My Geforce 9800GT is here

As I  anounced in the last post, I have purchased a new videocard, a Geforce 9800GT 1GB, to replace my old video card, a 9400GT.
Wow, what a big diffrence! It's the first time I can play FSX fluidly with full clouds on 1920x1080px resolution at around 25fps. Still I am not able to enable bloom without going back to 10-15fps, but who cares :)

I spent a day searching for a power source to handle the beas as the one I had barely had enough power, but it lacked some cables. The rest of the day was spent figuring out why I get so many errors and trying to complete a short flight.
It's time to buy some new addons.

CPU or video card update for higher framerate in FSX

Since the first time I put my had on a joystick and played Microsoft Flight Simulator X, performance (especially framerate) was one of my biggest problems. I like eye candy so I'm always pushing my computer configuration to the limit, after all it needs to be as real as it can.

Having this in mind I decided to scrap my old Geforce 9400 GT and buy a new video card.

I found this cool article on TomsHardware which compares FSX framerate on multiple CPU and GPU confrontations and at different quality settings. The graphics cards used in the tests are not the newest ones, but for people like me that are on a tight budget when it comes to hardware purchases, it does it's job.

Looking at the graphs, and in my pocket I ended up in deciding between a Geforce 9600GT and a Geforce 9800GT (1GB of DDR2 respectively DDR3). Combined with my E5200 processor which I just overclocked last evening at 2.78 Mhz it should hopefully give me the 20 framerates per second I dream at, while flying a complex aircraft during storm with medium/high quality clouds. Who knows maybe I will be able to even enable bloom.

Will test it and place my results as soon as I make the purchase. Keep you posted. If you have experience on a similar system please feel free to share.

New flight simulator screenshot website launched - www.mySIMSHOTS.NET

Flight simulators fans are invited to submit the best images from their virtual flights on www.mySIMSHOTS.NET website.

mySIMSHOTS.NET wants to be a portal for the flight simulators enthusiasts to share images from their virtual flights. Beside the upload  image feature the site offers the possibility to create albums, comment on images, browse the database or use the powerful search engine to find images of your favorite aircraft, airline or airport.

Images are ranked by the number of unique views and visitors have the option to see the best images of the last  month, six months, year or all time, calculated after the upload date.

In order to upload images you will simply need to create a free acount, which takes under 2 minutes to complete. 

AIRAC cycle1005 available at Navigraph

If you want to update the navigation database of  your favorite addons, AIRAC cycle 1005 is now available in the FMS Data section of the Navigraph website.