PC Specification?

1st Official Post

    Hi All,

    I'm contemplating buying or building a small PC purely to run Aerofly 2.
    I am a Mac user but understand the benefits of PCs for gaming and there seems uncertainty over a MAC version.

    What is a realistic specification to do either of the following:

    • Run this sim well
    • Run this sim at best quality

    This PC would not be used for anything else and I already have a good 27" monitor so just looking at the specs to run AF2. I don't want to be spending £1500+ when £700 would get me decent performance.
    Alternatively, does anyone run this on a Mac via bootcamp?
    Thanks for any input.

    The new GTX 1060 graphics cards will easily allow ultra settings and should be quite future proof. IPACS have recommended an i5 class CPU which has 4 cores. An i7 gives 4 cores and hyperthreading but is not necessary, the graphics card is more important. If you make up a PC and overclock it, you can get by on less, I use a 2 core G3258 pentium clocked at 4.3 GHz with a GTX 950 strix graphics card clocked to peak at 1550 speed. It was quite inexpensive and more or less allows all the settings to be run on ultra, one or two turned down a notch makes things smoother. Overclocking is not that hard, this was my first time and I just looked it up online. My total cost was under GBP350 including new Windows (from Asia) and excluding a monitor, existing case, power supply and hard drives. To run a screen bigger than 1080p I would need a more powerful setup.

    A 1060 is about 2 stages more powerful than my 1080p setup. Perhaps a 1070 would make sense if you find a good deal? Regarding an ultra wide 3440x1440 format, the image in Aero distorts at the edges in 1080p. The pilot's head gets strongly egg shaped in the corner a bit like rectilinear distortion with a wide angle camera lens. It is easily noticable in a 16:9 format, the 3440 is much wider. It would not matter if Aero used a cylindrical image projection but it does not. Not everyone minds this effect.

    We upgraded an older System (I7-920, 2.66 Ghz, 12 GB Ram) with a Nvidia GTX 960 4G Ram, in order to get HDMI 2.0 output to run a 4K television. It was not intended to be a games machine.
    To my suprise FS2 runs just smooth in the 4k resolution of 3840 x 2160.

    • Official Post

    I have a three year old i5 processor and a GTX 660 Ti and also can max out all settings. I have two full hd 27'' monitor and even with windowed mode over the two screens I can easily get 50+ FPS even over San Francisco or LA. Most of the times it reaches 60FPS where the graphics card is in sync with the monitor frequency (v-sync) that gives a smother image than @110 FPS.
    You don't need a fast processor for the Aerofly FS 2, an i3 thrid generation would probably be enough. A better graphics card will improve performance quite a bit and an SSD will reduce loading times very much! So if you won't use the PC for FSX you don't need an expensive i7, that only increases performance by maybe 5% compared to the i5...

    I don't think you'll need to overclock your system when you only render on 1080p. As overloaded mentioned, if you want to go 4K or even use virtual reality, you'll need a better system though.

    Cheers,
    Jan

    Regards,

    Jan