Switching to 7.

[-TheoGregory]

Well, i think its time that my solid workhorse PowerPC Dual 1.8ghz(256 mb card and 2gb of ram) goes into retirement. I'm changing to windows 7 for TrackIR, Better X-Plane FPS, Virus', Spyware and other goodies.

So my questions are:

What sort of performance could I expect from something like this:

AMD PHENOM II X6 SIX-CORE 1090T CPU, 3.2GHz -or- (Intel equivalent)

ATI HD5970 2GB Dual GPU Graphics Card

Kingston 8GB DDR3-1333

And the second would I be able to have most of the options turned up (buildings, texture res, water reflection)?

The last is a question of AMD (they seem like they're second to Intel). Would you recommend a Intel instead?

I'm sick to death of walking down the toaster isle at my local Briscoes and seeing better technology inside the $59.00 Breville on the bottom shelf! I think i have the worst computer of all the X-Aviation Dev's (Cameron can correct me if i'm wrong)

Thanks in advance for the answers

[Simmo W]

Welcome to 2010 Theo! Sounds more than capable, I just checked Tom's hardware site, the CPU comparisons show your CPU is only 1000points behind my Core i7 920 (15,500 points) which seems nice n grunty for most max settings. There are better experts here, but I've heard Nvidia cards are better suited to xplane, my gtx270 again seems more than enough. I'd also heard SLI/dual cards aren't worth getting for xplane, but again there are better experts than me! I have to admit I'm very impressed with the intel, and it overclocks from 2.66 to 3.2 no sweat.

I wouldn't be too fussed about turning all the buildings up - before xp10, it all looks too walmarty for me, so I keep it at mid level. About to post first preview of our new kmmh scenery, you don't need many other autogen buildings when you see this.

Enjoy your new baby and new viruses!

[-TheoGregory]

I like the 6 cores though. maybe ill get an intel equivalent. Yes I did know nVidia are better. Slipped my mind.

As for the SLI, x-plane 10 is taking care of all your cores. I'm assuming it will take advantage of all your GPU's aswell. Though its a dumb idea to assume anything with Austin

[garrettm30]

That's not a very likely assumption since it is a completely different issue. The latest word I've seen is this posting on Ben's blog:

http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/2009/12/why-isnt-slicrossfire-no-brainer.html

Also notice what he says in response to one of the comments on that blog entry:

Seriously, I do not know if SLI is even architecturally useful for X-Plane...our use of render-to-texture causes serious issues, ones that may not be addressable using current APIs.

I also question how cost effective SLI is - it would be a way for me to spend finite optimization time only improving the framerate for the subset of users who have AT LEAST one good graphics card already.

That post was ten months ago so who knows what is in the works. What we can learn from this is that the issue of multiprocessing and the issue of dual GPUs are two very different things, so drawing an assumption of GPU usage from what was stated about CPU multiprocessing is as good as a guess until they tell us more. If it were me, I'd spend the extra money of a second card on one single card that much better.

[Kesomir]

My advice is this:

1. Get intel over the AMD, i7 4tw.

2. Get a single GPU nvidia. I have had driver nightmares with x-plane and ATI, and crossfire is ignored, so you'll get half the card's worth.

[Cameron]

My advice is this:

1. Get intel over the AMD, i7 4tw.

2. Get a single GPU nvidia. I have had driver nightmares with x-plane and ATI, and crossfire is ignored, so you'll get half the card's worth.

Agree with the above sentiments. Right on, kesomir!

[Ben Russell]

+1 kesomir.

Buying genuine Intel also means that you don't get caught out with weird edge case compatibility with things like Linux Kernels and stuff too.

I have various VIA/AMD systems around that need special flavours of kernels to boot, or can't run things like OpenDarwin.

You might save $50 now, but it'll annoy you for the entire life of the hardware.

[Mikkel]

If your alternative is the I7 920 I'd buy the AMD considering the marginal differencei n performacne. Price/performance-wise it is a better buy and I have no issues with that processor under Win7. If you go for max performance the i7 is the choice to make - I would step up a bit from the 920 though. For me money is the show-stopper. That is why I ended up with AMD and ATI - and with both X-Plane and FSX they work great.

I did at some point have some problems with my ATI 4890 graphics card and X-Plane but driver updates solved the problem. That said, I'd probably buy nvidia today. Only reason I didn't was that the ATI had more VRAM and I figured that was a bonus when running X-Plane, which is quite VRAM-intensive.

[MatthewS]

+1  for Intel + NVidia 

Ive heard ATI compatibility is bad for OpenGL (just read the problems the Outerra guys have with ATI cards running OGL).

[Oliver]

I'm running a quad core with 2.66GHZ, and 8GB DDR3 Ram.

Problem is, I'm running Vista 32 bit, and Vista 32 bit only uses 3GBs of your RAM So I've got 5 useless GBs of RAM.... Luckily I bought Windows 7 64bit! Hopefully it uses my 8GBs, should be arriving in the mail today!

[Kesomir]

I'm running a quad core with 2.66GHZ, and 8GB DDR3 Ram.

Problem is, I'm running Vista 32 bit, and Vista 32 bit only uses 3GBs of your RAM So I've got 5 useless GBs of RAM.... Luckily I bought Windows 7 64bit! Hopefully it uses my 8GBs, should be arriving in the mail today!

It will (64bit) and win 7 fixes a lot of problems with vista, such as: shoutdown not shutting the machine but hibernating it and the mess vista made of the profile folders.

[Oliver]

I'm running a quad core with 2.66GHZ, and 8GB DDR3 Ram.

Problem is, I'm running Vista 32 bit, and Vista 32 bit only uses 3GBs of your RAM So I've got 5 useless GBs of RAM.... Luckily I bought Windows 7 64bit! Hopefully it uses my 8GBs, should be arriving in the mail today!

It will (64bit) and win 7 fixes a lot of problems with vista, such as: shoutdown not shutting the machine but hibernating it and the mess vista made of the profile folders.

Glad to hear it thanks Kesomir +1, USPS says it's out for delivery... I'm excited I should set a chair by my mailbox and just wait LOL  ;D

[Oliver]

Officially running on Windows 7 64 bit!!!!  8) Installing X-Plane! 80GBs... 

[AnonymousUser68]

I would like to update to an i7 but I've got a macbook stuck on 2.4Ghz intel processor. I'm updating to 4GB of ram but for now my laptop handles fine.

Computers go out of date so quickly these days :-\

[Mikkel]

Indeed, I bought a new computer 3/4 of a year ago and I already fear the consequences with Austin going nuts with cpu cores with XP10 to realize his virtual world.

I would like to update to an i7 but I've got a macbook stuck on 2.4Ghz intel processor. I'm updating to 4GB of ram but for now my laptop handles fine.

Computers go out of date so quickly these days :-\

[Oliver]

He says minimum specs requirement for XP10 are gonna be equal if not less then xp9's

[Mikkel]

True, but he also mentions that one will really need all the cores one can get. So I wonder what XP10 will look like with my "poor" quad-core pc. Time will tell...

He says minimum specs requirement for XP10 are gonna be equal if not less then xp9's

[Kesomir]

True, but he also mentions that one will really need all the cores one can get. So I wonder what XP10 will look like with my "poor" quad-core pc. Time will tell...

I would expect that it will use the four cores you have more than xp9 does, so there should be an improvement there. More cores will allow you to turn settings up further i imagine.

[djt]

I would expect that it will use the four cores you have more than xp9 does, so there should be an improvement there. More cores will allow you to turn settings up further i imagine.

It hasn't been specifically mentioned yet (at least I haven't seen it) but with the “16” core Mac Pro system the X-Plane 10 development team keeps mentioning only has 8 physical cores. The other eight are only virtual when Hyper-threading is enabled. 

Anyone with a Hyper-threaded enabled i7 (quad or hex) will have double the amount of virtual cores available.

The question is how exactly will X-Plane 10 take advantage of Hyper-threading.  I'm currently running two i7 (975X and 980X) based machines which have 8 virtual cores for the quad and 12 virtual cores for the hex i7 when Hyper-threading is enabled. 

The problem is I don't know of any game/sim out there that has been able to use Hyper-threading and with the heat it generates I've disabled it in BIOS on both machines.

What will be interesting also is to see how say a one higher clocked quad i7 will do compared to two lower clocked i7's.  I think the Mac Pro system Austin mentioned is using two 2.4GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Westmere” processors which is a pretty low clock speed when you compare them to say the 2.8GHz-3.3GHz quad and hex i7's (Bloomfield and Gulftown) that most PC's are using.  Not to mention a lot of  enthusiasts out there with i7's are running at 4GHz or higher, something I don't think is possible on a Mac.

[AnonymousUser68]

This is the answer to people who are scared of X-plane 10 FPS because of the supposed low FPS on the new shots. Don't assume there on Austin's 16 core beast. http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/2010/10/no-one-has-all-of-x-plane-10.html