what I have read. I am sure there are some good dual cores out now that can stomp on the new quads, but quad seems to be the new, best direction. (Everyone wants one now).

For just $20 to $30 more, he should be able to get a Tarrabyte drive (1,000 gigs of storage instead of 100 gigs). Then he can put ALL of his games on the big drive and never have to worry about filling it up.



Bill

[guzler]

I'm running a single core 2.4Ghz AMD, 8800GT and 2Mb 533Mhz ram and a single 250Gb hard drive. I have got UT2 installed along with some WOAI and other AI stuff. The cfg is tweeked around the autogen settings (following advice from SOH) and I have got the reduced autogen textures and clouds that are freeware. As a result my autogen slider is set at max, scenery density at dense, water on 2x mid, fairly medium to high settings on others and 60% traffic. Flying around the Aerosoft Palma Mallorca airport I am getting 10-12 fps. Stock, non major airports, I am getting 13-20 fps. Large airports such as Heathrow I avoid as it almost stops !!!

To be honest, I am very pleased with this considering my rig. The reduced textures for autogen have a big positive impact and visually, you can't really tell they are reduced, but reducing them from 1024 to 512 reduces the file sizes by 4 times, and on autogen, thats a big saving. This is my personal preference, I love autogen, the world is very dull without buildings and trees !!!!!

I also have Flytampa Kai Tek installed with all the boxes ticked exept the photo ground textures and getting 8-10 fps with it full of traffic. To some that would be a nightmare, but it's kept me going for a while.

I'm looking forward to getting a new rig soon, but with what I have learned, I will be applying the autogen settings to that one. I guess my point is that you can get away with a fairly low end pc without losing all the goodies with a bit of experimenting, but at some point you will want a faster rig in the desire for faster fps.

[modelr]

You don't want to throw those hard drives away, extra storage space is always a plus. However, the first thing I would do is convert those two FAT 32 drives to NTFS. It can be done without losing any of the info on them, will speed them up greatly, and make them readable by the newer OS's. I'm surprised they're working with XP. My rig didn't like FAT32 except on thumb drives.

[Navy Chief]

Not sure what Frank's laptop's video card is, but the remaining components look ok:

Intel 2 Duo Core T6400, 4 GB Ram, 320 GB HD, and a 500 GB external HD.

NC