Since I needed a new computer I decided to get one that would run G4. I have a Compaq Presario w/ 3 GB of memory 320 GB hard drive dual core. I also bought a Geforce 8400 GS w/512 ram video card and installed a 500 watt power supply. Realflight shows on the box the optimal requirements as 2.4 dual core,2GB ram,256 ram video card dedicated memory. My problem is my computer exceeds all the optimal requirements and it will not run the Sierra-Nevada fields without stopping or a ratchey screen. It seems to run the photo fields ok. Has anyone else had this problem? I have tweeked the video card every way I know. What would you need to run Realflight without any problems? My thinking tells me If I exceed the requirements it should fly any field any plane any time. I am beginning to think if Realflight put the real requirements on the box most people would not buy it because their computer will not run it. If someone could tell me a setting to change or what to look for I'll do what it takes to get the full benefits of the sim. I e-mailed Realflight about two weeks ago but no answer yet.

Christian Eagle

I am not a computer geek but it sure sounds like you have enough resources to run G4.

I have an Intel dual core processor running at 1.86 Ghz, 2 gig of ram, and a Geoforce 7900 GTX with 512 ram and my system runs fine including the Sierra-Nevada fields. My operating system is XP (sp3). I ran the Nav guides in Real Flight and I am getting between 130 - 160 FPS (frames per second) which seems to be very smooth but not perfect. It would appear your configuration is more robust than mine.... What OS are you running and what kind of FPS numbers are you getting???

What brand is that 500 watt power supply? In short, a lower quality higher watt power supply can cause a system to perform worse than a high quality lower watt one. You need to meet or exceed the requirements of your system in terms of capacity, but high speed components also need minimal fluctuation in currents.

I'm not up to speed currently with the detailed specs of various current GPU's, but not any relatively expensive graphics card is necessarily perfect for every type of application though.

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i am a computer a geek and former gamer. on your power supply on the side there is a label that shows what the rails are you need atleast a 20A on the 12v rail. cheaper power supplies will not have a good amperage on the 12v rail. your motherboard uses 12v rail to power itself. also post the amerage on the 5v rail. the 5v rail is what powers the video card when its plugged into its own power supply molex. this might sound like an obvious question but on the video card there is a molex for plugging in to the power supply is that plugged in? your video card will not preform well without that plugged in. the video cards now have to have their own power instead of taking it from the motherboard.

yeah keep us posted on that power deal[8D]

Many other factors also might influence your joy, and you are likely to get more Geeky-informed RealFlight info on the KnifeEdge forums, don't forget to use the search button over there either!

My system is much less jerky in full screen mode rather than 'windowed' mode which is not what I would naively expect but is easy for you to check on yours... Also experiment with reducing other effects such as smoke, foliage, clouds, etc. Consider turning off V-sinc...

I suppose if other comments above re power supply issues are relevant here, none of what I suggest would make a difference?

I do not consider myself a geek, but as a sideline I build about 20 computers a year for folks that need specialty computers. Your 500 watt power supply is overkill with your setup, but allows for future expansion. There is no issue with amperage considering the hardware involved on individual rails which is only a problem if you are getting into hard drive arrays or huge custom cooling options.

The down and dirty with G4.5 is that it is a huge GPU (video card) hog. We built a gaming machine earlier this year for RF G4.5 with an E8400 CPU (o.c. to 3.6 GHz) 2 Hard drives in a raid configuration and dual ATI 3870 video cards crossfired and over clocked. When we fired up the original settings we were getting 250-300 frames per second. When we set all of the settings to high in certain 3D fields with full water effects etc... the frame rate dropped into the high 20s to mid 30s. We are waiting for the ATI 4870x2 cards to drop down in price to upgrade for decent rates at high settings.

Look at your frame rates on different fields and I would bet that you are going to see a drop with the fields that are causing the problems. The reason the photo fields run more smoothly is that they are just a background where as the 3D fields need to be constantly rendered by the GPU.

To fix this you will need to lower the settings or get a faster video card. I would recommend a minimum of an Nvidia 8800GT or an ATI 3870. For the price look at the Nvidia 9800GT or the ATI 4750 which can be found for around $100-130 on sale. The ATI 4750 is just slightly slower than the crossfired 3870s for reference. For instance here is a decent Asus 4750 card for $120 after rebate [link=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121272]Newegg ASUS ATI 4750[/link] or a MSI 9800 GT for $110 after rebate [link=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127387]MSI 9800 GT[/link]

Good Luck!

I'm not sure I can answer all of your questions ? The power supply is made by ANTEC. The following is the information off the box.

Input voltage: 100~240VAC
Input current: 9A @115V,4.5A@230

Output:

Max Load:12V-22A
Min. Load:12V-1.0A

Max Load: 5V-24A
Min. Load: 5V-0.3A

I use Full screen to fly because it does a lot better. My OS is VISTA. IF I fly Alpine Meadow (Photo Field) I get 53 fps,IF I fly RealFlight Ranch (Sierra -Nevada) I get 11 fps. I 'am thankful for your all your answers and responses. What do you guys think about the Realflight optimal requirements? They seem to me to be inaccurate.

Antec is a quality brand as power supplies go. So that's not it. I was thinking you might have gotten a no name brand (those can be downright awful for high performance systems).

carlosponti was correct in asking if you had the power connected directly to your GPU. It is right?

Hopefully the people here with RealFlight on Vista have anymore tips for you.

Good luck

I run an system that is a friggin' dinosaur compared to yours, and it will run G4.5 just fine.

CPU: P4 3.0ghz (Prescott) 800mhz FSB and Hyperthreading
Motherboard: Gigabyte with 800mhz FSB and Hyperthreading
Video: Nvidia GS7600 into an old 8x AGP slot [X(] (I know)
Ramm: 2gb DDR PC3200 ram dual channel
Power supply: Thermaltake 850watt power supply with 30amp on the 12v rail and 27amp on the 5v rail

My fram rates are in the mid 200's

I play games and so far, there isn't anything I can't load up and play on this rig.

I don't know whats wrong with yours, but it should be rockin' and rollin' with G4.5. Just thought you might want to get a comparison to some outdated hardware that works fine with the same simulator. The only thing I have done to mine is add 6 case fans, a couple giant cooling towers to the CPU and GPU and some cooling to the Ramm. Other than that, it's just a slow-footed dinosaur compared to yours. My system temps rarely exceed 102F when I'm working it REALLY hard.

My Video Card (Geforce 8400GS 512 mb) has no way of connecting to the power supply I think? I just pluged it into the PCI slot. Is this correct?

who is the maker of the video card? it might also come down to Vista being the resource hog it is that its part of the problem. First suggestion i would make on that is to Turn off Aero to get rid of the special effects. well i looked at several PCI express cards with your same chipset and none of them seem to have the PSU external connector.

Is your video card driver up to date? You can benchmark your system using various online sites and compare with similar systems. This may help you decide if you have a problem. You also may have your graphic options to high on R4.5, try reducing them. G4.5 can make even the best gpu struggle if all the graphic options are maxed!

My video card drivers are up to date. I just don't understand . I have tried to call the Tech. support # of the video card but it's the Holidays and I can't seem to get through. I will keep trying. I have all my settings on medium.

For reference, here is a chart from Tom's Hardware showing how different video cards stack up in Microsoft Simulator X, showing Frames per Second (FPS) with Max setings (simular program type). Hint: the 8400GS is not at the top of the list.

[link=http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/gaming-graphics-charts-q3-2008/Microsoft-Flight-Simulator-X-SP2,785.html]Tom's Hardware[/link]

As I stated before, if you want the simulator to work properly, you need to lower your settings or get a better video card.

Best Regards

Not sure how good a rating system it is, but what is your "Windows Experience Index" in Vista? Find it in Control Panel > System > Rating. The GPU score from my Vista laptop's 8600M GS is a 5.3 (best score is 5.9). Your lowest score is your "Base Score". Mine ends up being a 4.5 due to my RAM speed. For reference PhoenixRC runs smoothly at max settings on this system (not as demanding as RF4 though I presume).

Yes my system rating is 2.0 I tried several times to refresh but my computer locks up??? It tells me to refresh but I can't. That seems low to me but what do I know?

I havent seen g4.5 yet, but i would maybe check the vsync option and see if that is on and if it is i would try taking that off and try the fields again. If that doesnt work i would put it back on if it is at first and go through 1 video setting at a time and dropping it down 1 click to see if it quits having issues on you. Also set every video setting to a medium setting at first and try to run the maps. IF they work but the quality doesnt look as good you can do individual settings and up the settings till you can still run it yet it looks better. I have fsone and have a very very good computer that i personally built and when i tryed upping the video settings i would have the same issues you are describing.

After HOURS of changing settings and my monitor going blank after some changes I gave up for a while. Just Yesterday (01-06-09) I read a post somewhere that suggested turning off Shadows. I did this and on photo fields I get close to 150 fps and with Sierra-Nevada fields I now get around 45-50 fps. This is a big change the only draw back is when the plane is on the ground it looks like it's not touching it. Some Sierra-Nevada fields get better frs than others. I called PNY tech support for the Geforce 8400 card and he said the only way it will work correctly is disable the onboard card. I told him I tried that several times and I lose the monitor every time. I have both cards enabled ,but the monitor is only plugged into the new card. If I disable the onboard card and do a shut down I lose the monitor. I tried it again for PNY and sure enough no monitor after about four hours of disgust to get the monitor back up and running again I never called PNY back.

Yea technical support for computer people is not the greatest thing to deal with. Well at least you got it running. Kinda weird that the shadows would be messing up the sim tho. You said your running vista right? Try getting omega drivers http://www.omegadrivers.net/ . There what alot of people use for gaming and such. Also if updating your video drivers the best way to do it is download a program called driver cleaner (google will give the place to download). Boot into safe mode (usually F8 on bootup) and run driver cleaner and delete all the specific files related to your video card. Once there deleted then reboot and run the newly downloaded video drivers and install. Then you will have the most up to date and most stable drivers possible. The driver cleaner is kind of a tricky program so really read the instructions thourougly before you do it so u understand how it all works.

It kinda sounds like Windows is actually using both video cards and treating your add-on card as secondary, with the desktop duplicated on both cards. Right-click on your desktop, select "Personalize", then select "Display Settings" and see which card is set to primary. Also write down the sequence of keystrokes required to re-enable your onboard video card in BIOS setup, for future testing (so you can get it back on with no display).

On the speed thing, there are a few basic guidelines that need to be followed if you intend to use your PC for gaming or any real work.

1: First and foremost, remove all anti-spyware/anti-virus software. They are all slow (some are fairly slow, some are mind-numbingly slow...Norton and McAffee, I'm looking at you) and they don't really protect you anyway. Also uninstall any third-party firewall program you may have.

2: Disable Vista's horrid indexing "services". To do this, in the search bar of the start menu, type "serivices.msc" and hit Enter. On the window that comes up, scroll to almost the bottom of the list of services. Find "Windows Search" and double-click it. On the "startup type" pulldown menu, select "disable". Hit OK, then right-click on the service and select "stop".

3: While you're still in the services menu, disable and stop any third-party update agents (like Apple updates).

4: Uninstall anything that ends with "desktop". Google desktop and AOL desktop are the likely suspects here.

5: Last year, Microsoft decided to jump on the desktop index bandwagon (as if Vista's indexer wasn't already bad enough) and released a Windows update called "Live Search". It's slow and awful. Remove it by going to your "Programs and Features" icon in the Control Panel, and selecting "view installed updates". Find "Live Search" and select "uninstall".

6: Disable Windows' automatic updates. Do this by going to the Control Panel, select "Windows Updates", then on the left side of the window that comes up, click on "Change settings". Set it to "Never check for updates". Ignore the warning about your system being vulnerable without updates (I find it quite amusing that Microsoft has included an admission of Windows being "vulnerable to security threats and performance problems" right from the factory here).

7: This has already been touched on, but do be sure to update your video card drivers. I only say this in particular because Vista seems to ship with the worst video drivers MS could possibly provide, assuming of course you're using the included drivers (you're not if you installed the add-on card yourself and loaded the drivers from the included CD).

8: Disable Aero, as has been said before. To do this, right-click on the desktop, select "Personalize", select "Window color and appearance", and select "Windows Standard" from the list.

9: Kill the side bar.

10: Definitely uninstall anything with "AOL" in the name.......'nuff said.

11: Finally, have a look in your system tray (the overly-busy area next to the system clock). See anything there you don't need? Some of the crap beleaguering modern Windows systems by shuffling around in the background has an icon down here, so you can find out what it is and know what to uninstall. "Adobe Photo Downloader" is one, and can be safely disabled without affecting the program's usability (what, you do like having a slow glitchy image previewer pop up and start a scan so it can start creating and displaying thumbnails for every last image on that flash drive you just popped in?). Sometimes you can right-click on a system tray icon to access a menu that will allow you to configure the program to not run on startup (Windows Live Messenger is one example, and it should definitely be disabled on startup). If this doesn't work for whatever program you're trying to disable, type "msconfig" into the search bar in the start menu. In the window that appears, check everything under the "Services" and "Startup" tabs to locate the unwanted program. Clear the check box next to its entry. The program won't run automatically in the background after your next restart.


It's really too bad you have Vista, it's dog-slow. Back when I first started playing with Vista and reviews were coming in comparing its performance to XP for various software titles, I was under the impression that it would be about the same or a little slower than XP. Then I tried a few games on Vista on my year-old laptop that run great on my 5+ year old Windows 98SE machine (I only keep 98 on it for a few programs I need, everything else I do on that machine happens in Linux). Imagine my surprise when performance was lackluster. Getting proper video drivers helped quite a bit, but performance on this dual-core Intel laptop still can't even match my tired old Athlon 2500+ in Win 98SE. At first I thought the integrated video card was just no good. I soon had the chance to try some newer games on a fairly new dual-core desktop system with a decent GeForce 8600GT PCI-E video card. Performance was OK but not stellar, which didn't surprise me considering the graphical requirements of some of the games. Then later I put one of the games (Live For Speed, namely) on my old 2500+, a game that was getting around 20-30FPS with factory settings on the new desktop. Wanna guess what frame rate I was seeing with even heavier graphics settings? 100+. "Oh,", I think, "maybe I just need to up the resolution to what the desktop was set to." Tried that, 1280x1024, and performance dropped all of 20 frames max (was still seeing 80FPS). This would be poor performance from Vista compared to even an equivalent system, but to fail this badly against a system that is over 5 years old.....? Something is awry. (And before any geeks ask, yes, the desktop had SP1, and the laptop did not).

Anyways, by taking the measures I've outlined above, I now have my dual-core laptop in Vista running at least a little closer to the way my 5 year old Linux machine runs all the time with all sorts of desktop gadgets and multiple programs going at once. I did write these instructions assuming a fair amount of Windows knowledge from the reader, if you need any more help just post here or shoot me a PM. Will be glad to lend a hand.

Wow alot of great tips hers. I have a new HP desktop and it is really pretty lackluster in performance with 4.5. I upgradedto a Geforce 9400GT 512mb card but still don't get very good frame rates on the 3D sites. I did notice someone mentioned that maybe my system is using both cards at once. I am goign to need to chack that later when I get home. I am a little frustrated by this whole thing considering G4 worked fine but not after I upgraded to G4.5.