Your guide to Big Screen 3D
FSX TEST REPORT
Page5 - Optimum Results
With FS-X's anti-aliasing turned on and its other settings set to high even replacing the CPU with a faster dual core processor did not budge frame rates above 14 - 15 FPS. It appears that the advanced animations created by Flight Simulator X puts a terrific load on the CPU when too many autogen and animated objects clutter up the landscape.
For a more realistic use of the simulator advanced animation was left on, but autogen and traffic setting were turned down (but not off entirely):
- Global Detail setting: Medium
- lens flare & Animation: ON
- AirCraft Detail: Ultra High
- Scenery setting: Medium High
- Weather setting: High
- Traffic: LOW
- Bilinear Filtering: ON
- Anti-aliasing: OFF (8x AA performed by graphics card)
As altitude is gained frame rates steadily increase until performance settles to about 43 frames per second. The best performance was achieved using a "tweaked" version of NVidia's version 91.28 graphic's driver with an over clocked PCI bus and CPU (not recommended). At a screen resolution of 1280 X 1024, frame rates between 25 and 30 appeared very smooth and acceptable. No difference in quality was noticed between the 7900 GT and 6800 XT cards.
The 6800 XT cards did run near their maximum temperature range, but they ran more quietly than the BFG 7900 GT card.
Conclusions
Unless you are using your PC for other multitasking applications changing to a dual core CPU will not bring very much performance gain for FSX running with XP. But a faster processor with faster RAM (not necessarily MORE RAM) may help.
More tests are scheduled here to test this kind of upgrade.
Considering that Microsoft's VISTA operating system is on the horizon, converting to a 2 disk RAID setup is appealing. Load times for scenery files were cut significantly. For now consider running FSX with the animation features and autogen objects set to low or very low density. The processor heavy FSX may not call for a video card update at this point. The 6800 XT was found to perform nearly as well as the 7900 GT, but keep an eye on the 6800 XT's temperature.
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