[louisv]

I was talking to some CAE engineers (by far the largest company in the field) and they said the difference is you are in a real cockpit that moves, with real instruments, a true panoramic view, and that costs millions all by itself.

The cockpit is bought from the manufacturer of the aircraft...a cousin of mine is an engineer there and he went to buy a A380 cockpit in Toulouse for CAE's A380 simulator...

The computing power is less than some workstations since they don't upgrade everything all the time. And the software is still mostly 'cheat sheet', table based...no real inertial calculations...To be fair that was 5 years ago, but still the differences are less than you might think, other than the physical cockpit of course. The graphics, while updated all the time are not that great but they are full surround !

Louisv

PS: "Real Flight Simulator" is a repackaging of a free software: by today's standard it's a piece of crap. Enough said.