Trusted seller !

Always good to have a middleman making a vast profit out of things you buy

I suppose, as far as eBay is concerned, as long as a seller consistently delivers what they advertise at the price it was advertised then they become "trusted" sellers eventually.  From their point of view I can't really argue with that, no matter how much I disagree with the seller's prices.

So far all the Tech reviewers I've watched seem to be quite underwhelmed by the 3060 performance considering it's price point, even the cheaper cards, which weren't at the 329 MSRP anyway.

I'm not that concerned about no availability if it's a bit of a dud compared to other 30 series cards, particularly the 3060Ti. It's not much better than a 1080Ti performance wise and often worse according to Gamers Nexus benchmarks for the EVGA card I was interested in. I was quite surprised by that and I trust those guys.

I can't see that this situation is going to improve for quite sometime either, especially now so many scalpers have joined the party and the resurgence of cryptocurrrency mining.

That lovely human trait greed is rife!

Yes, academic is right and I've re-evaluated too, putting all thoughts of trying out MS Flight Sim to bed. My little foray into gaming was only a lockdown tide over anyway and hopefully the end is in sight.

I'll revert back to books and music and a bit of Minecraft when the new 1.17 makeover comes out in the summer, I've exhausted the current version. I can't justify paying 400 quid for something that's just OK - maybe AMD will come up trumps like they did with Ryzen?

What is funny though is some folk are having a wheeze with the eBay scalpers, there's a 3060 Ti on there which has been bid up to £8,000, which is clearly a pisstake by the bidders to annoy the scalper. There's another one that made me giggle, he's selling a .jpg of a 3060 to try and catch out the bots, this is the text of the advert;



We're clearly not the only ones annoyed, but that one made me laugh . . . 

Go on Tim - you know you want to. 

www.theverge.com/2020/12/22/22194274/microsoft-flight-simulator-update-vr-xbox-announcement

I would suggest you get a "dedicated" Xbox Series X to play it on, but they seem to be as rare (and as overpriced) as graphics cards. 

Looks like you'll just have to spend the money on music.

Put simply, no, and no. 

This is a partial spec according to Microsoft.


So that's saying that Flight Sim will run comfortably on a pretty low-spec machine, but is that true?.  Personally I'd want to exceed the Processor, Memory, and Graphics card by as much as I could afford, or actually lay hands on as SOP. 

Rock, Paper, Shotgun - a well respected gaming site - ran their own tests using Microsoft's spec and came up with their own recommendations, which were these:

Processor: Intel Core i7-9800X / AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 2700X
Memory: 32GB
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 / AMD Radeon VII
VRAM: 8GB
Storage: 150GB SSD
Bandwidth: 50 Mbps

As they say, "Unfortunately, the official PC requirements don't give any indication of what kind of performance you can expect from each of these specs, or indeed what resolution they're targeting.

"Alas, if your PC only just about meets the recommended PC requirements for Microsoft Flight Simulator, you're probably not going to be able to see all that shiny detail unless you dial the resolution right down below 1920x1080. Using the components I outlined [in the article] above along with my GTX 970, I struggled to get the game running smoothly even on Medium at 1920x1080".

www.rockpapershotgun.com/what-kind-of-performance-to-expect-from-microsoft-flight-simulators-recommended-pc-requirements

As for the other question, about older cards hitting the market, they simply haven't. Don't forget a lot of those cards are in crypto-currency mining setups, and they'll stay there with the new cards just being piled on top.

When the rest of the RTX 30xx series is released some of the older gaming cards might hit the second-hand market.