nugat

Thankfully it looks like they've kept the same keyboard layout as FSX? So if you have a keyboard layout for FSX it should work for FS2020 too 🙂

Brilliant, thanks for confirming that! I ordered the physical version from Amazon, but received an email today informing me that they didn't have it in stock! 🤦‍♂️ I'll install it today via Game Pass and then activate it fully when my copy finally arrives 👍

I use Ultimate Terrain X (UTX), Ground Environment X (GEX) and Orbx FTX Trees HD. I haven't noticed any drop in performance compared to the default FSX scenery and everything looks like it's supposed to for the area in which you're flying. Unlike FTX global which covers the whole planet, UTX and GEX come in regions. But as I generally only fly in Europe UTX and GEX worked out cheaper. There are plenty of comparisons between the two products on YouTube etc if you want to get an idea of how they look. I also use MegaSceneryEarth for when I want to do a bit of sight seeing :-) It's not realistic at low altitudes as you're looking at a flat image and not 3d objects, but from a couple of thousand feet it can look stunning and it's nice to see "the real world" and not something that has been auto generated by FSX. However if you're flying airliners at 30,000 feet you're not going see much difference between auto-gen and photoscenery. I should add that as there's no auto-gen in MegaSceneryEarth there are no lights, so it's for daytime flying only. In the dark it just pitch black :-)

I should add that since I posted yesterday FlightSimStore support have kindly created an account on my behalf so I am now able to login and make purchases.

I have also been unable to buy FTX Global because the FlightSimStore will not register my account details. Everytime I try to register for a new customer account I get an "Error Account creation failed. Please contact us for assistance" message. I've asked them for help (twice) but although I've had a reply acknowledging the problem they've not solved it. So for me at least FTX have lost a sale. After this experience I'm not sure I trust FlightSimStore to buy even if I was able to :rolleyes:

From my personal experience as someone who uses both types of setup (TV and monitors) I can say that I've never owned a television that can match the image quality of a dedicated computer monitor. I play mostly on a 37" Panasonic television (as it's convenient) but it's immediately noticable when switching to a monitor how much clearer everything is (at 1920x1080). Plus you have to remember that 1080p at 40" is going to look worse than 1080p at 24", as you're increasing the size of the picture and not increasing the source resolution. I find some games look better than others on a TV, games with a lot of post processing such as Dirt3 will make up for the deficiencies of the screen by smoothing everything out. But if you're looking at a mostly static image like the Windows desktop, or a cockpit in FSX which is displaying a lot of fine detail the picture does appear grainy on a televsion screen. At the end of the day televisions were not designed with the sole purpose of displaying computer images, so there's going to be a tradeoff somewhere :-)

While this almost certainly makes no difference to FSX or P3D, it's worth taking into account that 970 has 3.5GB of "usable" video memory while the 980 has 4GB. This came to light a few weeks ago when people noticed that the last 500MB of memory on a 970 runs so slow it's effectively useless. There has been plenty written about it on the internet regarding the technicalities. This doesn't mean that the 970 isn't a great card though, for the price arguably there's nothing better. Just make sure that you're not using more than 3.5GB of video ram otherwise you may run into stuttering problems :-) At the present time this is unlikely unless you're running multiple screens and/or very high resolutions.

I hear what you're saying about 4k resolution, sure it's nice and will become more popular in the following years. However I don't think any laptop that you can buy today will be capable of running current games in 4k let alone games that will release in 2 years. To get 4k running smoothly (>30fps) on a desktop machine requires some serious clout, you'd need to be running two GTX 980 cards (or AMD equivalent). No laptop graphics chip compete with one GTX 980 let alone two. 4k really comes into its own on larger screens, I question whether you'd see much benefit over 1080p on a relatively small 15" laptop screen. Unless you have a need for 4k outside of gaming e.g image editing, I'd save some money and go for a good quailty 1080p screen.

I've been messing with my graphics settings the past couple of days and managed to trigger this issue a few times. One thing that definitely triggered it without fail is turning on 'anisotropic filtering' in the FSX graphics settings. Switching to trilinear caused the sim to load normally. Of course this may not be the same for you and could also depend on what settings you have in your Nvidia/AMD control panel (I'm using AMD). Another setting that appeared to trigger it more often is leaving the FPS set to 'unlimited'.