Free FlightGear flight simulator
Above the Clouds
The free flight simulator FlightGear has improved in terms of stability and realism in recent years and offers joystick pilots massive potential for fun.
The FlightGear flight simulator [1] is one of the veterans of the Linux gaming world. More than 20 years after its initial release, the program has matured into complex simulation software that brings many aspects of flying to the screen in a realistic way. For this article, we used FlightGear v2018.3.
The images in this article were taken with the best possible graphic settings (see box, "Graphics Settings"). At a screen resolution of 2540x1440 pixels, this only utilized about half of an AMD RX 580 card's capacity (Figure 1). Even with slower cards, FlightGear remains playable, because after switching off rendering options like 3D clouds the simulator's resource requirements drop significantly.
Figure 1: The RadeonTop graphics performance monitor shows that with an AMD RX 580 graphics card, even at maximum rendering quality in FlightGear, there is still plenty of capacity.
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