Here's a thought related to this thread.FSX has legacy capacity to accomodate old hardware (the Shader model 1 water for instance).Keeping the software compatible with older hardware takes time and effort, making development slower and potentially limited, e.g, they couldn't make a truely DX9-only version of FSX as that would alienate people with older DX8 cards. But since DX9 is a version of the older DXs, one can make a backwards-compatible piece if software 'reatively' easily.However, once you move to DX10, there is a radical departure from DX9 coding. Having to write a DX10 program, and get it to work with DX9 will be a real pain (although DX10 cards will be able to handle DX9 code, for a while).So my prediction is that FS 11, will be a completely DX10 (or varient at the time) bit of code. If you've been sitting on your DX9 card for the intervening years, you'll have to get rid of it. But it will provide the impetus to really utilise all od DX10s features, so FS 11 should be absolutely amazing eye-candy.Now we just have to wait for a few more years. I suppose I'll just fiddle with FSX while waiting :)

>Yes. You may utilize the second core a little bit more than>it is now, but do you really think simconnect application>would take advantage of a 3rd or 4th core? I don't think so! >And, for the first time since I remember, there are no higher>speed processors in the road map for the next 6 month! (only>quad cores). After that we may get the 2-5 percent spreed>increases that we saw in the last 3 years. (I bought my 3.4>ghz intel system 3 years ago!! I would have imagined that,>by now, my system would have been considered a dinasour!)I do believe that separate applications (i.e. AS6 or FSFK) will indeed take advantage of more cores. And since SimConnect is ASYNCHRONOUS, any add-on that is written to take advantage of that fact will in fact either be, or contain components that are, separate applications.Example. Today I have a P4 3.2 HT, and I run FS9, FSRealTime, and FS Flight keeper on my main pc. I run ActiveSky and JeppView FlightDeck on my tablet via wideFS. I also run Squawkbox as a module on my main PC.My Main PC sees all the windows services and junk as multiple threads and balances them across the two virtual CPUs.I start FS9, and it immediately hogs one virtual CPU (vCPU 0). I notice more of the Windows services that can switch processors end up running on vCPU 1. I launch FSRealtime and it executes mainly on vCPU 1. Same for FlightKeeper. When I launch the squawkbox from the modules menu, it runs on vCPU 0.A new simconnect client is NOT a module/dll, and it will behave just like FSRealTime and Flightkeeper. More cores (generally) mean more simultaneous threads. As long as the other apps are processor intensive, don't need lots of video or IO bandwidth, they should run practically "silently" on the free cores.

If the figures I have seen quoted for the 1st generation DX10 card power consumption requirements are anything like true I don't think many of us will have a power supply or case/cooling that will cope. This might be a bigger upgrade than simply putting a DX10 card in an existing computer. 275 watts - wow!Hopefully the 2nd generation cards will be much better but I guess we are now talking late 2007. We might all have that DX9 card longer than we expect.Chris

There is an awful lot of texture data that has to get pushed through in FSX. So I would imagine both the speed and amount of MB's you have (more is better) on the video card will be important. I was kinda disappointed running even moderate settings on some of the high end machines MS had set up at the conference. I experienced a lot of textures fading into the serious blurries due to lack of textures being pushed through. Maybe it just needed more tweaking.

>no you don't. If you've got your XP keys and CD, you can call>MS and have your old install deactivated and install on new>MB.Not any longer, at least not if you are running an OEM XP, as most folks are who build their own systems. MS changed the rules a few months ago, and a new motherboard is now regarded as a new machine. Has caused lots of, errr, discussion on the hardware boards.As hardware prices fall, the OS is becomming one of the most expensive components :)--Bryn

Hello Folks out there it was a big hit seeing Microsoft at the conference, and I heard just about everything they said, I also heard alot of things they did not say, did anyone here them say that they wanted the game to run out of the box at least twenty frames per second on a fast machine, I then pulled him aside (his named I believe was Scott that worked for Microsoft) and asked him is that with add-ons or without, he said without.So in my opinion with the new powerful FSX, and Vista coming out and the new cards, im still in the same spot im in with FS9, with all the add-ons, my frame rate will still be low(average with all add-ons 12 frames per second).Yes I know there are alot of tweaks out there to get higher frame rates and I use them all.So know from what I was told from Microsoft is yes to get the full effect of FSX you will need Vista, and a fast machine.I don

>I don

I don't think card makers use FS to showcase their cards, simply because FS up until now has been so CPU bound and it wouldn't really show anything of significance. FSX appears to be the first in the series where the video card gets more of the performance action, so perhaps card makers, and review sites, may use this title for GPU comparisons in future.Gary

As above, FS has never been that demanding a graphical application. The vast majority of processing is done by the CPU. Which is why so many still run on cards that are several years old.It's a relatively simple rendering engine compared to something like that used in a modern FPS for example.