I started Flying in FSX years ago, and flew the Atlantic in A2A s fabulous B 17 in Multi player, and you definitely had to be fully present!! the engines overheated, the weather changed or got out of sync and the formation ended up all over the sky. equally peoples internets lagged or crashed every few minutes.
So while it was a lot of time on a PC it felt like a legitimate choice as a hobby, and yes I did run up thousands of real hours.
It is odd but while i could just fly the approach it “feels” wrong in a PMDG Simulation to just “spawn” in like a first person shooter… so in fact either I fly short Haul flights EGSS to EGPH etc or Fly A2A s PA 24
I do wonder if thousands of new PMDG 777 s will be “Flying” for thousands of unattended hours across the Atlantic and the Pacific, and yes I will be tempted to buy it but it seems slightly extravagant to use such a brilliant long range aircraft to do City Hops
PS my wife ( or Co pilot) monitors all flights rigorously and laughs if I fly in VR!!!)
You are like me, I also do only short airliner flights (in my case A320neo).
These short airliner flights are more challenging and fun than long hauls because the workload is immense. You have to stay well ahead of the airplane, you’ve barely taken off and have to start the descent briefing. You also get in much more landings and takeoffs
Whatever it is, it’s not even close to the amount of pollution that one airliner dumps into the atmosphere. Don’t forget that avgas still uses lead as an octane booster too.
Then after a few minutes pre flighting the aircraft, I “fly for a few minutes” turn on the Autopilot and then let the Simulation of the Autopilot interact with the Simulation of the aircraft interacting with MSFS’s simulation of the world, while I go for a walk for an hour or so, timing my return to set up the approach…
I really wouldn’t be concerned with your environmental impact in comparison to all of the airplanes flying around the world right now. If you’re concerned enough to post about it, maybe don’t start a flight and then go outside.. Either sit and play make believe like we love to do, or don’t.
I’ll never understand the logic of starting a flight and walking away or going to sleep.
It’s mainly the impulse buys that fill the landfills. We find junk to buy because it’s right there for the taking. Children get impulse buy cravings hit the thrift store and clean or repair a ‘new’ thing, then when forgotten donate it to a reputable charity. Grownups buy junk like the perfect avocado tool that ends up in the trash. Using neighbor groups/buy nothings lets a New Years ‘treadmill idea’ go through 5 households as a perpetual coat rack instead of 5 of them getting junked. No matter how bad a lawn mower looks a quick photo and a FB post and an hour later someone who still wants it takes it. Let alone all the packaging trash. We tried to saddle Asian nations with billions of single use water bottles and made a mess of things. Now their revenge is to send huge plastic blister packs with little pieces of junk in them, many with a lithium battery inside. Next time you see a monster pallet of electric hand warmers with 15" blister pack panels at Costco(or the 300 packs of little plastic ones), just look at it as a future mountain of lithium infused junk, even if it has the magical .97 in the price. A quality pair of gloves will last a decade. A tiny tub of Ultima will make 90 sugar-free Gatoraide drinks in reusable insulated water bottles. Better to buy an heirloom quality $5000 piece of Amish furniture than 200 $25 ‘add qualifying items to cart for next day shipping’ baubles.
I reckon my PC uses around 350-400W while running MSFS and is on probably 6h per day though not. In terms of local electric utility costs that will come in at around $10.00 +/- monthly, or around 70 kilowatt hours worth off peak which is my typical use time. One needs to factor in what other potential energy uses a simmer is not accessing because they are simming. But for digital entertainment no doubt it’s costlier than streaming to your ipad or laptop.
I think about this a lot when simming and is a part of why I don’t do passive simming, such as described in here. I see little to no value to simming while away from the computer. What would I gain from it?
It is just a guess and could be way off. I limit frame rate to 45 always and occasionally down to 40 under rare conditions. 7800x3D is running at around 52% on average w/ a temp of around 70C on air cooling, 78F ambient, RTX4090 runs at around 55% w/ a temp of 64C or so. Given this, what would you predict? Is there an app I can use to display watts in use? Also, I did not factor in the two screens I’m using.
oh i tested mine with a proper meter so i couldnt say about you, but yeah, frame limiting is my bread and butter, in particular the off focus limit, i set it as low as it will go, and whenever i leave to do something i hit the windows key so that the game looses focus
I did once create a post saying they should consider a “low power mode” for MSFS for when people go afk in their airliners for hours at a time. Mostly I got ridiculed cus people don’t seem to care all that much, but I also did find out that minimizing the game in windowed mode reduces GPU usage. Also simply resizing the window to be very small takes a lot of load off the GPU too - which is good if you still want to be able to see your flight while doing something else.
If you want to pause the game, you can hit escape and then go to the option to save your flight and when the explorer window pops up the GPU and CPU usage completely disappears. It’s the only way to really pause the game from using power. Then when you come back just hit cancel and continue on.
There is also a low power mode you can turn on under “Experimental” features that removes your plane from the background in the menus and that massively reduces consumption when in the menu’s at least.
The sims usage certainly isn’t unsubstantial. I can imagine there a lot of people leaving the sim open, fullscreen, while they do other things or even go to bed, and it will just be gobbling 100s of watts that whole time.
I think in this day and age every company should really be considering how to reduce the impact of all their products as much as possible. Low power mode menu should be the default imo, and an easy, obvious way to reduce power usage during an afk cruise should be available. My 2c.
If you are serious about power measurement you can buy a Kill a Watt device. You plug it into the wall oulet and plug the power bar with all your computer and peripherals into that. It dislays volts, amps and power in kW or kVA. Costs about US$50-60 on Amazon The advantage is that it shows your actual power draw from the grid, including all peripherals and all inefficiencies in your system, such as the PSU itself.
when it comes to dealing with mains voltages i think i will second the proposal of using a commercially available purpose built solution like the one suggested here
I’m the same way, but what really gets me isn’t the environmental but the financial costs. I just can’t see how anyone can justify their computer running full tilt for hours doing nothing productive, especially when they are pushing well over 500 watts.
That’s what I would like to know, how much money is being wasted on the electric bill letting the sim run while you are doing other things. I can at least see justification if you kick on autopilot because you want to just sight see the world for a while because you’re still actively being entertained.
Really only those on high end hardware are likely to be pulling 500w or more, and those on high end hardware probably aren’t worrying about their electric bill.
