It's the Video Card, Stupid!

By Bill Smith (15 June 2006)

With the confidence born of ignorance (a trait shared by so many salesmen) he assured me that it would easily run a flight simulation program. After all, it had a powerful processor, plenty of RAM and a large hard drive. Of course, he was the last person that I should have asked for advice, as his primary focus was on earning his commission as quickly as possible. Unless he had specific knowledge of flightsim programs he would not understand that operators of FS2004 fly aircraft at 500 mph over incredibly detailed 3 dimensional terrain models, through a huge variation of weather features in highly variable light conditions. A computer needs a top quality video card to cope with this! Somewhere in the dim dark recess of my memory I knew this, but foolishly took it on trust that a more powerful machine would easily run FS2004. And so, in January 2004, I went ahead and acquired a new Windows XP machine at a "bargain" price.

For the next eight months I continued to fly FS2002 on my old Windows 98 machine until I was awarded a copy of FS2004 and installed it on the new XP machine. What a disappointment! Trees looked two-dimensional and the clouds looked like, well...sh**. Worst of all, at any airport with lots of scenery, the frame rates were barely into double digits. (Even with the amount of traffic set at a very small percentage). Whenever visibility reduced to less than three miles, I dared not switch to an outside view of the aircraft, as the whole program was very likely to shut down completely. Aircraft textures were often smudged and in particular, Tony Radmilovich's beautiful aircraft repaints were wasted on my machine (see picture, right) so I stopped downloading them.

My friends suggested to me that the weakest link in my computer setup was the video card, and that to upgrade to a card good enough to run FS2004 would be an expensive exercise. So I adapted my flying to suit my computer setup. I barely bothered with hand flying at low altitude, after all there was nothing much to see and the movement was not very smooth. I concentrated on flying jets at high altitude, always on autopilot. Elaborate commercial FS add-ons were of course, out of the question, as they would have murdered my frame rates. I still had a great deal of fun but I knew that it could be so much better.

Fortunately for me, an opportunity arose for me to upgrade when a friend of mine embarked on a very ambitious project, building his own very detailed 737-cockpit simulator. It is truly outstanding, and you can you can read all about it here.

He purchased and installed a "triple head" video card in order to run three monitors in his cockpit, leaving him with a spare, perfectly serviceable, 128 meg ATI Radeon 9200 video card that he offered to me at a special price. (Thanks Gwyn!)

I had a technician install the new video card for me just a few days ago and I was immediately "blown away" by the improvement to my flightsim experience. Compare the BAe 146 textures (see picture, right) to see what I'm talking about. (For the first time since I'd installed this aircraft I was able to recognize the man in the first officer's seat...It's me!) I began to enjoy the improvements immediately just by taxiing around Sydney Airport (YSSY), seeing textures on buildings for the first time. More importantly, I enjoyed incredibly fluid movement in both virtual cockpit mode and "tracking mode". As you might imagine, it is now incredibly easy for me to maneuver my helicopter between buildings and bridges with frame rates always in the low 20's. In short, I've become addicted to flightsim all over again!

My only reservation about this big upgrade is that with my old video card, I proved that my flight simulator would run for 15 hours straight without a glitch. (See my QF11 story, January 2006) Only time will tell if I have traded any reliability to achieve improved graphics and movement.

Finally, at the risk of preaching to the converted: Before you upgrade to a new computer, do your homework, and ask the right questions of the right kind of people. Make sure you get a good video card!

Bill Smith
Perth, Western Australia
leesmith@ca.com.au

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