Quick thought of the day: Yes, there is a reason why flight simulation software does not run so well on notebooks: They are optimized for power efficiency and not performance. That’s quite OK for every day tasks such as word processing, which typically requires less than 8 watts on my notebook, or running specialized software for mobile network analysis in virtual machines, which typically requires between 15 and 20 watts. But when simulating a virtual world, the stop-gap of around 25-30 watts of small notebooks is nowhere near enough. But just how much more power is used by a workstation when running flight simulation software took me quite by surprise when thinking about it a bit.
Case in point: When I run the flight simulator software on my dedicated workstation with a water cooled CPU and multi-fan cooled Nvidia 3080 graphics card, the setup uses close to 400 watts of power. Around 120 watts are consumed by the CPU, while most of the remaining 280 watts are required by the GPU. Compared to the 8 watts that my notebook typically consumes for ‘normal’ everyday tasks, that is 50 times more. That is quite a number! I could run 50 notebooks with the power that goes into that workstation while the simulator is running. That’s a thought that took me a bit by surprise. But there we go, this is how things are. On the other hand, a fan heater typically consumes 2500 watts, i.e. the power of over 300 notebooks running simultaneously. Everything is relative…