After many years away from flight simulation software, I recently purchased Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X (FSX) and I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised. In my opinion, the graphics and the flight models are surprising accurate for a simulator, especially when you consider it’s meant to be run on a home PC. I’ve read stories about FSX taxing fairly powerful computers, and perhaps that’s why I’ve stayed away, but since I purchased a new computer last year I figured I had the computing power to make it work. As it turns out, it works pretty darn good. I am still tweaking all the settings to come up with the best compromise between image quality and performance, but here is an example of what I’ve been able to get so far.
For the record, my computer has the following hardware.
-
CPU: Intel E6600 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo (dual core)
-
Graphics Card : Nvidia 7900GS with 256MB RAM
-
RAM: 4GB SDRAM*
-
OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit
-
HDD: 320GB
* While I have 4GB of RAM installed, Windows Vista 32-bit recognizes it as only 3GB. I won’t go into why here, but you can read the official Microsoft explanation or perhaps a more down to earth explanation on Chris Pirillo’s site.
Your graphics look quite good. I’m running FSX on a MacBook Pro with an Nvidia 8600 GT 256MB GDDR3 and it doesn’t look quite as “polished” as yours.
Thanks. I’m pretty pleased with the graphics and I feel they are a good comprimised between performance and visual effects. I still have some experimenting I want to do, I just need time.