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A friend of mine picked up flight simX in the sales but his media centre onboard GPU is not up to the task . He's looking for advice on what card will run this game on a 1080p TV smoothly with low noise levels.
System specs.
AMD Phenom x4
4Gb
Corsair GS50 PSU.
Cheers.
Edit: He is also happy to pick up something second hand from Ebay.
Ouch.. This game kills graphics cards on higher settings. I'd go for nVidia as they seem to do better in FSX if I remember. If he wants the settings high then nothing less than a gtx 570 or 580 (which might need a PSU update) will do. If you can settle for lowering the settings then a 560ti or 560 would be great, especially as he might still be CPU bottlenecked with the 570/580.
Ultra budget buy would be a second hand 460 1gb version.
Defo nvidia as it seems Microsoft have coded the game for their gpu's.
I would say he would need a better CPU as well though. FSX is notoriously hard on the CPU more than the GPU, so if he wants good frames he'll need a new CPU too.
I've just started playing the game with a i3 2100, 8gb RAM and 2 x 5770's (FSX can't use them in crossover though) and I'm going to upgrade to in i5 2500k as I'm not happy with the frame rates.
Cheers guys.
What settings are you running Mitch, and what sort of frame rate do you get?
Kind of a mixture with settings and frames tbh. Most sliders are about 3/4 with alot of the effects turned off, shadows etc. Cloud draw I have set at about 70 miles, but as soon as I see heavy clouds or fog my frames drop quite significantly, but I'm certain this is an ATi only issue.
With fair weather settings I can usually get about 25 fps stable, but this dips a fair amount over large cities or airports. The biggest improvement I've gained has been dropping to 4x AA and turning AF off. DX10 preview seems to be a big no no as well.
Oh and on that note, make sure your friend has both SP1 + SP2 installed which I think can help with fps. These can be found on the Microsoft website.