Building a system for Prepar3d

[Tweek]

Hi all!

Apologies, as I'm sure this kind of thread has popped up a thousand times before, but I figure it'd be best to ask with my own criteria.

Anyway, I've been out of the flight simming game for quite a while now (my last post was in August 2010, so that'll give you some idea!), but I managed to rake in a decent chunk of money betting on the World Cup, so now I'm looking to spend a load of it building a new system completely from scratch. Unfortunately, as I haven't upgraded my system for so long, I'm completely out of the loop when it comes to hardware from the last few years, so I'm gonna have to ask people to simply tell me what's good and what's not!

Now, from what I've been reading, the ability to completely max out Prepar3d 2.2 seems to be a pipe dream at this stage, although it seems 2.3 may go some way to addressing some of the performance issues people have been having. However, I'm guessing that there's people out there who've got it running well, at least on high settings (perhaps equivalent to or just above what could be considered 'max' settings for FSX), so hopefully there's someone that can help. What I'd consider to be running 'well' would be a stable, locked 30FPS throughout - I'm not bothered about getting 60-70FPS, especially with how challenging that currently appears to be.

It should be noted that I'm a fan of fast jets (among others), so I'd be requiring something that can actually keep up with texture loading at low level. Hopefully travelling at 400kts at 500ft through the valleys isn't too big an ask!

This would also include flight controls as well, as my current/old joystick wasn't cutting it (Saitek ST290). While it wasn't a bad and certainly did a job, it got to the stage where it'd stick if you didn't move it with enough force, so it'd end up 'snapping' past the point it was sticking at, which was an absolute nightmare for making fine adjustments, especially when flying things like helicopters. No amount of cleaning or WD40 seemed to do the trick, so I ended up cutting the springs out so I had free movement. Which is fine for a helicopter, but not great if you wanna just let go and have it centre itself! Obviously there are things like the X52 that people love, but I can't tell whether it has full cyclic/throttle/collective capability for when I do wheel the helicopters out.

As a side note, I'd also be playing other games on it (I'm guessing the most familiar to you all would be Flaming Cliffs 3) so I wouldn't want to be looking at a system that's built with the sole purpose of flight simming, but I'm guessing that anything that can run Prepar3d well will also be able to run the majority of modern games well, too. I thought I ought to mention it, though.

Price wise, I'm not going to say I don't have a limit, but I'd rather see what options I have before deciding how much to spend. Ideally I don't really want to be entering four figures (in GBP, not USD), but if what I'm looking at costs that much then I may consider it.

If you need any more info then I'd be happy to provide it.

Cheers!

[AussieMan]

Not sure about the rest of your system but 8GB of ram would be good, 16GB is better and I would recommend a video card with 4GB of onboard RAM (I have a GeForce GTX 760) with 4GB onboard. I have this because if you want to go to P3D V2.2 you will need a video card that is DX11 compliant.

[falcon409]

If you intend to "max" out P3D then the two things you'll want most of are memory. . .and memory. Pat stated correctly that the more you have, the better off you are (based on your motherboard's limitations). For the motherboards, at least 8gig but 16gig would be better. . . .for your video card (at least an NVidia 600 Series or above) 2gig, but 4gig is ideal as stated by several LM Pro's in their Forums. . .http://www.prepar3d.com/forum-5/. . .

Forget what you knew about FSX and it's settings as P3D settings don't work the same way. MAXING the sliders may not give the appearance and performance you want or expected based on the "all to the right" concept. P3D 2.0 and above has placed the majority of the texture loading on the graphics card so the 2gig suggestion is imperative and 4 gig will most likely be necessary at some point in the future. This takes the burden of all that work off the CPU and allows the CPU to perform other less stressful functions within the sim (a CPU of 3.8ghz or higher is best).

P3D_V2.2 is a bit quirky right now. . .beautiful when you can get the settings correctly,especially with the lighting and shadow effects, but still quirky with various errors popping from time to time. Not everyone has the errors, but there also seems to be no rhyme or reason for when they do show. As you said, V2.3 may correct many of the oddities of the sim, and hopefully so. While P3D certainly seems to be getting better and better with every new update, there are still many who have tried it, found that their systems simply could not run the sim based on their expectations or were plagued with error messages and finally gave up trying to find the cause and went back to FSX, which for them was far more stable.

Personally, I have uninstalled everything (sim-wise) except P3D. This will be my sim of choice until such time as it also becomes boring or my system reaches a point where it can longer support (and I can no longer afford) the changes and new requirements to run it.

[Tweek]

Thanks for the tips, and thanks for the link - hadn't thought to check their forums for some reason! The hardware section sheds some more light on the situation.