FS 2004 or FSX ?????

Location : Wrentham.Beccles Spotter Watch Member : No

Which is the best to run 2004 or FSX??? I am new to sims but it appears that there is more flexibility with 2004 for some reason.

thanks

Karl Clap

Location : Oxfordshire

An almost impossible to answer question... Crying

It will depend on a number of factors....

The capability of your PC - to run FSX well you need a GOOD FAST PC with a dollop of RAM and a decent gfx card. SP1 allowed for multi-core support which I think helped quite a bit. FS9 / 2004 ACOF or whatever you want to call it will run reasonably well on even a slow PC. Whichever version you get you'll end up fiddling with the detail levels for many happy(?) hours to get it just right!

The amount of addons (scenery and aircraft) is currently much greater for FS9, FSX is catching up but there are far more people out there who still design and program stuff for FS9 than for FSX. ALl you have to do is go to a download site like Simviation and see the difference in pages for FS9 military (170+) and FSX military (about 18...!). AI aircraft sites such as Military AI Works only program for FS9, but they do so in such as way as the packages are easily installed into FSX with a quick tweak of the traffic file which they publicise well on their own website.

If your PC is up to it, FSX is probably a good way to go especially with MS having got rid of their FS development team... Mad

I've got a (nearly 2 years old) Dell XPS 2.4Ghz quad core Q6600, 3Gig of RAM and 512MB 8800GT gfx card as the main specs and this chugs FSX along at about 30fps on a good day. It used to do FS9 at about 50 fps but I found that as soon as I got Horizon's GenX photo scenery for FSX there was simply no return for FS9... and it went...

The photo scenery actually improves frame rates as you do not need the autogen trees & buildings etc. The amount of addon sceneries still have a bearing on fps (for instance when I fly near any major detailed addon airbase I get down to 10-15fps but away from these it is a reasonably happy 25-30fps).

Hope this helps a bit...

Dave.