Moving up in the world -- graphically

[toprob]

Some time ago a friend -- and member here -- offered me his graphics card as he was upgrading. At the time I moved from a GTX 450ti to a GTX 770, which gave a big boost in visuals and performance. Back then he was upgrading to a GTX 980, and now he's moved on from that, to a GTX 1080, so once again I'm the recipient of a very nice graphics upgrade with the GTX 980! Thanks, mate, you know who you are....

Of course Prepar3d v4 certainly benefits here, I've always gone for good-looking visuals at the expense of FPS, which does mean that sometimes -- bad weather for instance -- things get very jerky. But now it just sits at a good frame rate, so the overal impression is smoooooth.

Aerofly FS2 just looks the same, really, although I have now turned the settings up a notch. But this isn't surprising really, I did say previously that the new graphics rendering gave me a big performance boost over the last couple of months, and even though a driver update disabled the vulkan rendering initially, a FS2 update got it working again, so I was already getting great performance all round. It's difficult to see any improvement over 120FPS, anyway.

The real surprise was X-plane. I've never really been a fan of the visuals, it just looks weird, so although I'm committed to doing a test X-plane scenery shortly, I've never been in love with the sim compared to the others. But now I know that the problem has just been my low-end system specs. Previously there was nothing I could do to get it looking nice, but now after some twiddling of the settings, the new GPU makes all the difference. This doesn't solve all my X-plane issues, as I also hope at some stage to upgrade my system with a big increase in the amount of RAM -- X-plane really expects lots of grunt and plenty of RAM, especially the development tools, but continually crash for me due to lack of memory.

Normally I do a 'landing' video whenever I release a new scenery, so now I can't wait to finish NZCH, as landing there certainly benefits from the extra realism!

[Nzeddy]

Is your GTX 770 for sale?

[toprob]

No, I seem to recall that I passed the previous card onto someone on NZFF, but this time I will need to put it back into my PC when I replace it, to act as a 'clean' installer test machine. I used to have one of these, which my old flatmate used most of the time, and I left it with her when I moved, but it seems she has disposed of it...