Widescreen Gaming Forum

are you on hard forum p2987?

because someone was asking about that score. Not sure where.

Anyways, Anything 8800 will run TH2G, its just a matter of the bell's and whistles...
Have fun.

Hi everyone. Happy new year. 2006 was a great year for CPUs and GPUs, I can't wait to see what 2007 will bring.

Here are the results of surround gaming tests at 3840x1024 with two 8800 GTX in SLI, a TripleHead2Go and three 19" monitors of native resolution 1280x1024. See the detailed system specifications in the signature below.

Unfortunately, with Flight Simulator X the frame rate does not improve significantly by adding a second 8800 GTX in SLI. At the same detail level I observed a maximum of 2 more frames per second. This does not justify spending so much money at this point. Keep your current configuration until prices decrease and new drivers/patches are released.

Detailed observations:
1. Flight Simulator X does not take full advantage of SLI. The graphics cooperation utility shows that the second card is underutilized. The frame rate only improves by 1 to 2 frames per second compared to a single 8800 GTX. Either a driver upgrade is necessary, or a game patch is necessary... or maybe the bottleneck is elsewhere (CPU?). If you have reliable information about this please share it with us. My next test will be to disable in-game antialiasing and apply antialiasing via the nVidia control panel, but I'm not expecting any significant improvements with this technique. nVidia told me they are having issues with Flight Simulator X which they added to their working list.

2. Flight Simulator X does not take advantage of a dual core processor. It occupies one core at 100% and almost not the second core. There is a manual technique to balance the workload between the two cores but the result is the same, each core working at 50% then.

3. The PC runs hot - At least one 12cm fan is necessary to evacuate the heat from the back of the PC. My advise is to add at least one more fan at the front of the case. Also, keep the case closed to create internal airflow or your graphics cards will accumulate a lot of heat.

4. A 550W power supply is enough to power this configuration. However, to be on the safe side follow nVidia's guidelines.

5. The 3DMark06 results fluctuate quite a lot. My latest results go from 11000 to 12200 3dmarks. Is this normal?

Just a note on the side: the Antec Solo case is not long enough to accommodate 8800 GTX cards. I had to cut the chassis to make mine fit. This case is, however, very silent, which helps to compensate the noise of the ventilation.

...

Now the good news: Flight Simulator X on three monitors is a great experience! You actually feel surrounded, like the title of this forum thread. The center of the cockpit falls in the middle of your center screen, righ in front of you, which helps for perfect take-offs and landings. You can also get closer to the instruments on the virtual cockpit without loosing the outside view.

Once again, 2006 was a great year. It saw the birth of the Core2duo, the TripleHead2Go and the 8800 GTX. If the software improves as much as the hardware did, then 2007 will be the year of the surround gaming.

CORRECT ME IF I AM WRONG!

Particularly, I am hoping a SINGLE 8800GTX can handle FPS games like FEAR and HL2 and simulation games like FS9, FSX. Comments?

Yes it is powerful enough.

I checked many reviews of the new Geforce 8 and am suprised how weak the 8800gts is at high resolution like 2560 and similar, only without AA AF it is playable and then the 7950gx2 is mostly faster, if SLI is used (f. g. FEAR)!

Overclocking is said to be very good on the latest 7950gx2 and and its price at ebay is significant lower than 8800gts (25% in my case).

-> So if you want to save some money get the 7950gx2.

The 8800gtx is 30-60 % faster (more with AA AF) but the price and availability is appropriate.

ruirod, can you post some screenshots (and some pictures of your monitors setup if possible, I dont mind even if you have to use your mobile phone) of FSX in 3 x 19". I am not interested in external views and Virtual Cockpit mode (as I have seen a lot already) but am interested in 2-D Cockpit mode. I like to see how the 2D panel fits without stretching inside the center monitor.
Thanks.

Hi p2987,

I'll soon post the screenshots and the photos you've asked. First I need to clean my desk :-)

I can tell you that the 2-D cockpit will look overstretched and ugly. It needs to be manually resized. I never use that mode because it is not realistic. That might also be why nobody ever posts those shots.

I'll make a few screenshots of the original 2-D cockpit and then I'll resize it and make some more screenshots.

Cheers.

As promised, voici some pictures:

Virtual Cockpit view of the Bombardier: My favorite!
Also notice on the left the SLI GPU load balancing visualization. The green bar should be full in my opinion, but as you can see the two cards are not fully cooperating.

Cockpit view: The ugly and unrealistic :-)

Cockpit view resized:

Cockpit view further resized:

Back to Virtual Cockpit view, this time with a couple panel overlays: main and GPS.

I hope this helped.

Cockpit view further resized:

FS 2004 had aswell the bug that every flight you had to resize the cockpit panel manually.
It is a pitty.