N069NT

You are far from alone! I posted the other day in another thread here after a five year absence. I invested countless thousands in PC hardware, flight yoke & rudder pedals, throttle quadrants, and who knows how much in aftermarket payware from complex aircraft to airport scenery and ground textures to weather. Started with FS98 in 1999, finished with FSX in 2015. I still remember my last FSX flight with Carenado's Phenom 100 before packing everything up and moving. Then life changes meaning priorities change. It happens to real world private pilots too (and I'm one of them as well). In any event, I have already set aside a budget for a ground up new build and new hardware (I sold it all several years ago). However, not having a clue what we are looking at for a roadmap on where FS will be going into next year and beyond and hardware and software (payware) expectations and openness, I think I'm just going to go with a budget build and reinstall all over again FSX and all of my aftermarket payware. I am a little concerned about MS's adaptation of FS to the Xbox however. I hope power PC users can take advantage of that power in settings and aftermarket upgrades long term. I'm also concerned about MS's servers being capable of what they are about to experience in demand and users not experiencing stutters no matter how fast their network is.

Well after about a five year hiatus on this forum (I see my avatar is no longer there nor my sig) and selling my simming PC and sim hardware, I'm so glad MS is bringing back FS! As one of countless members here who built simming rigs since 1999 for FS98 and owned every version through FSX, man this just gets my sim juices flowing again! Now the questions for me are many regarding the amount of money to spend on a new build and obviously nobody can really say for certain (yet): Will more cores and hyperthreading help improve performance with weather and complex scenery add-ons? I want to know if spending more on an i9 over a non-hyperthreading i5 would be worth it. Will a more powerful GPU help in frame rates? I want to know if I can get by with a GTX 2060 or it would be beneficial to spend more on a 2070 or even 2080. Will overclocking the CPU help with frame rates like in previous versions? We overclockers here all saw tremendous frame rate boosts in FSX and on back with aggressively overclocked CPUs (my last one was an i5 4690K running at 4.8GHz). Will 4K resolution and/or multiple monitors impact performance? FSX and prior versions didn't much run off the GPU so resolution upgrades didn't impact performance to the extent like regular games. Regarding the discussion about console vs. PC, there is no comparison and there is no way a console can keep up with a gaming PC with dedicated graphics. The reason is simple: dedicated graphics. As enthusiasts know, the higher up you go in resolution the less the CPU speed/power means in games and the more the GPU comes into play (same with memory speed and type). That's the limiting factor of the console: no dedicated graphics. It is a shared graphics platform and that means developers have to detune and lower graphics quality for consoles vs. the PC game version. As one who had both PC and PS4 and played a few games on both (Project Cars being the last one), the differences are enormous when PC settings are cranked up. That and the fact moving up to a 1440p display over a console's 1080p output. A recent excellent example of that is here where the PS4 version of Red Dead Redemption 2 is compared to the PC version recently released: https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/red-dead-redemption-2-pc-vs-console-early-graphics-comparison.html And yeah, PC gaming is going nowhere anytime soon. I like the convenience of my PS4 but in racing sims like Asseto Corsa I know I am missing a lot of eye candy detail over what my PC offered. I don't see FS on the console vs. on the PC being any different. Microsoft knows there is still a massive PC flight sim community, and you can be assured they didn't just start it back up for the Xbox which new version along with the PlayStation is due out a year from now.