"We are all flying through unfamiliar skies in the dark. And ahead of us there is more darkness, until the lights go out forever." Wise words there.
Do you know who wrote those words? I did, back in 2020, when I installed the DVD edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 for the first time. I'm a brilliant writer, truly brilliant. The only person in the whole of the United Kingdom who ever understood the internet. And you, dear reader, you're good enough to be my friend. That's right. You're worth it.
You're unusually attentive, and I like that. Let's talk about Flight Simulator 2020. I bought it a couple of weeks after it came out, in 2020. At the time my PC was a nine-year-old Intel i5-2500K, but I quickly swapped the CPU for a Xeon 1275 in order to squeeze a bit more performance out of the game. Flight Simulator didn't run particularly well - my PC was a generation older than the game's minimum hardware requirements - but it did run.
As mentioned in the previous post I've built a new PC, and I was curious to see if MSFS 2020 ran any better. Why did I build a new PC? The immediate cause was Windows 11, which won't install on my previous motherboard. Even if it could the 2011-era LGA1150 socket has reached a point where upgrades aren't cost-effective any more.
My new PC was going to be built around an Intel i5-12600K, which was launched in 2021. But to my surprise the CPU was faulty, so I settled for an i3-12100F instead. K means overclockable. F means "no internal GPU", and KF means "overclockable, and no internal GPU".
No-one respects the i3. Back when it was new, it was the weakest "real" CPU you could buy from Intel, just one step above the Pentium-branded budget models. Nowadays i3 is technically very similar to i5 but with fewer cores, which is less of an issue with gaming than it is with video editing, as very few games truly take advantage of multiple CPU cores. The benchmarks say that an i5-12600K is four times more powerful than my elderly Xeon, while my new i3-12100 is only twice as powerful. I thought it would be interesting to compare the performance, given that the system is otherwise similar. It even uses the same GPU, because I'm not made of money.
Let's benchmark the two with Cinebench. First, my old four-core Xeon E2-1275 V2, which would have been state of the art in 2013:
In comparison this is the score for my new four-core i3-12100F, which would have been state of the art in around 2018, albeit that it came out in 2022:
As you can see the numbers are considerably bigger. What do they mean? I have no idea, but they suggest that my i3-12100F has slightly more than twice as much single-core performance as my Xeon 1275, and slightly more - slightly, slightly more - than twice as much multi-core performance. In comparison the equivalent scores for the i5-12600K I originally opted for are 17,000 and 1,800 respectively, so the i3 isn't all that far behind in terms of single-core performance.
So I dug out my physical copy of MSFS2020:
Look at all those DVDs:
Back in 2020 the physical edition of MSFS2020 didn't make a huge amount of sense. Swapping a bunch of DVDs is faster than downloading the game, but the installation still requires a huge update, so the speed gains are marginal. Five years later the game has had so many updates that the original release is completely out of date. But still. Let's do this. Let's do it. I had trouble finding a DVD drive. I eventually dug out an ancient IDE model.
Let's install disk one. As mentioned back in 2020 it has been a long time since I saw the InstallShield wizard. A long time.
Back then I used to wake up with an erection. I still had hope. That's all gone now, and yet I remain. I carefully put the disk into the tray and closed the DVD drive.
It took about twenty minutes. After it had finished I loaded up the second disc:
I carefully placed the first disc back into the box, taking care not to scratch it. I rotated the disc so that it was right-side up. It's important to be right-side up. After twenty minutes I installed the third disc. Disc number three:
Long-term readers of this blog might remember the original post. It was an arch joke. The humour came from the stupidity of documenting the least interesting thing about MSFS2020. The disc swapping. What kind of nutso lunatic photographs the process of swapping ten DVDs. And also it was an attempt to make you, dear reader, feel my pain. Because there is only pain. Let's insert disc four.
At this point night was falling. Heck of a nice Christmas present, Microsoft, turning off Windows 10. There are Ukrainian orphans who were hoping for the gift of AI this Christmas, but no. There are kids out there who were born in 2015, for whom Windows 10 has been their whole life, and now it's gone. Disc five:
Now Windows 10's tummy is very still and it is very quiet like mother was when daddy took her tubes out and cried all night. There's still Linux, but that's sick and wrong. The Macintosh shakes its tassels and rolls its hips seductively, but can you trust it? Will you wake up in the morning? Windows it is. Disc six:
I got to thinking about how many floppy discs Doom came on, back in the day. So I decided to look it up. Four floppy discs. That's how many floppy discs Doom came on. Four. Or alternatively five if you bought the game on 5.25" discs. 5.25" discs were still at thing back in 1993. Disc seven:
The 2016 version of Doom would have required thirty-five thousand, five hundred and fifty 3.5" floppy discs if the whole thing had been released physically, which it wasn't. There was a DVD release, but it only had a small bootstrap that downloaded the rest of the game from Steam. Disc eight:
If Microsoft had kept Windows 10 alive I wouldn't have had to spend night-on £500 building a new PC. I could have used that money to do something else. Almost a year ago to the day, I visited Berlin and tried out a Canon EF-M film camera.
It's an odd city, Berlin. There are three defunct international airports, including one almost in the middle of town. Three defunct international airports. One of which is semi-defunct. Schonefeld. That's the name of the game. Schonefeld.
During the Cold War the town centre suddenly found itself behind the Iron Curtain, and then when the Iron Curtain fell the town centre became the town centre again, but there was also a new town centre at Potsdamer Platz, although when I visited last year it had a run-down air. The trendy word is polycentric. Berlin is a polycentric city. Disc nine, we're almost done:
£500 doesn't stretch as far as I used to. MSFS2020 was released in August 2020, which was accidentally superb timing, because there was a global travel lockdown and the game allowed people to explore the world without leaving their home. In the wake of COVID everything seems to have gone up by £200. I'm not a wealthy man, but pre-COVID I managed to save up enough to visit Hong Kong. That total cost of that trip wasn't much more than £500, because the air fare was unusually cheap and Hong Kong is not expensive if you're willing to bum it.
Six years later however air fares have risen, hotel fares have risen, and I feel sorry for all those poor travel bloggers. It was a booming industry pre-COVID. Disc ten, the final disc:
In theory the game won't run unless the first disc is present in the DVD drive. But in practice you only have to copy one very small .ini file to an ISO, and run that, and the game works.
At this point I typed in my code to activate the game. It told me that the game had already been activated, which is fair enough. I activated the game myself five years ago. Then it dawned on me that the game was now a Microsoft Store app, and the only way to run it would be to install it from the Microsoft Store. Which downloads a complete copy of the game and installs it in a separate location, so the rigmarole with the DVDs was a pointless waste of time.
Damn. After spending a surprising amount of of time finding out where the game had installed, and deleting it all, I instead downloaded the whole thing from the Microsoft Store, which took three days. After strategically installing some world updates the installation directory grew to 230gb, making it by far the largest game I've ever owned. Albeit that it models the entire world, including probably you and I.
So, while Microsoft takes away, it also gives, because we will live forever. The tops of our heads are digitised and immortalised in Microsoft Flight Simulator. And I suppose people who were sunbathing when Microsoft's satellite flew overhead had their entire torso digitised, not just the tops of their heads.
