Well, after the AVSIM 2006 convention I have to say, FSX looks breathtaking. But,....we're all gonna need super-PCs to run it properly. I was taken aback how poorly it ran on most of the PCs at the convention except for a single VELOCITY PC where it ran smooth as butter in a beautiful PC box with deep blue fluorescent lighting. (A good VELOCITY PC costs anywhere from $4000 to $6000 and THEN you add stuff onto it to make it even better.)FSX is gonna come with many beautiful options but the display options (which are superb!) will prolly wreck my current FS PC which is already fairly well powered (3.80Ghz) but obviously rapidly getting out of date--and it's only 18 months old ! I would reckon from what I saw --with frames averaging 12 to 16 when running more or less OK and dropping often to 5-7 at airports and over cities--that we'll need heavy dual core PCs with a big PSU (550-650W?)and huge nVidia 7900 video cards of 256 or 512MB RAM. Seriously. I was just shocked at the FSX stutters I saw on most of the PCs at the convention. So were several of my longtime FS mates who attended.One thing I just don't know is whether the introduction of DX10 and VISTA will make things easier or better.I have a feeling FSX will have a lot of folks feeling disappointed in a somewhat similar fashion as when FS2000 came out and excited us all initially and mightily until we realized that our boxes just could not process it properly.Anybody else have views on this? Please share thoughts, etc.JS

FSX runs ok if you don't go crazy with the settings. Sure there is plently there for us to crank up as hardware progresses but for now its very much comparable to FS9 performance wise with the right settings. :)Check out my post in the screenshots forum:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...42828&mode=full

Great pix, yeah! But your system is medium high end and I bet a lot of folks don't have even that kinda rig so your frames are far superior to what many will achieve (including me!).JS

I was at the convention and noted that most of the FSX demo PCs were 3.5GHz P4 dual core, 4G RAM and either a 7900 GTX or ATI X1900 XTX video card. Frame rates were sometimes low (ie. 10-15fps), but for the most part the FSX experience was pretty darn good. Don't forget that all of these PCs were driving 24" widescreen monitors, which is much higher res and hence much greater impact on FPS that what the average Joe Blow will experience with their home rig. Overall, I was pretty impressed with what I saw for the amount of screenage these systems were trying to run FSX upon.The most surprising FSX performance low for me was with the Dell XPS notebooks they had there. While the FPS was quite reasonable, there were significant pauses when trying to pan around in external view, or switching views in general. These notebooks had a 2GHz core duo CPU, 2G RAM and a 7900 GTX video card. The main reason for my surprise was that I have run the FSX beta 3 on my "I am not worthy" Dell 9300 with 2.26GHz Pentium M, 1G RAM and 6800 go video card and actually experienced much better overall performance and no stutter at all. Must have been a driver issue I suspect.Gary

Are not the spex you outline pretty close to "Super-PC" status for most simmers ?Yes, drivers might have been partly responsible for poor performance. The DELL XPS notebooks are impressive machines indeed.I also observed that generally on these machines, the loading times were very long and slow, taking one to two minutes which I find unacceptably long. With the kind of PC h.p. you are talking about for the convention machines, surely you would expect FS to load in moments, no? JS

>But,....we're all gonna need super-PCs to run it properly.Where've you been over the past few months. ;)A supercomputer by today's desktop standards will be needed to run FSX at full sliders - this is done by design! This insures that when you and I eventually upgrade our computers in a year or two, FSX will continue to provide better looking graphics and performance.Never forget - the sliders are there for a reason. Simply reduce your visual details, and your performance will improve. Don't feel that you are "missing out" on anything, because nobody will be running full sliders (and enjoying it) when FSX releases. At equal perceived performance (frames and smoothness), FSX looks visually much better than FS2004... so you're still improving on your experience by going with FSX at lower sliders. Just think of the sliders as the program's potential, and that ALL the hardware has to catch up. :) >I have a feeling FSX will have a lot of folks feeling>disappointed in a somewhat similar fashion as when FS2000 came>out......and and FS5, FS5.1, FS98, and FS2002, and FS2004...If we've learned anything from the history of MSFS, it's that the simulator will be written and designed to perform at it's peak on hardware that is a step ahead of us. It's the age old debate - write for computers that exist today, or write for computers that will exist tomorrow... The ACES team writes for tomorrow, insuring that in the years between releases, the program can continue to grow and "improve" with the advances in hardware design. Had they written FSX for today's computers, you wouldn't see much better than FSX with lower sliders. The programmers at ACES aren't magicians - they can't pull more processor cycles from thin air to create their improvements - there will always be a hardware component to the question. :) I think this is partly why on the eve of EVERY MSFS release, there are lots of folks who are emphatic on NOT updating to the new version. Yes this often has a lot to do with addon compatability, but it also has to do with performance. People have FS2004 running full (or close to full) sliders and can't imagine running a simulator at any other level than full - even if FSX gives better image quality and improvements at the same perceived performance on lower sliders. There will be lots of folks disappointed, but I won't be feeling sorry. Those types who are stridently opposed to running anything less than full sliders just don't grasp the concept behind the programming goal. I for one appreciate the fact that ACES has programmed the sim to let me get IMPROVEMENTS to the visual world when I update computers, not just a simple kick in the FPS pants. There. I've rambled on it again. Back to the day job,-Greg

"A supercomputer by today's desktop standards will be needed to run FSX at full sliders - this is done by design! This insures that when you and I eventually upgrade our computers in a year or two, FSX will continue to provide better looking graphics and performance.True..and then two years hence...we would be looking forward to the FSXI that would work on PCs nicely two years thence.:)Manny

That's strange. I can hit my FPS cap of 24 in FSX Beta 3 fairly consistently, in dense areas like NYC, and I have a majority of the eye candy turned on, except that I have sparse autogen. My specs are as follows.AMD 64 3400+2 GB RAMNvidia GeForce 6800 GS w/ 256 MB RAMOf course, not many can run a maxed-out new version of FS right out of the box on their current rigs. Remember when FS9 was first released? I remember the threads from people complaining that the clouds killed their FPS, as well as autogen, and that the terrian was too blurry. How many threatened to stay with FS2002? Now that we've had 3 years for hardware to catch up with the capabilities of the engine, as well as the 3rd-Party community's contribution, people look at FS9 as some kind of flight-sim nirvana. Maybe we'd all be happy if they had just stopped at FS9?

By any chance do you have any AI package loaded on your system? I wonder what it would be like with something like Ultimate Traffic!

Not yet. I'm not confident enough yet to try and port over UT from FS9 to FSX. It will probably be an FPS hit, although FSX ships with a robust amount of the fake airline traffic, and there seems to be better performance over the same amount of traffic in FS9. I will definately be keeping FS9 on my system for some time, though. My hardware can deal with FSX, but once big scenery add-ons are released, I don't know what's gonna happen. :-)Oh yeah, I've noticed that turning off Light Bloom and turning down Autogen helped immensely with framerates. I gained 15 FPS when I turned off Light Bloom and turned down autogen to sparse with most sliders close to full. Water effects also affect frames, but not as much as the bloom.

I share your impressions, J.C. And am pretty impressed with the manner FSX performs on my moderate/average boxes. :-) IMHO, at least 2GBs of RAM is the most important detail with FSX on winXP. The second most important thing is a PixelShader2 display adapter with at least 256MB GPU RAM per 1280x resolution. Kind regards Jaap

It was stated by MS at the AVSIM conference that turning on either water detail with reflections or bloom, each cause the FS graphics engine to render the scene twice to generate the effect, with a resultant impact on frame rates. If your PC is not state of the art, you'll likely need to turn down or turn off these two features to get much better frame rates.Gary