Yeah – I have confirmation now that the Gen-4 graphics _did_ run X-Plane 10.05 and earlier. I’m still trying to sort out what’s going on with that. We may just have been lucky in how our older shaders compiled…

Re: CPU, I cannot answer that, and I do not think there is any clear correlation between money and performance across different part categories.

Of course I had to turn everything right down and fly out of Vancouver!

Earlier you wrote that L2 cache is the limiting factor in x-plane. Does this mean that it is best to spend more on CPU than GPU ?

eg. i7-3770 ($298) with GTX630 ($68) – that is a 4:1 ratio….?

No – no HDR. The driver doesn’t export the GPU shader 4 extension, so the sim doens’t even try.

And honestly, the GPU isn’t there. It has no instancing, so frame rates are just awful on all fronts. If I dumb the graphics down enough to get 25 fps at 1024 x 768 window (this does _not_ look good) and then go to 1920 x 1200 full screen, I have 15 fps with no aliasing. So there’s no way this GPU has enough fill rate to do HDR.

NB: everything above applies to the Windows Intel HD driver.

While using the Intel HD Graphics 2000 on that you have, does X-Plane display the HDR option in render settings? Does this option come up in HD Graphics 3000 or 4000?