Budget graphics card for flight simX

[jigger]

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.

[kalniel]

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.

[mitchgixer6]

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.

[jigger]

Cheers guys.

What settings are you running Mitch, and what sort of frame rate do you get?

[mitchgixer6]

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.