Graphic Card for Flight Simulator use

[sbr428]

Can anyone recommend a Graphic card to get best results with Microsoft Flight Simulator FSX Gold Edition.
Rest of Unit as below.
Tagan 500 Watt PSU
Gigabyte EX58-UD3R Motherboard
Intel i7 920 Quad Processor 2.66 Ghz
4 x 2Gb Crucial DDR3 Ballistix 1066mhz Memory
320 Gb Samsung Spinpoint Hard Drive
At present Nvidia GeForce 8500GT Graphic Card

 

[PieEater]

Generally in FSX Nvidia cards give substantially better frame rates whilst ATi cards have noticeably better image quality so swings & roundabouts.

If you're after better performance FSX thrives on CPU clock speed so overclocking your CPU would be a good start.

This might be helpful

 

[sbr428]

Thanks for that Pie Eater will overclock tonight. Is the Geforce 8500Gt good enough or will I be better off upgrading.

 

[PieEater]

The 8500 will be a bottleneck in your system anyhow so an upgarde would be worthwhile. Depending on budget I'd look at a 9800GTX you should be able to find one for ~£115 all in and there will be a noticeable difference. If you regularly play games then a 1gb 4870 might be worth considering, if you're going to overclock your CPU you'll have both a performance and image quality improvement plus a better card for other 3d apps.

 

[sbr428]

Thanks for the info

 

[nxr]

Newer benchmarks (1280x1024 or 1920x1200) suggest that nvidia have improved the FSX performance for the GT200s, but they still seem to lag behind the G92s.

These charts include the 8500GT, so you can get some indication of the sort of the boost you can expect.

 

[nxr]

The most suprising card in there is probably the 9600GT. That's a pretty impressive showing from such a cheap card.

The 8800GT results seem to indicate that there's no benefit in FSX from paying extra for a 1GB card (you gain about 0.5fps).

So if you're looking for the biggest FSX boost for the least amount of cash, the 9600GT probably your best bet.

 

[sbr428]

Thanks for that info nxr most helpful