What is the most cost effective way to increase performance in X-Plane 11?

Question

I understand I need to upgrade my PC, but I am not sure what will have the most impact on performance. I am able to run on med-high settings at a pretty consistent 30fps. I'd like to increase the visual settings and use some scenery addons without grinding to a halt. Thanks for the help.

Specs:

OS: Windows 7 64-bit

CPU: i5-4670k @4.0GHZ

GPU:  R9-280x 3GB

RAM: 8GB DDR3 1866 G.SKILL Sniper Series

Answer 1

Hi, starting from these specs, I would personnaly go for GTX1070, or even GTX1080 from Nvidia. X-plane currently takes more advantage of Nvidia GPUs than AMD GPUs.

If needed, you could also add 8Gb of RAM.

That would already be a good start.

But if I were you, I would wait half a year (or maybe a year) until Laminar Research realeases the upgrades of X-plane 11 that will take advantage of Vulkan technology. More information on this page :

http://developer.x-plane.com/

Just type Vulkan in the search bar.