Sim to suit my needs?
 

Hey all,

I almost hate to post this, this forum is filled with "What's the best RC Flight Sim". That is, however, not what I'm asking and unfortunately, I wasn't able to find an answer in searching so please bare with me!

I have a pretty high end machine capable of *****g out graphics on just about anything. For the techies here are the specs:

AMD Phenom II X4 965BE OC'ed@ 4GHz
4GB RAM DDR3-1600 (Btw I often get commented that I "don't have enough". This is more than enough for any R/C Flight sim and it has never been not enough for anything I've ever done. The more RAM you have, the more the PC has to sift through and allocate. Therefore, have only what you need, the moe you have the more slowed down you'll get. A claim supported by countless benchmarks! This is one of those performance things that have surrounded urban legend to no end because of prebuilt PC manufacturers wanting all of the numbers to be as high as possible, so they cram more RAM in even though it slows the PC down! aka Marketing vs Performance, Marketing wins, it has to sell, it doesn't have to be the best. /endrant)
ATi Radeon HD5870 1GB OC'ed to 900/1200
Windows 7 Home Premium

So, that said, a definite perk would be something that is aethetically pleasing when cranked up. Additionally, I actually prefer rendered fields to the "photoreal fields". I never did like those, 3D on top of 2D looks worse than 3D on top of poor 3D, in my opinion. This is not, however, a dealbreaker by any means. The reason I do mention it though is because a lot of people will say something along the lines of "Such and Such is OK but it's a resource hog" etc. Or not reccomend it because it performs poorly on older prebuilt machines, that won't be the case here so please keep that in mind!

However, the primary concerns are a realistic physics, as I want to use it to hone my skills over the winter. I would also like it if it had models that I can actually buy. I am planning on getting a new model over the winter and as I am still a newbie, it would be nice to practice on it on the Sim before taking it out on the field. Secondly, the ability to use my own transmitter, that's fairly universal I think, but it is an older Futaba (round), and another BIG perk would be the ability to buddy box it. RealFlight is the only one I KNOW of that does this because of the InterLink Elite. But my girlfriend wants to learn to fly and it would be nice to take a trainer up in the sim in a buddy box mode, it would be more enjoyable for both of us than just handing her the sticks and resetting over and over again. However, not a deal breaker, but a definite plus.

I could care less about online play / combat modes / 12.7 million planes to choose from, etc. etc. I want physics, realistic planes (not a whole host of planes I will never own in my lifetime, I want to be able to fly things like the Escapade, Great Planes Cherokee, Pheonix Tucano, etc. Stuff that's in my price range, I would get more use out of that. Now, a 33% Edge would be fun too! But a lot of these sims I see have a bunch of odd planes, huge jets, etc. That's fun, but it's not practical for me.

I appreciate everyones input. I understand this is asked a lot, and I may be wrong in assuming that my situation is unique enough to ask again but if this has been answered before in a similar setting please point me in the direction! I also ask that your answers be as objective as possible. I'd like to know WHY a particular product is reccomended over another.

Thanks in advance!

-John

RE: Sim to suit my needs?
 

Try [link=http://rcflightsim.com/]Clearview[/link] it has great flight physics, ground handling has issues on occasion. The price is lower then anywhere else, the quality is improving constantly.

That being said, RealFlight is probably the absolute when it comes to comprehensive RC flight simulation.

If the price is within your budget then you may as well get a sim that does it all.

My two cents....

RE: Sim to suit my needs?
 

Yeah it seems like it's between realflight and pheonix. I've seen clearview, but I'm not sure it's what I'm looking for. Do you (or anyone else) know if, when using the DX5i if I can plug my Futaba round (6XA) transmitter into it and use it? That's one thing that makes realflight appealing is plugging in my Tx into the Interlink, AND having BOTH for buddy box time.

Thoughts?

John

RE: Sim to suit my needs?
 

Since you brought it up...this isn't true. A computer doesn't have to "sift through" memory to access a memory location. It uses the address and goes directly there. As an analogy: The fact that there are millions of websites doesn't slow you down in typing www.google.com does it? No, b/c you know the address. Can you post a link to some of the "countless benchmarks" stating this? Here is one showing minimal (almost nonexistent) gains going from 3GB to 12GB, but certainly now slowdown: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rade,2264.html

RE: Sim to suit my needs?
 

Thank you,

Actually, I belong to another forum (Overclock.net) in which this is a common belief and resonated over and over again in various topics, someone else challenged me on this too. I can link you lots of benchmarks, actually, but they are irrelevant. There are some OLD benchmarks showing that going from 32MB to 128MB has detrimental performance, for example, my guess is older CPU Memory controllers. However I stand corrected, but I still stick with my 4 gigs. I guess people see all of the other gear in my rig and think that I should have 8 gagillion gigs of ram, I rarely even need 2 gigs. It's simply not cost effective to add RAM that I don't need, when I can add it later if it became necessary.

However you are right, it isn't detrimental to performance as I have been led to believe. Over on OCN many have mentioned that "countless" benchmarks prove it, but I guess I never follows up, haha. Sometimes on the internet, information relayed as fact that is somewhat logical, gets relayed as fact over and over again it becomes a foundational or common knowledge (things like the 'inch per gallon' rule in aquariums, for example), even though they are completely ludacris!

-John

P.S., I pulled the trigger on Real-Flight. It's been decent so far, but I am disappointed in the model lineup. It's either trainers are giant gassers, nothing in the lines of what I'm looking for in my next model, low wing tricicyle gear, but I'm sure I'll find something on the swap page.