Setting up your home flight simulator can be very challenging, you will find that there are many different software setups add-ons and types of hardware available for the game. Getting all of these aspects to run together and work well is not easy. You need to ensure that each aspect of the flight simulator is correctly installed and runs well on your hardware. Achieving a good installation and setup will give you a high performance simulator that is great fun to use.
A major consideration when setting up the flight simulator is the hardware you have available to run it. The faster the computer hardware the more realistic the simulator will be. Running the simulator on it’s own dedicated hard drive is also a common way of increasing the simulators performance. If you are a new pilot then learning the aircraft systems and flying techniques can be challenging. Ensure you have a good begginers guide to aviation to help you through this.
Having suitable hardware for your flight sim will give you more options for installing add-ons to the game. Flight simulators require good CPUs, graphics cards and ram. If you are purchasing new hardware then ensure you get medium to high end graphics cards and cpus to ensure the simulator will run correctly.
The CPU should have the highest GHz rating that you can afford, modern CPU’s often have multiple cores, multiple cores generally don’t help flight simulator performance too much, however, having a core run at a high speed does. So put your money towards a higher GHz rating when purchasing a CPU rather than buying one with lots of cores.
The last hardware consideration is your hard disk drive. You can now purchase solid state HDD’s, these are by far the fastest hard drives available, unfortunately they are also the most expensive. If you can afford one of these it will give you a huge performance boost especially when running the flight simulator with graphics packages installed. If you buy a typical hard drive then try to ensure that it is running just the flight simulator and nothing else, so you would have one system hard drive and one hard drive dedicated to the flight simulator.
Picking between the thousands of software additions available can be quite daunting. Just remember that for each scenery package you install, the hardware will slow down. It is crucial to install scenery packages on well maintained hard drives, this allows your computer to find the information it is looking for quickly and so speeds up perfomance.
Finally you need to understand how to fly an aircraft. This can be a very steep learning curve for the beginner, however, it is also the most rewarding aspect of flight simulation. When learning to fly you need to understand how the aircraft works. How to fly the aircraft and how to navigate the aircraft.
Following these steps will ensure you have the best flight simulator setup you can, as well as giving you a great hobby and hours of fun.
See here if you need help setting up your flight simulator for the bestperformance!