Propulsion: Learn about piston and turbine engines, their capabilities and how to control them.Theory of flight: Find out why airplanes fly and how the pilot controls the aircraft.Newer Ivy Bridge processors are a little more difficult to overclock and require additional steps to avoid heating problems (search online for "de-lidding" procedures if you want to overclock an Ivy Bridge CPU). These days I use the Sandy Bridge i7 2600K and run it at 4.8GHz. This capability is very important if you want to run FSX well: Make sure to use a "K" series CPU and learn to overclock it. The one saving grace is that current Intel CPU's are easy to "overclock", allowing the FSX users to boost the processing power of their systems. FSX puts most of the processing load onto a single CPU core, so it fails to fully take advantage of today's computer hardware. PC games have also begun to move more processing over to the powerful GPUs on PC graphics cards. Instead of just increasing the raw processing speed of a single CPU core as the Aces team expected, Intel and AMD turned to developing multi-core products. One problem is that the Aces Studio which developed FSX misjudged how computers would evolve. In 2012 we are much closer, but still not quite there yet.
The computers that were available in 2006 were not powerful enough to run FSX at full settings.
There is an enhanced freeware in-game recording/playback addon called FSRecorder as well.Īnother important reason for FSX's continued use is that as computers become more powerful, the better the flight simulation experience becomes.
If you want to make videos you will need third party screen capture software such as FRAPS. FSX also has built-in recording/playback function that allows flights to be recorded and played back within FSX.
You can also make a screenshot any time by pressing the 'v' key and FSX will maintain a photo journal for you, or you can edit the shots and post them on a blog or online photo album.
Certificates, mission rewards and flight logs are recorded in a Pilot Records area. Passing the check-ride results in being awarded a certificate or upgraded license. Each series of lessons ends with a "check-ride" which can be quite challenging to get a passing grade. There is also a "Flying School", which includes a series of written lessons paired with in-plane instruction developed by famed instructor (and really bad pun-maker) Rod Machado. FSX includes quite a few missions, some of which are used as tutorials for complete newbies, and the rest range in difficulty from "Beginner" to "Advanced". There is also a "Missions" engine which can be used to create a scripted scenario with set goals, and the system will evaluate your success or failure and reward you for successful completion. At its core, unlike many computer games FSX does not give you any objectives, so it's up to you to take the tools provided and make of it what you will: This mode is called "Free Flight" and it allows you to choose your airplane, origin, destination, route, weather, fuel etc.