Specs for seeing moving cars and animals on the ground

At least this:

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ Socket AM2
Video Card: Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT
Motherboard: ASUS M2R32-MVP
Memory: Corsair XMS2 DDR2 2 GB (matched pair 2x1024)

These are the specs for my machine. And I got from 12-30 FPS at somewhere around "Medium High" settings and "Custom" settings, the "Custom settings are a mix of "High" and "Medium High" settings and some of my prefrences. I normally get 12-17 FPS on the ground and 17-30 FPS in the sky. I have seen birds, AI cars, AI airplanes, but no animals in forests.

Hope this helps!

Orion

Thanks ollyau, but I have no idea about AMD, what is the Pentium match for this?

Is there any hardware configuration to use ALL High setting at fast framerate?

Hmm, not sure about a match exactly but what you would want is a Core 2 Duo of some description. Probably a E6700. With SP1 out for FSX now it's hard to say what hardware will do what. People are reporting dramatic increases in frame rate so ya know lol I'd go with that E6700 and if your budget can stretch, a Core 2 Quad or Core 2 Extreme, bearing in mind FSX is very CPU dependant. I know not a lot of people are going to spend that much money on computer solely for flight simming, but with something like FSX, if your computer can run that well it can run probably anything else maxed out.

Hope this helps,
Sno0ze

You do not need that powerful of a system. Get atleast a 2gb of ram, a 250 gb hard drive, and a 256 mb video card. Get that and you will be fine. I see cars and animals with an AMD 3800+ 2.0ghz, 1gb of ram, nvidia 6100, and 250 gb hard drive.

If you're really looking for a Pentium System, the Conroe 6600 (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo) seems to be the leader in the "bang for the buck" category right now.

The amount of RAM needed on the video card depends a lot on the monitor resolution you will be running. I'm running 1680x1050, and I went for a 640 MB 8800GTS.

mdaskalos wrote:

If you're really looking for a Pentium System, the Conroe 6600 (2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo) seems to be the leader in the "bang for the buck" category right now.

The amount of RAM needed on the video card depends a lot on the monitor resolution you will be running. I'm running 1680x1050, and I went for a 640 MB 8800GTS.

Sorry for my ignorance about CPU, I always thought CPU was measured by clock speed, my current one is 3 GHz, so I expected to see a 4 GHz Pentium. Now you mentioned a 2.4 GHz, why it's slower? dual core means two cpus added together making 4.8 GHz?

nottobe wrote:

Sorry for my ignorance about CPU, I always thought CPU was measured by clock speed, my current one is 3 GHz, so I expected to see a 4 GHz Pentium. Now you mentioned a 2.4 GHz, why it's slower? dual core means two cpus added together making 4.8 GHz?

Well, around two years ago, Intel stopped emphasizing higher clock speeds, and shifted to the multiple-core processor. (of course, the development doubtlessly preceded that time frame.) If software is written to take advantage of it efficiently, thing can approach (approach but not meet) the 2x 2.4GHz = 4.8GHz ideal you mentioned.

I guess the change was made because it is easier to manufacture two or more cores running at a lower speed, than it is to produce ever-increasing clock speeds on CPU chips.

The FSX developers received a lot of criticism from the community for making statements that were interpreted as their being not ready for the shift in focus to multi-core. The thrust of the criticism was that Microsoft works quite closely with Intel regarding hardware advancements, and that they shold not have been caught flat-footed by this shift.

Of course, even if software is not written to take advantage of dual cores, you can realize some gain when your're running multiple programs at once: the two cores can handle demanding programs separately, and will not slow down as much as they would if they were on a single-core machine.

mdaskalos