FSX - An FPS Eater?

[Ecko]

Lets look at it...


My PC* is about one year old now. I bought it last summer as a "put together yourself" PC, so I could get exactly the parts I wanted. I chose an Intel Pentium 4 550 (3.4 GHz)  processor, which wasn't bad at that time, but not state of the art either, I don't know how old it was at the time. For my video card I chose the GeForce 256 Mb 6800GT, which was about a year old, but one of the best, since the 7800 series and the ATI equivilant hadn't come out. For my RAM I chose 4x512 Mb (2048Mb ~ 2 gigs) of PC3200 (DDR 400), 2 gigs was quite a lot a year ago. The rest was just average stuff, 200 Gb maxtor harddisk, 400 Watt powersupply... (so on)...


That makes my PC look like this:


Intel P4 550 (3.4 GHz) - "Okay" by todays starndards, but far from good!

GeForce 6800GT, 256 Mb GDDR3 - Mid range today I'd say, bear in mind this is two years old!

2048 Mb PC3200 (DDR 400) RAM - Still good today, I don't know wether or not PC3200 is still the fastet, but 2 gigs isn't bad.

On-board AC97 soundcard. (:P)


And how do I run this un-optimized demo:

1280 x 1024 - 85 Hz
4X AA
8X AF

All settings maxed out
All AI settings at 50%


Result, an average of 15 FPS, on a two year old video card and an average processor.


My conclusion is that, that isn't bad on un-optimized software, with amazing graphics.


If you like, post your FSX experience in terms of graphics, settings (including AA and AF, should you use that) and your essential hardware.

[Tweek]

That's very good indeed. Especially, as you say, for an unoptimised demo.

People need to know what their individual system can handle, and exactly what sort of settings to tweak before they complain about low frame rates, or poor performance in general.

I think the main FPS hog right now, is autogen. It doesn't seem to be at all optimised, so I'm expecting better performance in the full version.

[Saitek]

It was choking on my 9600XT. I was getting less than 15FPS. I need to test it some more though.

[PisTon]

The p4 550 / 650 are still pretty good. 90% of the time in most games it's the graphics card that is the bottle neck. Which is true for me and fs9. My 650 usage maxes out at 80% in fs9, while my graphics card is working it's a$$ off (X850XTPE)

[Mobius]

I think the FSX demo is almost better on frames than my FS9.

[cleobis]

Well, I hink FSX will ru faster out of the box, than FS9 did when it came out...

right now I have a laptop :

Pentium M 2,13

1 Gb DDR2

Ati X700 128Mb Mobility

My experience:

@ 1400 - 1050 with everything maxed out ( I know it wont run well with everything maxed out, but I wanted to try it out ), clouds @ at 60 mil viz, and at fair weather,  I have .....

19Fps above sea and 7 to 8 above land...

I think it isn't too bad.

With everything at medium, still the same rez, I get 20Fps (locked at 20) above sea and 14-15 above land.

This is with an unoptimized demo, so I think that when it is all sorted out, it can get even faster.

In conclusion, I think that a medium/top level computer of todayu FSX will run preatty well.

Also, when the Dx10 hardware comes I think it will get even faster with much better graphics...

I'll wait until there are Dx10 Graphic cards to get a good desktop...no point in upgrading now if in less than 6 months, Dx10 will be the thing to have...

Just my two cents...

Cheers

[C]

On an 18 month old system (P4 3Ghz, 1GB, X850XT-PE) I was getting anywhere between 9 and 22fps on the default settings (except for increase water detail). Not bad for what isn't the finished product.

Most encouraging for me is the apparent increase in quality of the default aircraft...

[Splat762]

So what would be considered a "good" FPS hit?  I'm running a P4 3.0, 1536MB RAM, 256MB Geforce 7800 GT video card set at 4 x Antialising and 8 x Anisotropic.  Could go 8x and 16x on those two respectivly also.

From inside the cockpit I'm getting about 23-35 FPS with the graphics set pretty high and about 9-25 FPS on external shots.

Should I be expecting more from my video card or am I sitting where I should be?  I understand this is a demo and still have some tweaking to do on the full release.