GFX CARD UPGRADE - RTX-3080

TIME FOR A BIG UPGRADE

As flightsims grow bigger and bigger, frame-rates shrink further and further. It was time to make an upgrade. Looking around at the new RTX cards, it was clear that it was going to cost a small fortune. Availability (or lack of) was driving prices up to crazy levels. No use whinging about it though - it is what it is and if you want the top card, you gotta pay the top dollar.

I ended up getting a great price for my 1080 card and replaced it with an ASUS RTX 3080 TUF OC 10GB 'TUF GAMING'.

It gives me 4K Ultra High Def. This will make FS2020 look absolutely awesome maxed out at 3840 x 2160. This RTX model is the OverClocked version and is about as good as it gets for the money.

It's a monster of a card and is all-metal construction. It weighs a ton and one does worry about the weight of such a beast - I feel like it could do with a vertical support at the end of it. Performance is a given at this spec - it just screams along at a blistering pace no matter what you throw at it. 

You can get as much as 150fps in some games at ULTRA settings, but FS2020 is still really in development and has yet to be optimised to take advantage of these new video cards. It will no doubt get better as time moves on and updates improve efficiency. Still, it looks like liquid silk with absolutely everything maxed to the hilt.

The temperature control of this particular card is pretty spectacular! It runs cooler than my 1080Ti - no matter what I throw at it. The only down side (apart from the eye-watering price) is the power consumption. There's no such thing as a 'green' game PC anymore 😂 

My only concern is that the Intel i7 9700k CPU will be the next bottleneck. And the fact that my Z390 ROG STRIX MotherBoard only has PCIE-3 slot for the GPU when it should really be a PCIE-4. It is, of course, backward compatible, but it means that I'm not squeezing every ounce out of the card.

FS2020

 I just bought FS2020 even though I was worried about all the bad reports relating to Frame Rates :-O Read the results....

Click On Photo

THE COCKPIT!

My Shack & CockPit

Some guys have huge, homebuilt hyper-real cockpits in their homes and some guys have to work from a tiny corner of the lounge. I'm lucky in that I have a small area in our "Hobby Room" where I can play Amateur Radio or can play Flightsims.

It's not ideal because the HOTAS is slightly too high and too far away from the pilot, but other than that, it's not too bad. Oh yes, I nearly forgot - it's way too hot in the summer! But then again, I'm always outdoors in the summer months.

The MFD's on the sides of the monitor are not really ideal because of the reach, but there's just nowhere else to place them! Mind you, it's only like the overhead panels in a civil jet - you gotta reach up for those switches too.

XP GOODWAY FLIGHT PLANNER

GOODWAY - BADWAY MORE LIKE!

I watched a video the other night on YouTube, extolling the virtues of a piece of software called GOODWAY from www.xpgoodway.com and I decided to visit the site and buy a licence for the software.

Goodway Flight Planner seemed like a fabulously useful piece of code to help plan flights in X-Plane and so I was kinda excited to get my Licence Key soon after I purchased one. Except I didn't get my key. I didn't get anything!!

I wrote to the French developer (Stef, aka ijonesfr) but only ever received an auto-response  from a bot. Looking around the internet, I soon discovered that many other have fallen foul to this unscrupulous person and I can only be grateful that I paid through PayPal so I might eventually get my money back!

It's very annoying to see that the website remains open and will happily process your order, take your money but never send the licence-key for the software. It's basically just robbing people!

DO NO BUY FROM
www.xpgoodway.com

UPDATE : I got my money back from PayPal.

MSI GAMING-X GEFORCE GTX 1080 Ti 11Gb OC

SUPER GPU!

Since upgrading to a higher resolution monitor, I've seen frame rates drop and I've had to get off my 'High Horse' and turn down the settings to guarantee silky smooth gameplay. So to resolve that issue, I've replaced the 1070 with a 1080 Ti with 11Gb of  DDR5-X VRAM.

This Nvidia card is made by MSI and is one of the fastest 1080 Ti's out there, with that special "X" memory and has made a hell of a difference. It's really intended for use with an UltraHD 4K monitor, but mine's just a 2K 2560-1440, so it's not really being stretched. Thankfully, all the sliders are back up to Max/Ultra and the sims look amazing!!

TWEAKTOWN SAID: 

"I knew that I would be impressed with MSI's GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G before it arrived, for the simple reason of: you can't stuff something up that is already great. NVIDIA has effectively provided consumers with a $1200 graphics card at $699, and then MSI has grabbed that GTX 1080 Ti and nurtured it - and its custom GTX 1080 Ti graphics card is a MONSTER!!!

4K 60FPS gaming on a single graphics card for the most part, and amazing 3440x1440 performance - all from a card that is whisper quiet, looks great, and would be even better in SLI with another GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G. 

MSI only makes quality high-end graphics cards thanks to its Twin Frozr VI cooling technology and expertise with custom PCBs, so you have a card that will last you for years - both in performance, and also from a physical product point of view as well. 

During all of our testing, the MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X 11G ran at 67C maxed out - but we have some overclocking numbers that we're going to share with you in another article coming soon. I'm expecting some big things from the card in the OC department, and if what we're seeing with out of the box performance like this - overclocked performance should be another beast in itself!"

X-PLANE NEW GA

TOO HOT TO HANDLE?
I know now that the HotStart TBM 900 was a little too 'hot' for me to start off with. It's a true "STUDY GRADE" aircraft and on top of learning how to configure everything in X-PLANE, it's just too much study and not enough fun!

I had no idea that you couldn't choose to start with the engines running or that you always went back into the cockpit in the same state you left it. That's not very helpful when you're trying to learn. So with that in mind, I looked for a very realistic GA which gave you the option to run with a few cheats until such time that you could do everything from scratch including cold-starts, etc.

Thankfully, I stumbled upon Airofoil Labs King Air 350 and it seems to offer everything I want at this stage. It is another "STUDY GRADE" aircraft but has clickable options to start Cold, Ready to Taxi or Ready to Take-Off. That's just perfect for everyone! It means I can have some much earned fun flying after the big PC Build and still have scope to get more serious in a few weeks time.

I also like the idea of the Beechcraft's twin engines and the traditional cockpit. Enormous levels of detail have been applied to this aircraft and it's not only gorgeous looking on the outside, but also on the inside - cockpit AND passenger section. This aircraft's level of realism (from an operational point of view) is quite staggering!! All systems including Electrical, Fuel Systems,  Pneumatics, Fire Protection, Ice and Rain Protection, Pressurization and Oxygen, Hydraulic Power and Avionics are modeled perfectly, down to the very last detail, demanding considerable skills and to master.

So for now, I'm going to focus long and hard on this aircraft and use it for all my X-PLANE learning phase. Once I've mastered this, I should much more easily be able to jump from one aircraft to another.

X-PLANE NEW SCENERY

SCENERY BOOST - UK

Let's face it, we all want to explore our own country when we get inside a virtual cockpit, so it's important to download some detailed and recognisable scenery. There's loads of free scenery out there, but the best has to be paid for - it's just 'pennies' considering the enormous levels of detail!

I chose ORBX's GB North, GB Central and GB South packages. It looks pretty good and even includes a landmark just at the back of my house, which is nice. ORBX is an Australian company and so I was surprised to find such great UK coverage. Bit silly to think that way really, since they cover countries across the globe. I just didn't expect to see something as trivial as WINTER HILL TV MAST to be included.

Ooops! I forgot to mention - I also got MEIGS FIELD, Chicago. Why? Because, of course, every flightsim enthusiast on the planet will have fond memories of taking off from this field in the very earliest release of Microsoft FlightSim back in the early 80's :-)

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SETTING UP XPLANE 11

A BRIEF DETOUR FROM DCS WORLD

Now and then I want to change from the stress of air-combat to the relative relaxation of civil aviation and when I looked for a sim to install on my new PC, I quickly realised that Microsoft FlightSim is a wee bit long in the tooth (although 2020 version is due out pretty soon), so I switched to XPLANE 11. This is a brief post to look at that installation.

Setting up DCS WORLD was straightforward and installing the aircraft (and learning to fly them) has been fairly trouble-free. Xplane 11 on the other hand, has been a little more involved - mainly I guess, because it's all new to me.

The first choice to make was whether to use STEAM or the independent download version - I chose the download version for more control. The download took forever due to the file sizes involved but that's to be expected and is after all, no different to DCS in that respect.

The Xplane environment took a little time to get familiar with but I'm quickly feeling more comfortable in the Settings section and I have now configured my 'throttle & stick' to a stage that I'm kind of happy with, although I'm certain that I'll be altering it all again. The thing I initially struggled with getting right was the Views within the cockpit, but now I've got that sorted and I hope to make it even easier with the addition of the X-CAMERA PlugIn.

Rather than play with the provided aircraft, I thought it best to choose a really top-notch payware model and focus purely on that. I was looking at allsorts from Jumbos to Cessnas and in the end opted for the TBM 900 by HOT START. It is an extremely highly rated aircraft and looks worth the investment of study time.

YouTube Video Review

I have to admit though, my first attempt at flying the TBM 900 didn't go too well. Unfortunately, there's no hot start (excuse the pun) - so you have to do a cold start each time. No doubt that will become a simple process once I've got it memorised and properly understood, but in the mean time I've ended up with either flat batteries or engine fires LOL.

In my frustration, I turned to the the 747 which I'm more familiar with from FS2000 days. This seemed to be working fine until I released the brakes and pushed the throttles forward - at which point I just turned around in circles! I'm sounding like an idiot aren't I??

At first, I thought it was the Nose Wheel Steering at fault and I messed around with the joystick assignments, but in the end, I discovered (by physically watching the throttles in the cockpit) that only engines 1 and 2 were being pushed forward! It was a simple case of changing the separate throttle-assignments from Throttle-1 and Throttle-2 to just "Throttle".

So for the sake of people searching Google for the answer to the problem, here's some keywords to help find this page......

• Xplane aircraft keeps spinning around on runway
• Xplane nose wheel steering not working
• Xplane spins to the right

It's worth pointing out (in case you're a bit of a dumbo like me) that you do also need to switch the NWS on when taxiing :-)

Anyway, back to the main aircraft, the TBM 900. She's a beautiful, single-engined turbo-prop and this particular rendition from HotStart is immaculately presented. The model is ultra realistic like none before and requires a great deal of study-time. There's no cheating - you have to do cold starts every time and selecting the wrong buttons in the wrong order can lead to damage to the aircraft, which you then need to have repaired (and pay for (virtually)). There is a log of all maintenance and repair costs, which gives you some inkling of just how expensive it might be to own an aircraft like this.

 

 

When you first enter the cockpit, there's a tutorial (voice and text and arrows) to help you learn the start-up procedure and I strongly recommend that you write this down with a pen and paper (using the pause button to give you time to do so).

One very frustrating thing about this plane (or maybe it's an Xplane thing) is that if you cock something up, you can't simply press a RESET button and start from scratch. For example, I ended up getting the start-up wrong and an engine fire ensued. I thought I'd just start again, but every time I returned to the cockpit, the fire was still in full blaze! Apparently, I had to spend virtual money and get the maintenance guys to repair it LOL.

So there you have it - I'm slowly getting used to it and despite some frustrating sessions (which usually result in me switching off the PC and walking away), I'm quite enjoying learning. I'll update as my knowledge improves.

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