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Comment by alexitosrv | Hacker News Reader

Guys, partially related but, I would like to upgrade my workstation at home for running this when it gets released. Do you have a best value GPU in mind to recommend for running this at an acceptable fps?

I have been out of the gaming scene with PC so your thoughts are welcome!

Also, what kind of controller for PC is the recommended?

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I've been playing on a GTX 1070 just fine. It's not at the highest settings but it still looks amazing.

I have a Honeycomb Alpha Flight Yoke and a plethora of Logitech gear for everything else (throttle quad until Honeycomb drops their own, rudder pedals, and some super basic avionics). I bought all this just for 2020 and it has worked great so far.

The yoke is pricey @ $250 USD but it is completely worth it. The build quality is phenomenal. Better than any real yoke I've ever used, plus it has a lot of basic switches already on it that replicate a small GA aircraft faithfully.

Are there any alternative to Logitech's switch panel and radio? I see people using them but I find it strange that there's no mid-range alternative to these without having to step in the big boy shoes of RealSimGear stuff.

Not that I know of, but sure some things probably exist(ed). It's kinda sad because I think most of Logitech's stuff is pretty low-quality. The throttles and rudder pedals are just kind of sad when you see the build quality of nice products.

gpu.userbenchmark.com

Select two GPUs from the list there (checkboxes). It will take you to the comparison page where there are two search boxes to type in the GPU you want to compare. It'll show price (usually decently accurate) as well as performance comparison.

On the AMD side you have the 5700xt as the top one at ~$430 (once you select it the website lets you quickly move between the products in the line - 5600, 700, 700xt). I think they have a newly released 5500/xt which along with the 5600 are probably good value.

On the Nvidia side you have the 2060[ti, super] and 2070[ti, maybe a super variant too?].

Never forget, nvidia is very evil :) I didn't even consider buying nvidia for that reason so I bought a Sapphire Nitro+ 5700xt* in November. Had to RMA the first card due to hardware issues but the replacement works great in Windows and Linux. It had driver issues but those have been resolved for a while. I think OpenCL support is still not great in Linux (and maybe Windows) but I don't use that so I can't tell you more about it.

* Nitro+ has factory overclock and upgraded cooler which is silent when not gaming and cool and relatively quiet when gaming. Sapphire generally considered the best AMD card maker; their Pulse and Nitro+ are competitively priced with other variants.

Thanks man for your helpful reply!! Probably at the end of the year I'll get my hands on any of these.

By the end of the year the advice will be outdated. Nvidia will have released their Ampere lineup.

Just a caveat that userbenchmark (while pretty useful) is banned on several hardware subreddits for _very_ questionable scoring methods, which seem to indicate bias towards certain manufacturers (most notably, drastic changes to CPU scoring just after the new Ryzen chips were released which seemed deliberately designed to keep Intel's enthusiast parts ahead). I believe their GPU benchmarks are more trustworthy, but I would skip them entirely still.

3Dmark is still fairly standard, and most reviews will include a suite of gaming / rendering tasks as well that can give much more useful real-world benchmarks. LinusTechTips is usually very good - e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoDPTJ-3qCM

Good writeup. I was in same decision process some half a year ago, went with 2070 super at the end. At that time, Nvidia was marginally more powerful (10% on average), had much more quiet implementation (Radeon heats up much more by default), and had raytracing (questionable but still an added bonus). Price difference at my place was maybe 50$ between most quiet 3-fan variants. So at the end, pretty much same price/power ratio.

Went with Nvidia since noise under load was very important, and for windows their drivers are generally are super stable and just work (don't have that great experience with Radeon from the past). Good to see Radeon side catched up, we all benefit from competition.

Nvidia's new 2060 and 2070 should be enough; I've been shopping for a gaming PC and have a 1060 from 3 years ago. You can pick up a laptop in the 1500-2000 range with this GPU built in.

Don't they have recommended/minimum spec on the product? I haven't checked...

There is a fair difference between a mobile and full size version of GPUs. For the 2060 the difference is about 20-25%.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-mobile-rtx-2060-ver...

The 2060 laptop and desktop pack the exact same chip. Provided you can cool it well enough, you can just overclock your laptop GPU and get the exact same performance.

Thanks!. I am hoping they have a more concrete requirements spec by the end of the year. I cannot even find a release date but only teasers. I have a Dell T5800 in need of upgrade in the graphics department, but it's on great condition for everything else I throw to it. I come from a NVIDIA NVS310 so I have a good margin for improvement!

You can check out some existing builds here [0]. And you can also save/post a public link here to your custom build, once you have a tentative one.

https://pcpartpicker.com/

Great, thanks! I didn't expect that site to be still up with the latest tech, and wow it has not only kept up but improved a lot!

My price range is around 1K, but wow there is plenty of choices, look: https://pcpartpicker.com/products/video-card/#sort=-price&pa...

My base workstation is a Dell T5800 series and it has a 2x Gen 3 PCIe x16, do you think it would need more upgrades? like power supply? It has a Dual Xeon E5 and all memory banks are full at 256GB of sweet RAM :)

Both Nvidia and AMD are releasing new GPUs later this year. Even if you don't buy one of those the old ones will get cheaper then, so don't buy anything until you actually need it.

>>what kind of controller for PC is the recommended?

Depends on budget and goals:

* If you want to fly something realistic like a Cessna etc, get a yoke. Saitek offers a good combo Yoke/Throttle Quadrant/Rudders, which are a great way to start a fun yet relatively realistic experience. You can then upgrade it with instrument panels etc, but that is if you get quite serious about things. The basic combo is MORE than enough for a long time.

https://www.saitek.com/uk/prod-bak/yoke.html https://www.saitek.com/uk/prod-bak/pedals.html

Alternatively, CH has an "All in one" yoke with hand-controlled rudder and attached throttle. Slightly less realistic (as the rudder is not via feet), more space-saving & compact :)

http://www.chproducts.com/Flight-Sim-Yoke-v13-d-705.html

* If you are not looking for realism of that kind, or want something good value, and/or might fly fighter flight games as well, the Thrustmaster 1600 combo (joystick + throttle) are a reasonable "solid entry" pack.

http://www.thrustmaster.com/products/t16000m-fcs-hotas

* Finally, if you are really on a budget, OR play in living/family room on a couch but don't want to fly with gamepad, Thrustmaster HOTAS/Ace allows you to physically connect throttle and joystick, so you can hold it on your lap or similar and play from anywhere :)

These come in PC+PS4 or PC+XBOX versions:

http://www.thrustmaster.com/en_UK/products/t-flight-hotas-on...

http://www.thrustmaster.com/en_UK/products/t-flight-hotas-4-...

* Note also, TrackIR adds a huge amount of reality and fun, if you don't go the full VR route. It LOOKS like it'd be gimmicky, but once you put it on, it's quite natural and huge amount of fun. I was honestly giggling first time I've put it on and looked to the side and below my plane just by moving my head around :)

https://www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/

Thanks man! Very helpful answer. Really appreciate it as later on this year I will be on the market for this.

The CH yoke doesn’t have a dedicated hand-controlled rudder but it has three levers for prop, do you mean mapping one of them to control the rudder?

Whopsie.

It should have paddles similar to racing ones that you use for rudder. I may have inadvertently linked wrong one though (can not edit anymore)

Try this

http://www.chproducts.com/Eclipse-Yoke-v13-d-717.html

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