Flight Simulator X: QX6700, and 8800GTX

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deeznuts

2[H]4U
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Building a box for somone, and they want to be able to play Flight Sim X. Not a huge screen by any means, 1280x1024 resolution. Everything I have read says that the Sim brings everything to it's knees, even the 8800GTX. But I have not seen any mention of the lower resolution this person will be playing. I don't want him to spend $650 on a game to have it play as a slideshow.

Anyone with experience have any advice? is the above config enough to play framerates smoothly? With at least most of not all eye-candy turned on?
 
I play with all settings on Medium High on the machine in my signature at around 15 fps. So,yeah, that should work fine.

I should note that a good frame rate to shoot for in FSX is around 15 fps or higher.
 
Just as a point of interest, you'll want to check out whether FSX benefits from the move from two to four cores, otherwise it'd be better to go with a cheaper but higher frequency dual core part.
 
I play Flight Sim X Deluxe with an 8800GTX, C2D e6700, 2GB XMS2 memory, and an eVGA 680i sli motherboard. I have had no problems running that game at max everything. The only thing I have done is run nVidia's nTune utility that overclocks some stuff.

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I play at 1280x1024 on an 18" LCD.

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FSX doesnt even take advantage of 2 cores, do not know why but it doesnt. Hopefully some patch will let it take advantage of a multicore processor. Does not even make use of SLI if you have it.
 
I am afraid to run it on my new machine, will make me feel like I spent my money on nothing even though all the components are great. FSX is just some lousy programming.
 
CountIt178 said:
I play Flight Sim X Deluxe with an 8800GTX, C2D e6700, 2GB XMS2 memory, and an eVGA 680i sli motherboard. I have had no problems running that game at max everything. The only thing I have done is run nVidia's nTune utility that overclocks some stuff.

::edit::

I play at 1280x1024 on an 18" LCD.

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Where did you find an 18" LCD?
 
quadnad, already have the CPU, so no issues there. I did suggest going for X6800 for the higher GHz but the allure of quadcore for years to come was too much.

CountIt178, thanks, your post just did it! I'll recommend a 8800GTX, the wifey of the guy authorized $1500 for everything and he wants to max this out, not save money for later (you guys know how the wifey things sometimes works)
 
i did some searching and does anybody know if FSX is even using DX10? from what I read it is only DX9 and there will be a patch for it later on this year enabling it to be DX10.

i am in the same boat as the OP. i have an s939 x2 4400 and 7800gtx512 and was wondering if it would be better to upgrade to a c2d and 8800gts or stick with the x2 and 8800gts
 
I run the beta on the rig in my sig at about 17FPS, which is kind of sad...guess that even forcing SLI on the thing doesn't make it faster.
 
I tried playing on my rig in sig. My lord this game runs slow as heck, and Im used to cranking everything up. Oh well, only a matter of time before that changes.

Those who are playing....what do you think of the JANET flight mission? :D
 
FSX is very lightly threaded so it will benefit a bit form dual cores. Not so much on a Quad. IT is mostly texture prefetch AFAIK.

It will run DX10 in time. There is SP1 due in the near future (no specifics yet) and then at a later date will be DX10.

FSX is designed for single threaded performance- go Ghz over cores if you can. Maybe the DX10 pipeline will be inherently more multi threaded.
 
With my QX6700 at 3.2 / 4GB of Dominator 8500 / 8800GTX at stock speeds the game is mostly playable at 1920x1200 16AF / 4XAA with medium detail levels. Frame rates seem relatively smooth, but texture loading is still very slow ,and as soon as I crank up autogen or turn on any of the AI cars, aircraft, or boats, my framerates plunge into the single digits.

The game does not make any use of additional cores as the previous poster mentioned, nor does the engine take advantage of SLI or Crossfire.

This has been the only game I haven't been able to run with everything turned on with decent framerates. The engine just seems bloated for lack of a better word.
 
loafer87gt said:
With my QX6700 at 3.2 / 4GB of Dominator 8500 / 8800GTX at stock speeds the game is mostly playable at 1920x1200 16AF / 4XAA with medium detail levels. Frame rates seem relatively smooth, but texture loading is still very slow ,and as soon as I crank up autogen or turn on any of the AI cars, aircraft, or boats, my framerates plunge into the single digits.

The game does not make any use of additional cores as the previous poster mentioned, nor does the engine take advantage of SLI or Crossfire.

This has been the only game I haven't been able to run with everything turned on with decent framerates. The engine just seems bloated for lack of a better word.
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jeez...if thats what ur getting with that setup then maybe i should rethink my upgrade. i was going to go with a e6600 and a 8800gts.
 
If you plan on running lower resolutions with mid level details that should be fine. Like I said, the engine just seems horribly optimized. I can be getting forty some FPS in the countryside, but panning around the cockpit some textures refuse to load thier higher resolution mip maps unless you pause the game and wait for the engine to catch up, or if you are flying a higher performance aircraft, the texture loading becomes totally bogged down and you are stuck with a blurry mess. It may be somewhat smooth, but its a blurry mess none the less. I have tried forcing AF thorugh the control panel, setting in game AF, and even following some tweaks posted on other forums that are supposed to help with the problem, but at the end of the day I found I was spending more time tweaking config files and playing with driver settings trying to get the game to play well than I was in the cockpit.

It just wasn't worth it. Really ticks me off too as this was "the" game I was really looking forward to playing on my new build. :(
 
There's a number of cfg tweaks that help with texture loading. Check out the forums at www.avsim.com


Overall it's a hog. For my almost 4 year old system it Jeckyl and Hyde. Away form major cities, I get excellent (25+ fps) performance. Near major cities no matter what I seem to do I get 5 FPS.

I do a lot of flying in Boise and the upper Midwest. Surprisingly I can run autogen at extremely dense with a medium bubble with minimal performance hit.
 
Apparently the new service packs 1 and 2 now allow proper use of Crossifre and SLI, anyone confirm ?
 
The FSX expansion pack "Acceleration" uses DX10. The SP1 patch for FSX is DX9, but the SP2 will be DX10.

btw I have played FSX @ 1280x1024 on 8800GTX, 8800GTS, and 7900GT. Trust me even my 7900GT can play it without any problems at high settings.
 
my uncle has a 8800 GTS 320MB but it stutters on Ultra high settings :(

he may want Xfire with 2 3870's to run it better at 1680 x 1050, but not sure if CF properly supports FS X
 
FSX is cpu limited not gpu limited. As long as you have a 7 series gpu then you will be fine. You will need at least a 3ghz core 2 and 2gb of memory to run the game at 3/4 settings. You can forget running max settings on this game with current hardware unless you are strictly a bush flyer. Fly anywhere near any major cities and you will see low 20's to high teens with settings at 3/4 with a 3ghz machine. SP1 added huge benefits because it added support for multi-core. My frame rate went up 30% after SP1. SP2 really didn't do anything that i can see other than add a limp wristed attempt at providing a dx10 patch. dx10 runs abysmal in fsx and adds no graphical features at all other than cockpit shadows which look like crap and take half your frame rate away. dx10 also breaks compatibility with many of my 3rd party aircraft addons for fsx as well. Running in dx9 maintains compatibility on most addons and gives a better overall frame rate. It doesn't matter which resolution you run the game in because it is cpu limited. I get the exact same frame rate in 1280x1024 as i get in 3840x1024 with my triplehead setup.
 
go figure, uncles only has a 4300 @ 2.7, 2g of ram and a 320mb GTS, i thought the 320mb may have been the limitation trying to load high res textures.
 
if the budget is $1500 I would pass on the q6700, get q6600. It is way cheaper and I like how well it overclocks :)
 
perry753 said:
The FSX expansion pack "Acceleration" uses DX10. The SP1 patch for FSX is DX9, but the SP2 will be DX10.

btw I have played FSX @ 1280x1024 on 8800GTX, 8800GTS, and 7900GT. Trust me even my 7900GT can play it without any problems at high settings.
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when you say you're running with "high settings" are you using lens bloom and also maxing out CPU-controlled traffic (aircraft, boats, cars, etc)? When I put the previous on about 30% I get playable settings. Any higher than that and the desktop rig in my sig starts to stutter.

ninja edit: and I'm using Acceleration so I've got SP1 and SP2 helping me out.
 
dido i had traffic @ %60 and the other %30 and no lense bloom


try the DX10 preview it has, this apparenrtly uses better API calls resulting in some better performance.
 
MrGuvernment said:
dido i had traffic @ %60 and the other %30 and no lense bloom


try the DX10 preview it has, this apparenrtly uses better API calls resulting in some better performance.
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no Vista for me so no DX10. I dual-booted to Vista once just to try out the DX10 "preview" and the performance gain was marginal at best. All it did graphics wise was add in-cockpit shadows (this is unnecessary for someone like me who's practicing actual flight and hence have my attention on getting the plane on the ground then on the shadows).
 
I saw that it was multi core optimized. Does this include quad core? if so, I will be getting that.
 
WinMan_x2000 said:
I saw that it was multi core optimized. Does this include quad core? if so, I will be getting that.
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As of SP1, FSX is multi-core aware. However, it is primarily multi-core aware in the resource loading paths. IE, loading textures for scenery, loading AI, loading secondary traffic. That actual rendering engine has _some_ multi-core support but not throughout. The primary multi-core support come in resource loading so that your load times are less when loading the simulation world.

And, the multi-core support is fully scalable -- 2x, 4x, 8x, 16x, etc.
 
MrGuvernment said:
my uncle has a 8800 GTS 320MB but it stutters on Ultra high settings :(

he may want Xfire with 2 3870's to run it better at 1680 x 1050, but not sure if CF properly supports FS X
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The GTS is fast enough for ultra high, but the stuttering comes from your memory. You need more than 320MB to store everything.

Rozal0 said:
Wow guys, you ahead and do a 8800Ultra in SLI, waste your money.
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Right on the money. This game is NOT GPU limited. Do triple SLI with Ultras and you won't see a bit of a difference. Turn on SMP and use an overclocked QX9650, you'll see a pretty hefty increase in your FPS. Flight Simulator X just has an immense number of constant calculations (just imagine all of the things that need to be continually monitored and adjusted, especially with dynamic weather), so the CPU is really where your money should be spent if you want reasonable performance out of FSX.

SP1 improved a bit, hopefully later patches will make better use of multiple cores.
 
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