So as the title states a co-worker of mine was asking about playing Flight Sim X with at least moderate to high detail on a laptop. I don't know much about Flight Sim X other than I heard it was a beast to run on desktop even with top systems. I'm assuming if thats still true and hasn't been improve upon by game revisions or something then hes SOL about running it on ANY laptop unless its at the lowest of game settings.

Could someone enlighten me so I can tell him what hes going to have to do/upgrade to or is it going to be impossible on current laptops to run this game smoothly with details turned up? Thanks for any help with this as I don't keep up with this style of game and haven't seen any laptop benchmarks.

What you've heard is true, the game is a beast. If he is stuck on a laptop, be better get a dual core for sure. I just upgraded my desktop from single to dual core, just in time for the FSX update to be released with support for DC, and it made a huge improvement. I can turn the quality settings up a lot more now and still keep playable framerates (~20 or so is fine for a flight sim). Keep in mind I'm still running an X600XT with 256m DDR1. I know there's laptops with faster video chips out there, even some with SLI. So, I would say get the fastest dual core with the fastest video chip he can afford, and he might come close. I doubt it'll play on any laptop (or desktop, for that matter) at totally maxed settings and still maintain great FPS any time soon, but maybe close. You don't have to play at max settings to get some great looking graphics though.