Can my laptop run Flightgear??

[The Master Reaper]

Hello so I wonder if Flightgear can run on my ASUS vivobook 15 X540UA (Laptop) Intel core i5-7200u, Intel HD graphics 620, Windows 10 64Bit with 8Gb of ram with 1Tb of storage space (798Gb usable so far)

[legoboyvdlp]

It will. However, Intel Graphics in general are not very powerful meaning you might not be able to use full settings. You may as well download it and give it a try

[wkitty42]

i'd certainly be putting more memory in that laptop, too... even if FG doesn't like it very much, the whole rest of the system will benefit...

[legoboyvdlp]

8GB is more than sufficient for most tasks: after a year I've never run out of memory (not just in FlightGear but overall) except once

and that was when I experimented with ultra high tree density in wlbragg's awesome Kansas scenery!

[Parnikkapore]

I'm running FlightGear with 8GB of RAM too.

[wkitty42]

i've got 16Gig of RAM and FG will easily (or has in the past) eaten 10+Gig and lead my system into swap space where everything crawls... especially on long flights around the world without exiting or stopping... the last time this happened, it took me over 10 minutes to kill the FG task... why? because the system was so slow and it took minutes to even change from one screen to another...

my recommendation comes from the fact that the OS needs some of that RAM for its operation so there's less then 8Gig available for other programs... there's also that winwhatever loves to run programs and ""hide"" them in the system tray... folks think that's just a quick link area but it is actually running programs so there's more memory consumed and we haven't even started FG yet... these days, there is similar with linux and mac as well...

[legoboyvdlp]

Wow, you must have some crazy LOD settings :O
Apart from that one episode in Kansas I've never seen more than three and a half total usage by FlightGear. But of course, more RAM will be of benefit - but if the OP isn't running out of it it won't have much impact.

[Parnikkapore]

It generally gobbles 2/4-3/4 of my total RAM here on Linux. Keep in mind my idle RAM usage is about 830MB tho.

And by the way, it heavily depends on the aircraft - the SpaceShuttle is a RAM hog and a good test of how high it can go!

[enrogue]

I use an Intel NUC (7i5DNKE) with 8G ram and an M.2 SSD for development & testing - it's a similar spec to the laptop above (Core i5 7300U, HD 620 graphics) - it sits on the back of a monitor plugged in via HDMI as a second machine (my primary is an iMac). It runs Ubuntu 18.10 & FG runs fine on it - though you aren't going to get 60fps with all the shaders turned up - more like 20fps, and I don't normally have bare LOD set above 90km. I have done quite a bit of testing of the Shuttle on it & it works great

frame rate is quite steady - less variable than the iMac (2013 i5 with GT750M), and as a bonus DDS textures work on Linux, but don't on the iMac

I also use it to test windows builds in a Win 10 64bit VMware virtual machine - this works fine as well, but the fps is lower & more variable

Sorry I can't say what it will exactly be like on native windows, but it should be similar to what I see on Ubuntu

[cptRon]

Should work fine. I have it running in Linux on an intel i3 with onboard intel graphics, 4 gigs ram and 4 gig swap, with medium to low settings.

There are also a bunch of rendering tweaks you can go through if you dive through the property tree( press '/' to bring up in-sim, or launch sim with --httpd=5401 and direct web browser to http://localhost:5401 and navigate to simulator tab and then properties ), plus the options in the main menus. In the property tree most things that effect rendering will be found under sim/rendering/ . So you should be able to get it running fairly smooth, but maybe not looking as nice as you would like.

[tdammers]

i've got 16Gig of RAM and FG will easily (or has in the past) eaten 10+Gig and lead my system into swap space where everything crawls... especially on long flights around the world without exiting or stopping... the last time this happened, it took me over 10 minutes to kill the FG task... why? because the system was so slow and it took minutes to even change from one screen to another...

A mild increase in memory use on long flights is to be expected, due to FG remembering your flight path; but that's only going to be a couple megabytes max. 10+ GiB sounds like a memory leak, and that would be a bug. Which of course I'm not ruling out; this is a C++ program after all, and it's written in a coding style that is still mostly how you'd do C++ in the 1990s. The prime suspect here is probably failing to unload cached assets (3D models, textures, terrain) as they become unused - if you keep loading new models and terrain tiles and textures, and never release the RAM, then a long distance flight will keep grabbing memory. But figuring out what to unload is a hard problem, and I wouldn't expect anyone to come up with a perfect solution.

my recommendation comes from the fact that the OS needs some of that RAM for its operation so there's less then 8Gig available for other programs... there's also that winwhatever loves to run programs and ""hide"" them in the system tray... folks think that's just a quick link area but it is actually running programs so there's more memory consumed and we haven't even started FG yet... these days, there is similar with linux and mac as well...

The running programs and how the GUI displays them are two different things. Those programs are running whether the system tray is there or not, in fact, programs can run without any visible cues whatsoever. If you want to know what is currently running, IIRC Windows has this "task explorer" thing that lists all running processes (or at least the ones you are allowed to see), including their resource usage.

On Linux, the situation can be similar, but you have a bit more control. A typical heavyweight Desktop Environment like, say, KDE, will typically spin up a bunch of services ("daemons") for all sorts of background tasks. Some of them are useful, some are convenient, some are questionable. None of them are mandatory for Linux in general though, and you can get a pretty lean-and-mean setup by configuring things to your needs and disabling services you don't need. And if you want, you can take it a step further and use a lighter-weight GUI with fewer bells and whistles; a minimalist window manager like, say, dwm, doesn't add any services at all, at the expense of providing few integration features, and fewer conveniences like for example auto-mounting or a notification tray.

On my Linux machine, the most memory-hungry services right now are TOR (anonymizing onion-routing web proxy, 30 kB resident), CUPS (printing system, 21 kB resident), and PulseAudio (desktop audio routing / mixing, 14 kB resident). There's also Xorg, which you might consider a "service", and that one is currently eating 250 MiB.

Right now, the system is using 4.8 GiB out of 7.62 GiB usable; most of that is being used by Firefox, Chromium, and two VirtualBox VMs. By shutting down the VMs, and closing a few memory-hungry tabs, I generally have no trouble running flightgear with plenty of memory to spare. A much bigger issue is that I have to make do with Intel Graphics, which limits the amount of vertex and texture data I can keep on the GPU, and bus throughput is mediocre, so once a scene gets too complex, performance plummets, despite plenty of RAM being available. If I had a better GPU, then I could probably get more use out of that RAM, too, and bumping RAM to 16 GB could then allow me to run at higher quality settings. Or I could simply keep those VMs loaded and not worry about RAM at all.