I recently tried to see if we could get our two CAP laptops to run a flight simulator. I got a whole 5FPS out of that attempt.
Has anyone experimented with using external video cards as a solution to this problem?
I have seen laptop run flightsims before but you're going to drop a pretty penny on one that can do it. I would advice talking with your local EAA and see if they have one you can use. I know the EAA here has a few that they loan to organizations such as CAP. The one we got was a PC tower with the software on it and a monitor, we had to provide our own controls.
We have our own controls, and we have a projector at our site. But it is a shared site, and desktop systems aren't something we could permanently set up, resulting in increased risk of damage to the hardware.
I can build an external video card interface that can run off the CAP laptop's PCIE bus via the expresscard slot for under $200. I'm just curious if anyone has done something like this already. If not, I'll probably turn it into a Cyber/AE event we can get some PAO coverage on as well.
So, assuming your are using Microsoft Flight Simulator, you should be able to get it to run on any modern laptop (made in the last 5 years) with a dedicated graphics card. Some of the CAP issued laptops predate that, and many of them are basic without a dedicated graphics card. I've gotten them to run on older laptops (circa 2010) that were donated to the squadron without any issues (and without lag).
A dedicated external graphics card should work fine (but I haven't tried myself).
The requirements for Microsoft Flight Simulator X (with the expansion pack) are:
Computer processor: 2.0 gigahertz (GHz) or more
Memory: 1 gigabyte (GB) or more of RAM
Hard disk space: 16 gigabytes (GB) available hard disk space
Video card: 128 MB or more video RAM
I took a look at what Best Buy has to offer, and while their cheapest laptop wouldn't work (because it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card), they do have a $279 laptop that would more than suffice, beating most of the requirements by at least quadruple.
My 5 yr old Laptop runs FS X decently. I get 15-30 fps depending on the aircraft that is loaded.
Hp Laptop w/AMD Quad core @2.2ghz, 16gb ram, integrated video.
Where things slow up are with after market aircraft with tons of detail (Carenado C182 w/g1000, C206).
I have heard from some of our SQ/CC's that some of the new laptops from NHQ will not run FSX without a workaround, but I don't know what it is.
Quote from: Al Sayre on March 05, 2016, 11:58:37 AM
I have heard from some of our SQ/CC's that some of the new laptops from NHQ will not run FSX without a workaround, but I don't know what it is.
If you can reach out to those contacts and find out what the workaround is, I would greatly appreciate it.