The A2A Simulations Community

i want to buy fsx but i don't know if my computer will run it below is some of the main parts i have in my computer

software: windows xp pro service pack 3

AMD: 1.4 ghz

768mb RAM

graphic card : ASUS NVIDIA GeForce GT 210 PCI-E Graphics Card - 512 MB

please could you reply by telling me if it will be slow,good or bad graphics etc

My gut feeling is that yes, FSX will work and you'll be able to fly the Spitfire. I had a similar speed AMD processor in a laptop computer a few years ago, loaded with the XP OS, and I was able to run FSX plus some A2A products acceptably. I'm sure your graphics card is much better than the integrated GPU that came with my laptop.

However, understand that FSX is very reliant on the CPU for its processing. You have what I would consider a low to mid-range computer for flight sims, and you may have some choppy frame rates if you choose dense autogen scenery, AI traffic, cloud distance, etc. I suspect you're going to have to scale the graphics back quite a bit. Install the FSX service packs 1 and 2 (or the "Acceleration" expansion pack) for improved performance.

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WinXP PRo needs @ least 1GB to run just on its own I think with 768 mb ram you might be pushing your luck.
I had 4 GB ram with a 512 MB vid card and it was running it @ low settings. If you are going to try it after you have installed FSX run this program

http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

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XP Pro x64 requires 1GB RAM. However, there is also a version called XP Pro and the minimum RAM required is 64MB with a recommended 128MB.

FSX really doesn't make use of extra RAM. The processor will always be your bottleneck; faster is better. The caveat is that multicore processors don't improve effectiveness because the sim only uses one core. Your graphics card will make a difference though.

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I like Thunderbolts! (Link to MySpace tribute page)


120th Fighter Wing, Montana Air National Guard

My concern is the AMD: 1.4 ghz CPU. I could be wrong, but isn't this an extremely slow CPU?

Scott.

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A2A Simulations Inc.

what could i use to get decent settings i don't want to be spending lots on a graphics card

But it will still suffer when the rest of the RAM is overflowing and its content is being swapped to the hard disk. Plenty of stutters, blurries and freezes that last several seconds will be the result. Maybe even Out Of Memory crashes. Don't forget that not only FSX needs RAM but also the OS and all the other programs that might be running (REX etc.). I sometimes got problems with 4GB that only stopped when I upgraded to 6GB, even though I run a rather lean installation of Windows 7, with as few programs running as possible. Having only 768MB RAM will be pressing it, especially when the graphics card also uses some of that.

At any rate it won't be pretty. With 1,4GHz and that little RAM he will have to turn the graphics details all the way down. It might work, but there could be problems.





As far as I know FSX does have multi-core support since the Service Packs. It's not very effective but it helps.

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- Patrick

I'll try to be precise: No, it will not work, because:
- your CPU speed is way too slow. In FSX, you need a CPU that has a high number of GHz. It is commonly admitted that a modern CPU running at 3GHz is a minimum.
- given the speed, your CPU is surely an old single-core. FSX needs multi-core CPUs in order to build the terrain when you are flying. If your CPU has only one core, then your terrain will always be extremely blurry and the sim will be choppy.
- your graphic card is a low-end one, with very few onboard RAM, which means that it will struggle to display high resolution textures, leading to poor framerates
- 768 Mb of RAM is just enough to run Windows. These will be consummed as soon as you'll try to launch FSX. On my computer, FSX usually eats 1,5 Gb of RAM alone.

So the conclusion would be that buying FSX right now would be a waste of money. You should save your money for buying a more powerfull home computer (NOT a laptop) with modern hardware inside.