The GFX card was always going to be important to the over all performance and I really wanted my PC to be DX10 capable with enough memory to handle the workload of FSX.
With that in mind I chose the Sparkle 8800GTX 768MB GDDR3 384bit Duel DVI-I-HDTV with 575/1800 Core/Memory Clock. I couldnt find anything close to the performance of the 8800 GTX at the time of purchase. However there are many benchmarks posted on the internet claiming other cards could keep up with the 8800's. I think when it comes too FSX the extra performance you will see from having 768MB of DDR3 RAM on board would mean far more bang for your buck.
Performance
I cant stress the importance of RAM on the modern graphics cards enough. Think of RAM as the size of the pipeline that information has to travel through and then think of the information traveling through the pipe in terms of speed or "clock speed". You can have clock speeds that would make NASA sit up and take notice but one without the other is a waist of time. I think the balance between clock speed combined with large amounts of good quality RAM is a winning combination. While there are other cards that offer higher clock speeds there are few GFX cards that offer the RAM needed to take full advantage of it.
Computer Hardware Basics
The same rules apply across your whole computer, you will hear me say it allot when ever I'm talking performance. It's a very important balance between all the systems on your computer. If you have an old PC buying the latest GFX card will not fix your FPS in FSX, it may even make things worse. This is because the choke point in your PC still remains. FSX will need at least a good even combination across all components to run well on your PC. One sub standard hardware component can have a huge effect in a game like FSX bringing the whole PC to a grinding halt.
Setup
I like to over clock just about every piece of hardware I have in my Home Performance PC's and normally I don't mind sharing those details with people. I don't even mind telling people how they can do it for them selves. But I have stumbled upon something by accident that could be worth allot of money to someone one day, ( hopefully me ) so in this case I'm not going to provide information about how I got the GFX performance I Displayed at the 2007 Expo. I will say that after some research I found my PC was running FSX in far more detail than most with far better performance (in the order of 25FPS Improvement ) than even the most impressive computers displayed at the EXPO. I think it may have something to do with the way I configured my GFX card. In the future I may post a little more information about it.
Round Up
For all round performance in FSX on a budget I wouldn't recommend anything less than a 8800GTX at this stage and for around $350 your getting good performance for your money.
Coming Soon.....
Memory Information and Setup for 2GB of Kingston HyperX DDR2 800
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