lundi 9 avril 2012

What To Think About When Setting Up Your Flight Simulator

By Peter Harris


Implementing the best flight simulator possible on your home computer can literally take hours and hours of work. It is easy to get frustrated by the multitude of additions, add-ons and software setups available with modern flight simulators. Taking the time to successfully install and setup a flight simulator will result in a highly realistic and detailed simulator that will give your hours of enjoyment and challenges. Breaking down the steps required to install a realistic simulator will make the whole process much easier to complete.

The first step is ensuring that the hardware you have will run the flight simulator at a reasonable frame rate, low frame rates means low levels of realism. Having software and the game itself installed on it's own hard drive is one good way to increase flight sim performance, especially if you are running a lot of additional software. If you are new to aircraft systems and aviation in general it will help to find a good pilots guide to give you a better understanding of how to fly the aircraft.

Hardware is a big factor when determining if a flight sim will run well enough on your home computer, if a flight simulator runs slowly then it will not be a realistic experience. Most modern simulators require a good graphics card, essentially you need one with over 1gb of ram. You also need a medium to high end CPU.

A good CPU is one of the biggest performance factors you will encounter when setting up the simulator. Having a CPU with a high clock speed is very important for flight simulator performance. This is actually more important than the core count of the CPU. So try to buy a CPU with a high clock speed, the cost of CPU's generally goes up with the GHz rating.

The last hardware consideration is your hard disk drive. You can now purchase solid state HDD's, these are by far the fastest hard drives available, unfortunately they are also the most expensive. If you can afford one of these it will give you a huge performance boost especially when running the flight simulator with graphics packages installed. If you buy a typical hard drive then try to ensure that it is running just the flight simulator and nothing else, so you would have one system hard drive and one hard drive dedicated to the flight simulator.

There are thousands of software add-ons available for flight simulators, the most common are scenery packages and additional aircraft. Scenery packages will give you the biggest performance hit to your machine, to reduce this performance hit use a good defragmenter and ensure that this defrag program is run every time you install additional software.

Finally you need to understand how to fly an aircraft. This can be a very steep learning curve for the beginner, however, it is also the most rewarding aspect of flight simulation. When learning to fly you need to understand how the aircraft works. How to fly the aircraft and how to navigate the aircraft.

Following these steps will ensure you have the best flight simulator setup you can, as well as giving you a great hobby and hours of fun.




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