Beyond doing a complete overkill... what are the "bare-minimum" system specs recquired for FSX to run smoothly (50+ FPS) at maximum graphical settings, I plan on building my new PC to those specs.I know a lot of guys are going to say 4 ghz this... 1 gb that... if thats the BARE minimum I'll take it, but I want to primarily hear some feedback about current systems that are achieving those rates.

"what are the "bare-minimum" system specs recquired for FSX to run smoothly (50+ FPS) at maximum graphical settings,"Not sure that hardware exists just yet.....Kidding...I dont know myself...I think your talking pretty high end stuff though...I hope to get a copy of FSX ASAP after the 17th...I'm looking forward to seeing how my rig handels it??Have Fun!!

See the rig in my sig? It does not run FSX at 50+ FPS at maximal graphics settings. It doesn't even get half way. In fact in major cities it barely gets 1/4 of the way. You have a wait on your hands for hardware to catch up I think :-)Gary

I have a feeling if THAT (impressive) system can't get 1/4 of the way there it sounds like FSX needs (in order to run impressivley) Windows Vista.

Why do people think Vista will improve FSX performance?Maybe it's just me, but I think you'll find that FSX has been built for XP and DX9 and the performance issues are no different to any other FS release. Accept that you can't run it maxed out from the start, upgrade the hardware and watch for the tweaks and most of all enjoy it for what it is!

it doesn't need Vista. It needs to be completely rewritten to take advantage of the current technology.Doug

Oh get real Doug. Everyone has an opinion, but lets face it a rewrite won't happen to FSX so there's little point in suggesting it. Don't get me wrong, a rewrite would be pretty cool for add-on developers, though I suspect that users would get fed up with having to scrap all their add-ons and repurchase every few years.Also, with so much time having to be spent on recreating previous releases, there'd be fewer overall releases.I'm sure that once Vista is released, and then DX10 appears, and then DX10 GPU's creep out, and Aces produce a DX10 version of FSX, we'll see some new features and maybe some performance improvements too.I guess they could have just sat on FSX till next summer to make it a full DX10/Vista release; this is the real world and people need to earn a living.But that's all irrelevant; buy FSX, set it up to work with the system you have, buy a new PC, look out for user tweaks. Sounds like all other FS releases to me. I mean look at the fuss when FS9 came out and then look at what current PC's do with it!I've said all that and even though my new pC was finished over a week ago and FSX has been sitting there for even longer, I've not even installed it yet!!!Dreamfleet Project ManagerGreatest Airliners - DC-8Greatest Airliners - 727 Whisperjethttp://www.dreamfleet2000.com/gfx/images/F...BANNER_PAUL.jpg

Why do I think it needs Vista?Probably because Microsoft stated it was designing the utlimate release (from my understanding there is to be a patch of this release to the full Vista 64-bit release) as a game optimized to run on Vista, give the fact it's a 64-bit game currently tweaked to run on 32-bit hardware.Right?

I agree... I'm still tweaking but the available consumer level hardware to run FSX maxed just isn't there yet.Hoping DX10 will make a difference...