Graphics card needed to run FSX Steam Ed acceptably

[TobyV]

So, after 7 years of mostly good service, my laptop (once upgraded with SSD and more ram) has probably now reached end of life, getting rather slow recently and most worryingly, really rather hot, to the point I can feel the warmth through the over 1-inch thick desktop on which it stands and after a few hours of use, I cannot hold my hand against the bottom of it for more than a few seconds.

I've decided a laptop for home use is not really of any benefit to me. For mobile computing I have a tablet, so I am planning to go back to a desktop. Looking at the prices of finished, off the shelf DELL or other branded machines (e.g. Acer, who I never liked much), I am now looking to do what I haven't done for 10 years and build my own PC again.

Even that isn't that cheap seemingly. I am not picking especially high-end components and even so the price is quickly racking up. Question is, the motherboard I've selected, ASUS H170M-Plus comes with "AMD Quad-GPU CrossFireX". Are the modern multi-core oboard GPUs comparable with the graphics card technologies of 10 years ago, or would I still be better off going for a [basic - because some of them are literally £100s!] graphics card, at least for the benefit of the separate memory?

My most demanding graphical applications will probably be FSX steam edition and some photo editing and 2D CAD (so nothing desperately demanding, I wouldn't have said).

[TobyV]

Decided for the sake of CHF48 (about £39) a basic graphics card had to be a better bet than hoping the onboard graphics could cope.

New spec will be:
ASUS H170M-Plus (LGA 1151, Intel H170, mATX)
Intel Core i5 6500 (LGA 1151, 3.20GHz)
Corsair Vengeance LPX (2x8GB, DDR4-2133, DIMM 288)
Gigabyte GT 710, 2GB DDR3, PCI-E 8x 2.0 (2GB)
WD Green 240GB SSD

[DaveB]

Hi Toby,

I don't know a great deal about FSX:SE other than it fixed a few probs (not many) with the DVD version. What I can say is that FSX is very CPU intensive. You can have the best GPU in the galaxy but if your CPU is a tiddler.. the sim will suffer. I run an i5 2500K (3.3-3.7gb) on Win7 Ultimate (64-bit) and until recently.. this all spit out via a GTX560Ti with 1.2gb onboard ram. System ram is 8gb. I now have a GTX760 with 4gb ram and the difference is marginal. My old intel E8400 rig (3gig) ran FSX with an older 9000 series graphics card and when that died, I replaced it with an Asus GTX560Ti (1gb) and the difference was almost breath-taking! I'm not sure what you're going to get for £39 but unless you have the CPU from hell.. my honest feeling is not to expect a lot. Your i5 6500 should run it ok but I think you'll find the graphics card will cause a bottleneck. Its all a balancing act.

ATB
DaveB

[TobyV]

Hi Dave,

With the graphics cards, it was all rather odd, there seemed to be a few for around the price I am paying, and then they very quickly shot up to the equivalent of £150 or more and even one for £225 was still labelled "Einsteiger" (beginner). There were others with three fans onboard which looked enormous for well over £500, which looked like computers in themselves.

In my world (engineering) studies have actually been done running CFD (computational fluid dynamics) codes on GPUs because of their high floating point capabilities, but if as you say, for whatever reason, FSX hits the CPU rather than the GPU.... This said, I thought the whole point of DirectX was to actually get the graphics card to do the work.

Oh well, guess I will find out soon enough! One reason for choosing this card was that it was in stock, so in theory, my whole order should be ready for collection by tomorrow afternoon so I can get building.

Toby

[DaveB]

£225 for a beginner card. Yikes!!!

Well.. you won't know until you try it mate Current cards to look for (secondhand) are GTX 970's which are strong performers. They're probably quicker than some of the '10 series' Nvidia cards. All this said, your mobo is geared up for ATi and I have absolutely no idea what's hot and what's not in the ATi range.

I wish you good luck with the one you've chosen anyway Look at throttling it back to half your monitor refresh rate as a starter and take it from there.
ATB
DaveB

[TobyV]

At least to get started, I shall be using my old TV as my monitor (since I am moving from a laptop back to a desktop), jsut like they did in the early 1980s I tried it today (since it has been parked for a year or two) and the picture isn't bad, can get 1440x900 resolution. Perhaps I shall have to upgrade the graphics end of this new machine in fairly short order. I had another look at the site and so many graphics cards (except the ones which are literally £100s) are simply out of stock

[blanston12]

I have often used this website to compare the performance of different cards.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_list.php

The score they have is really just the raw performance of the GPU, it does not take into account memory or cores but its a pretty good benchmark to compare different cards.

[TobyV]

Thanks Joe. In the meantime I googled the graphics card I had intended to purchase, read a couple of reviews and edited my order to remove it I think a little more research on my part, a short wait and the parting with a little more cash may result in a happier outcome in the long run

[DaveB]

I think that's a wise move Toby.

ATB
DaveB

[TSR2]

Hi Toby, its worth remembering that FSX is DirectX9, so lots of the enhancements on the newer card will result in diminishing returns. That said, 2GB of memory would be useful with some of the modern FSX creations which use larger textures i.e. bigger than 1024 x 1024. A very high end card from a few years ago would probably make a good purchase if the right one can be found, albeit, you'd be looking at ebay. My old GTX 770 2GB ran FSX really well. it must be at least 3 years old now, so no idea what the current price would be second hand. The general consensus seems to be the current high end ATI (AMD) cards are roughly equivalent to the NVidia GTX 1060, but no more than that. A good compromise card (new) might be the NVidia GTX 750 Ti at around the £100 mark in the UK.