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Georgesim

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  • Birthday 06/25/1971

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  1. I wonder if they released updates and patches after a few months.........
  2. I think it really depends what you want to do/expectations of the GPU performance. I am in the same boat as you, have built myself a 3900x machine and am waiting and seeing before I get a graphics card. I already have a medium to low end one- an RX580 and FS2020 runs just fine at medium settings all the time at 1440p and not too badly at high settings. As I say, it depends what you want to do. I want to play FS at 1440p, on one monitor, and alone. Others will want to do the same on two monitors or three, or 4k or whatever. Others will want ULTRA plus settings and then some. There are, and will be even more in the future, a LOT of things that people do with flight simulator. My GPU is bottlenecking my flightsim experience for sure. If I buy one of these new cards coming out, for the foreseeable future, until direct x 12 support comes along, it will be my CPU that bottlenecks flightsim at 1440p. I suppose my point is that with an app like FS2020 there is just so much too it on the processor and graphics side, that any setup is going to bottleneck someplace. For now I'm ok with saving my money and having the gpu as the bottleneck and playing at medium settings. I have noted some of my experiences and observations here: https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?326336-I-built-a-pc-and-wanted-to-share-some-thoughts
  3. As the title said, I built a PC. Mainly it is for office use and serious photo editing, but I wanted to make sure the thing ran flight simulator well enough. For me it does, and that is astounding considering how old my graphics card is and wasnt one of the best in the first place (RX580- but more on that in a bit). Disclaimer. When I say runs well, I find that above 24 fps I am happy, Oh and I dont have much traffic in the sky and run the simulator either in a window at 1080p or full screen at 1440p. Like all previous recent (ish!!) versions of FS, it runs better in a window presumable due to the lower pixel count. Most of the time I get at least that with HIGH settings and Live weather, often with the ULTRA preset too. On MEDIUM settings, the thing just runs and runs and no problems. I thought I'd share some of the thinking behind spec selection and have a little look about what the computer is doing while flightsim is running. I am no expert in these matters at all, and any wisdom will be a summary of other peoples ideas from various corners of the internet. The processor. The Intel vs AMD question. In my own case this was answered for me by my need to do multiple core processes (non FS). AMD Ryzen is just cheaper. The internet seems to think that these Ryzen processors are fast enough. So I went with one of those. A 3900x. I have checked the processor usage while flying, and of the 12 cores I have, FS uses 1 core extensively and 3 others to a lesser extent. So a 6 core processor (Ryzen 3600) would have been enough. However I am mindful that Direct x 12 support (supposedly coming soonish) will up the core count usage- dont ask me how or why. Motherboard and RAM. These were the hardest things to understand as from my reading I gathered that not all RAM is equal, that there is speed and latency- you want more of the first and less of the latter, and that achieving the advertised specifications of RAM sticks is an overclock to the processor. That meant a motherboard with sufficient power delivery. I had decided on 64gb of RAM, speed 3600mhz latency 18 in two 32gb sticks (they need to be a matched pair). This is overkill for flight simulator (in terms of capacity). I've not had the simulator use more than 18-20gb of it at any one time yet- but that is still a lot and leads to the conclusion that 32gb is probably a decent minimum for no fuss. I went with a B550 motherboard and was glad that the prices had become more reasonable by late August. I wanted plenty of USB ports, wifi, and more than one type C. I went with a Gigabyte Vision D. I could have spent £100 less on an MSI Gaming Edge Wifi. However for me the built in thunderbolt controller was a very desirable feature. I doubt very many people would need that. Graphics Card. I was so close to the release of new graphics cards by Nvidia and AMD that I could not justify spending serious money on something that would probably drop in price significantly after November. So I pulled my old RX580 out of my 2012 Mac Pro and gave it back its original. Storage and power supply. These chose themselves. I wanted 2tb of SSD storage and the cheapest and easiest way to do it in late august was an NVME 2tb ADATA SX8200pro. And for the power supply I went with the most reasonable 700W Bronze I could find. The thing has cost me £1300, but bear in mind that there is an additional 500 or so to spend on a graphics card at some point. If we take off the features that were specific to my build (extra cores, RAM, thunderbolt etc) then it would have been closer to 800(however I already had a GPU to shove in there temporarily) Oh and I already had a monitor. Putting the whole thing together took less than an hour start to finish. The only tools required were a couple of screwdrivers. This was however after a lot of research and notemaking. My monitor is 1440p, so 4k isn’t an aspiration for now, nevertheless I was surprised at how well FS runs on this machine. The processor is not particularly fast, AMD processors are fast enough and no more, and the graphics card is a mid to low range from quite a few years ago. At 1440p MEDIUM is always playable and playable well and smoothly. High works well as long as I’m not flying over Athens or some other BIG city with lots of drawn buildings, and ULTRA is ok once I’m a few thousand feet over the ground. Playing in a window, 1080p is fine at ULTRA. I do find in terms of visuals, HIGH is a nice setting, so I am looking forward to upgrading the graphics card, and perhaps multi monitor support, secure that the settings are not THAT taxing on my system in general. Moreover I feel I have laid down the foundations for a system that can grow as the simulator becomes more bulky and resource intensive over the years. I've posted this because there are many questions asking if this or that hardware is suitable. Well it would seem that any AMD Ryzen processor with 6 or more cores will be suitable. There are many complicated guides about how to squeeze the last framerate out of it, but I have used an old GPU and got reasonable results. I will admit my RAM and storage are fast, but they were not particularly more expensive than slower RAM or storage. NAturally others will be more demanding in terms of frame rate, but with new graphics cards being released, there are ways to achieve those things in the near future.
  4. If the game gives me the option to not have to worry about the rudder then as far as i am concerned I am flying it right. Since I don't have pedals and have no desire to get any, and utterly hate twisting the joystick- I find that very hard for some reason, I truly appreciate Microsoft's commitment to me in this regard. It is probably the main reason I don't fly Xplane very much. A lot of RAM is fine, and I am lucky in regard to my internet connection, it is fast and not too expensive. I do appreciate other people's concerns in this though.
  5. I flew 14R http://vau.aero/navdb/chart/UUDD.pdf
  6. then I shall have to land there again and see if this was a one off!
  7. nope, the only add on I have is AS16 thinking hard I don't think this is a sim representation. Domodedovo 14R in real life is a categry III ILS
  8. thanks, that article seems to imply that the offset is at an angle. in the case of 14R at Domodedovo I landed parallel to the runway, not only that, ATC seemed to believe I had landed correctly on the runway. However this isn't the first time this has happened, I seem to remember landing in Gambia somewhere in similar circumstances- maybe a good reason to jot these things down when they happen.
  9. Ok so a little googling got me the answer, not all ILS have a DME. Interestingly having the direction line in the middle of the instrument landed me well to the right of runway 14R - i presume that is a bug?
  10. but why do some ILS frequencies give me distance info in the cockpit and others don't? I'm on approach to Moscow Domodedovo runway 14R tuned in to the frequency. I get the glide slope and direction diamonds, but no distance info. Yet at other airports I do.
  11. well I am enormously looking forward to it. I will buy it as I have bought every other one since fs98. the breaks will be operated with the full stop key, the s key will cycle my views, and there will be an option to stop the aircraft wildly veering to the left while taking off. with any luck there will be 2D cockpits. There will be simple but nice looking scenery covering the globe and some kind of inbuilt flight planner and database of navigation frequencies. There will be a range of aircraft to fly. With any luck it wont use more than 6 cores of the processor allowing a well overclocked i5 to shine with the thing, and running in 1080p should not be too taxing for many graphics cards either.
  12. wellllll on my i9 macbook pro with a vega 20 running an external 27 inch display at 1440p in bootcamp windows, I get max sliders (other than traffic which is at 10%) and fps of locked 30 which it doesn't go down from. the only add on i have is AS16 weather (not the cloud textures) bear in mind that macs are not optimised for running windows, the bootcamp chipset and graphics card drivers are not very good, the thermal constraints of the chasis are awful, any power and voltage cleverness that apple does to its hardware dont apply in windows, and yet the fans only ramp up to anything louder than barely audible(for a computer than runs under load as loudly as a 747, thats amazing) for the first hour or so and then settle down to nothing. apple computers are not magic, and that processor / graphics chip combo is about equivalent to a good i5 and nvidia 1050 in a well cooled computer- these are not particularly high end specs, they are budget to mid gaming pc specs. I'm not saying that a new fs will not be system hungry. I'm sure it will be. But it might take advantage of multicore processors better and will certainly take advantage of graphics cards better.
  13. In this case I found forum posts to be the most useful, but only up to a point. They had given me the impression that I would have to add cloud textures too and inevitably the forum threads would start comparing this texture to that texture. All good info for many and for me at some other time, but I really did have to hazard an educated guess that I probably didn't need to almost double the cost and buy the cloud textures too. Youtube videos were less useful. Finding specifically what you are looking for is very frustrating sometimes and finding a content creator that doesn't have a thousand and one other add ons running while talking about the one I was interested in was even more of an issue. In any case, in almost all of the videos I watched, the features of AS16 were quickly glossed over and its ability to integrate with these or those cloud textures was what the creators wanted to talk about at length. Leaving me with even more of an impression that I would have to purchase the cloud art in order to get live weather updates. I am not in any way trying to say bad things about the community here. Communities discuss what is important to them, and it seems to me that I was trying to gather a piece of information that was so very obvious that no one needed to say it. But I do feel that the folks selling me the software ought to have said it.
  14. ok firstly I havn't posted this in the fsx section because I think what I am talking about applies across the platforms. oh and I am not trying to provoke a discussion on the pros and cons of various freeware and payware weather add ons. I used to use the fsx real world weather for almost every flight, I enjoyed the way it changed the weather every 15 minutes or so, and so now that that service no longer exists I was looking for an add on that does something like that. From doing some research, searching the internet, searching forums, watching some youtube, I just about understood that Active Sky 16 was probably what I was looking for. So I went to the website and find the product I was looking for and click learn more. I was confronted with jargon and so much information that I did not understand that it made my head hurt just to get through it all. More to the point I had no idea if this is the add on I wanted. As I read again and again I just about got the hang of what it is all about, but still no idea if it does what I want it to do. Ah well, I'll look at the store pages as HiFi doesn't sell on their own page. They are worse. Paragraphs of words that I understand individually but not when they are put together in this way. Again i had no idea if I wanted this product. So I bought it anyways, from Just Flight, and indeed it does what I wanted it to do, and very good it seems to be too at automatically giving me a variety of weather on my flights. What I have just described could apply to so much that is flight simulation related. Any information relating to this add on or that add on is complex. No one leads with or indeed has the TLDR bit. In most other situations if i was interested in purchasing something and I was confronted with long lists of features that I did not understand I would assume they were lists of weasel words. The only reason I know they are not is because I have been flying on the computer since flightsim 98 and have bought and used many add ons and have got used to the lottery of whether the thing was useful. Now the next thing I want is a traffic add on that will populate my skies with reasonably accurate liveries and aeroplanes. Something that can be turned down to one or two planes at any one time so I dont take a frame rate hit. Something that will keep the odd cessna, baron or learjet here and there just for fun I'm not looking forward to the research.
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