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Wednesday 28 March 2012

Some Important Considerations About Purchasing Flight Simulator Games

By Pete Harris


If you want the best flight simulator setup possible there are a number of considerations you need to be aware of. You will need to think about the level of visual detail the simulator has, as well as the realism and challanges associated with the gameplay. The above considerations will be affected by the type of hardware and software you intend to use. Is your home computer up to the task of running your chosen simulater and what additional software or hardware items will you run.

Visual effects are the most processor and memory hungry part of any flight simulator, the more detailed the graphics are, the slower your computer may run. This is especially apparent when installing and running third party scenery add-ons. These add-ons take a large amount of disk space, and require a high end system to run at acceptable frames per second. An important but commonly overlooked aspect of system performance is your hard disk drive, if you experience slow performance with your flight simulator try installing the game on its own drive. Also keep the drive well fragmented, this will allow the computer to access the information it is looking for quickly and therefore speed up the performance of the simulator.

Hardware additions to a flight simulator is a great way to increase the realism and enjoyment of your game. Common additionas include yokes, ruddel pedals, throttles and track IR devices. Adding this simple hardware equiptment can increase the realism and enjoyment of the simulator tenfold. If you have never tried adding even just a flight yoke to your simulator setup it is absolutely worth the cost and you will add years of enjoyment to your sim.

Adding third party software to your flight simulator is a very common practise. There are literally thousands of additions available online to buy and download. These can include; additional scenery, weather effects and visuals, new aircraft or simply better and more realistic aircraft than what is provided standard with the game. The downside of adding software additions is the performance hit your computer will take. The single most important hardware change you can make should you be finding your simulator is running slowly is the CPU. Essentially you need a CPU with the highest possible GHZ rating, note that multiple cores don't add benefit, but a single high GHZ core does.

Picking the right flight simulator is probably the most important consideration. In 2012 there are a lot of choices all promising great graphics and realism. Just remember the graphics will only be as good as your computer allows, and the realism whilst quite high on all new flight simulators, requires you to have a reasonable level of knowledge about aviation and piloting aircraft.

Have a decent look around before making purchases and keep an eye out for those free piloting guides available on certain websites. Joining a virtual airline is a great way to meet like minded people and will also provide a wealth of information about setting up your simulator.




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