Hello fellow aviation enthusiasts and virtual photographers,

I'm in the planning stages of building a new PC dedicated entirely to flight simulation and, most importantly, capturing the highest quality screenshots possible. We all know the struggle of balancing ultra settings, complex add-ons, and a stable framerate to get that perfect, crisp shot.

While most gaming advice focuses on high-frequency CPUs, I'm looking at a different path: a used workstation with a Xeon 24 Core 2.6GHz processor. My theory is that raw single-core speed gets you high FPS, but a massive number of cores could revolutionize the screenshot workflow.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these ideas:

The "Background Beast": Imagine running MSFS on one set of cores, while another group of cores handles OBS for flawless 4K recording, a third set runs Photoshop for live edits, and a fourth manages Discord and navigates charts—all without a single stutter during the critical moment you hit the screenshot key. Is this realistic, or just a dream?

Batch Processing Power: After a long virtual flight, I often have hundreds of high-resolution PNGs that need resizing, slight color correction, or format conversion. Would the 24 cores dramatically speed up this tedious batch processing in tools like Lightroom or specialized converters, turning an hour-long task into a matter of minutes?

Virtualization for a Pristine Sim: Has anyone experimented with using a core-heavy CPU to run the simulator inside a dedicated virtual machine? The goal would be to have a perfectly clean, minimal OS environment solely for MSFS or X-Plane, eliminating all background noise from Windows to achieve maximum stability and performance for a screenshot session.

I'm curious if anyone in this creative community is using a high-core-count Xeon not just for FPS, but as a dedicated engine for a seamless and powerful content creation pipeline. Your experiences and insights would be incredibly valuable!

Happy flying, and may your frames be high and your shots be stunning.

Pause the sim, tweak your settings, and use the sim screenshot itself to render a screenshot; it can do up to 12K!  This works the same on a high-end and a low-end CPU. You will gain absolutely nothing with a Xeon, other than getting moderate framerates and a lot of heat.  A Ryzen 7 9800X3D will be faster in anything you describe. 

 

A minimal OS made sense 20 years ago, but these days, with Windows 11, the resource management of the OS is highly capable, and you would need to do very weird stuff to have an impact on the sim. Keep in mind, it runs in a sandbox, so it just needs enough memory.

 

 

I am confused.  Is that the same famous Mathijs the very very kind and helpful member of the Aerosoft staff making the replying post??  Has he returned to Aerosoft?

 

Regards,

 

Aharon

No, but if I can help a fellow simmer, why should I not do so?

On 12/3/2025 at 12:11 PM, Mathijs Kok said:

No, but if I can help a fellow simmer, why should I not do so?

 

AHHHHH  that is you the famous Mathijs!!!  Good to see you back to the Aerosoft forums and welcome back to the forums!!!  Hope all is well with you and you are happy with new job with another software company.

 

Regards,

 

Aharon