Buddy308

Which "plug-in?"

I'm an old guy. I played around with MSFS back in the olden days when gaming on Windows was a real "adventure" in itself. But I was in the heyday of my profession and very busy raising kids -- I just never had near enough free time to do anything but scratch the surface. Even though I always left FS installed, right up to FSX in 2012, I still lacked the time to turn it into a real hobby. Now, the kids are grown, and I'm retired. I built a new PC expressly for Flight Simulator 2020, and I'm having fun! It may be rough around the edges, but this time around, the adventure is learning the sim from the ground up (pun unavoidable) and watching it mature. I'm very glad they released it with "rough edges" rather than waiting until it was thoroughly polished. The keyboard assignments are intricate, but I'm getting a real kick out of learning them. The learning curve is steep, but what a gratifying sense of accomplishment one gets when things start to become second nature. Yet everywhere I go I run into threads filled with XP and P3D users who simply delight in criticizing FS because its very first release isn't yet as good as those sims that have been in development for literally 25-40 years. What a gargantuan waste of time and bandwidth those threads are. Flight Simulator 2020 is a hoot and a miracle of technology that within a few years will probably have left other sims in its wake. Going along for that ride is superbly entertaining and enjoyable. If many experts are extremely comfortable with the sim they've been flying for a long time, I'd be the last one to criticize then for wanting to stay with it, and I'd say nothing to them that I wasn't confident was highly constructive.

Remember that no matter how much RAM your Mac has, the most that Parallels can access is 8GB which, by itself, will limit your experience. What Mac do you have MBP or iMac? What CPU? What GPU? Using Parallels, Windows will be able to access only a small amount of RAM for the GPU, and that will not be VRAM. Overall, as a Parallels user myself on a latest-version iMac with 40Gb RAM and a Radeon 570X, I cannot imagine being able to run FS2020 in any enjoyable manner.

Regarding specs: I know this is a new program, sharing a name but not much code with the old MS Flight Sim, but I'm looking for similarities between it and the old one or P3D. Originally, FS was more likely to be CPU-bound than GPU-bound. I'm presuming that FS2020 will also be dependent on very powerful CPUs, but so far, I've been unable to find information on whether single-core speed or multi-threading performance is more important -- i.e., Intel or Ryzen? Which has been preferred recently for X-Plane and P3D?