Cardinal Forums

After browsing around and looking at screenshots of FSX, I finally decided to take the "plunge" and buy FSX...SE. Thirty bucks or so.
As I cradled the little box in my hand, all the way home from WalMart...which made driving a bit difficult....I had visions of the Canadair, the great scenery and such. I sat down at my PC, tingling with excitement,(PC is a P4,2ghz,800buss,30 gb hd, Nvidia GeForce MX 420). I tore open the wrapper and stared at the 2 disks inside for a moment, then extracted Disk one and stuck it in the drive, and waited.................................................................................
Nothing happened.
I began reading the small print about installing and lo and B-friggin-hold there it was.......the words....cannot load with CD-ROM, must have a DVD-rom to load. I am beside myself.
I went to Radio Shack to see if there was something there I could purchase to make this all happen; It is now 5:00pm cst. They had nothing, but they pointed me to a PC store several miles away.
The PC store no longer exists...so I went to BEST BUY and bought a
DVD-ROM-RW...60bucks plus tax.... I am seathing....
I return home to install the drive; it is now 6pm and I am into the game for aprox. 90+ dollars.....I am talking...yelling to myself....and about to lick my first window.
The DVD is installed and it is now 6:30....I insert the 1st disk and alllllllll is right with the world....It loads and after...........and registration.....more I have the game on the screen. After an hour online with tech support it seems my video drivers are out of date and we upgrade those.....it is now 7:45pm and I am tired....and it becomes glaringly obvious that my video card is inadequate. NOW I have a few questions:

What are the optimal settings for my PC, to run FSX?
What is a good, middle of the road video card(Nvidia)?
Is this game always an extremely slow loader (2-5mins)?
Does SB3 load and operate as well as it did with FS9?

All for now and TIA,

DWL

Ouch. Wish you had posted earlier while thinking about switching.

Optimal settings depend on your computer and video capabilities. I would begin by letting FSX determine what it thinks are default settings for your machine. The list of sliders is long and boring, but I can go over them if you like. The big framerate killers are Autogen, Water, AI Traffic, 3D clouds. Fly with default settings and be ready to pull these back one notch at a time to see what effect each one has. As much as you would like, try to change only one thing at a time so you can gauge the effect.

nVidia makes the best video cards right now. ATI has fallen way behind and seems to be catering to OEM stuff although they do have a couple of decent low-mid range cards. The nVidia card would be better IMHO (and I have a long standing predjudice against ATI from years past so take that with a warning of my bias). Which card depends on your cash flow. The newer 8000 series and 9800 cards are probably a waste of money for your P4 CPU system. Give me a dollar figure and I'll do some research.

Yes, the game does take a long time to load, even on my monster quad core machine. Some of that depends on the complexity of the scenery at the location where you have your plane. Some depends on the speed of your hard drive. Big, complex airports take a longer time to load, of course. And it depends on slider settings and how much work the computer must do to generate the scenery (buildings, etc.)

I have not yet installed and loaded SB3 with my new setup, so can't answer the last question. I'm running FSX on Vista 64-bit and I am cautious about installing any program I can't verify as completely 32-bit. Just haven't had time to research that.

Make sure you kill any background programs that are pulling CPU cycles. On an older machine, these things slowly add up and choke the life out of your CPU. You can also make a run with the defragger to make sure your HD is working at its best. And please don't expect results like I've posted. I have a ton of add-on programs including FS Genesis terrain mesh, X-Graphics, ActiveSkyX, Scenery Tech X, and (for the US and Canada), Ultimate Terrain X running on a (for now) state of the art quad core computer. It will run successfully on a P4 if you tweak it a bit (see my previous screen shots on this forum).

Good luck, and check back in when you get ready to go.

Let me add a note here about video cards. First, make sure you can put a PCI-E (PCI Express) card on your motherboard. If you have an older board that only handles AGP cards, your choices are limited. Then, take a look at the amount of RAM the card has. One possibility is an nVidia 8800 GS card with 384 megs. These are $129 less a $30 rebate at NewEgg.com which is a highly reliable vendor online. I buy most of my high end stuff from them due to both price and availability. (You could have found a good DVD burner there for $32 or so.)

Thanks, for the info. It is helpful for sure

Well all is not lost. I did bring it up this a.m. and was able to get to and off the rwy and up to cruise. I absoutely love the Canadair, panel and all. I am a bit disappointed in scenery, as it doesn't look or render much better than FS9. I have had some success at tweaking the sliders a bit and getting things to happen more to my satisfaction.

One thing I did notice in settings was the ability to turn off areas of the world scenery, stuff where I have no intention of going....anytime soon. As it is I usually fly the houston, OKC,St louis,Chicago corridor, as I am most familiar with those airports and procedures.

I will most likely be posting more as I delve into FSX and will probably be asking a lot of questions. Thanks for all the info.

As for now...it is off on vacation with my kids and grandkid. See you all when I get back!!!!

DWL