Greetings everybody, This is my first official post on AVSIM, although I have read the excellent contributions of you all for years. I haven't seen anything on the forums that addressed these two questions, but if I missed a previous post that did, I apologize. My questions are these:1) Does anyone know what kind of hardware ACES ran/tested FSX on, and why can't we get our hands on it? Were they hooked up to some CRAYs or something? (I'm assuming that they were able to run the program reasonably well to attain publicity photos such as those on this site) http://www.avsim.com/pages/0106/FSX/fsx_thumbs.html2) I remember seeing that microsoft had 'certified' FSX on Dell XPS systems, and was wondering if anyone more experienced than I could tell me if this is paramount to lip-service endorsement of a manufacturer, or if there really is a performance advantage available to these systems.After browsing the forums for the past month or so, the opinion seems to be (and I'm generalizing here, I realize there may be dissenting opinions..) that NO ONE can run FSX to its FULL potential at acceptable/playable framerates. ("acceptable" to me means nothing less than 20 FPS). If this is truly the case, I can't help but wonder how the dev's ran this thing themselves. I am looking to buy/build a new gaming setup and anything up to 10k price is acceptable for my situation. However, from reading posts in this topic, it seems with no true multicore support or SLi, I would be just as well off with a 2k system. I know very little about the game dev. process, and if anyone can help me gain some insight into these questions, I would greatly appreciate it.Happy flying to all.-Josh

Hi Josh..I was one of those whp screamed about poor performance right at the beginning.. and it sill is a dog. However, I have managed it to have a decent FSX setup without much compromizi on the quality. The only open issue I have is... how bad it would be if I purchase a detailed airport scenery (there hasn't been a really good airport scenery so far). I also have the FS9 ultimate Traffic running at 50%.1. I have a Core 2 Duo E6600 OCed to 3.4 and the 8800 Graphics card with 2 Gigs RAM2. I have almost all the sliders to the right with the following exception.a. I have theautogen and the complexity down 1 notch from the extreme right. b. I either choose FPS Unlimited (it gives extrea FPS at the expense of blurries) or Bloom (for night flying).c. water is set at 2 Low. )(this gives me the new FSX water but without the shadows of the clouds and coast)And I get a decent FPS of around 30FPS. except around very big cities. I also found that photo sceneries like Megasceneries help FPS a lot. I have also got bored/tired of the full autogens of FSX. Almost all cities around the whole world...look the same, I have also started using FS9 photosceneries that i have over to FSX which works fine..and thery are FPS friendly.Manny

Nobody is running FSX to it's "Full potential" because that would mean we would be running it under DX10.None of us are running it under DX10.Actually the question you ask (what did devs make FSX on) was brought up in the past. The answer was, nothing out-of-the-ordinary. Just solid systems from that time (late 05-through 06). P4's at 3.0-3.6 ghz, nothing fancy.Don't spend $10,000 on a rig for FSX. Look at the specs of my system, in my signature. That inexpensive hardware runs FSX amazingly well, but not all sliders right...put that out of your mind. No comp can do that right now.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

aggie - see what service pack 1 does for fsx. i hear it helps run the program "much better" that's from an aces guy we'll seei'm waiting to buy my new machine too i'm stuck with a mac right now so i'm monitoring the progress of the fixes but i might wait until amd comes out with their new 65 nm processors this summer i am hoping that, along with the service pack(s), amd's 65nm's will do the trick for frame rates, with dx10 support adding the finishing touch-just my thought process at this time

In early September, ACES was demonstrating FSX to AVSIM Conference attendees using exactly the type of hardware Mace describes: midrange Pentiums with CPU speeds in the low to mid 3 GHz range. It ran very nicely. FSX was never intended to run with all sliders "maxed out" at the time it was released -- in fact, when you first install FSX the setup process adjusts sliders based on an individual user's machine. When I bought FSX on the day of its release, it also ran just fine on my PC right out of the box -- except for the most highly-detailed cities such as Seattle and Tokyo. What I can't figure out is why so many people don't seem to understand the concept of sliders. ACES clearly designed FSX to have some room for growth to accommodate hardware improvements over time. As has already been pointed out, there is NO computer which is currently capable of running FSX with everything maxed out. Would people actually prefer that ACES had released a "dumbed down" version of FSX, with no headroom for growth??? This seems illogical to me. I just don't get why people seem to have so much difficulty with ACES' design concept regarding sliders, because their strategy makes perfect sense. Regarding your statements about multicore and SLi: There IS "true multicore support" in FSX. It's been shown repeatedly that FSX will use about 30% of the capacity of a second core. While there may not be "full" multicore support in FSX, I think the jury's out as to whether that's ever going to happen, or whether it would even improve overall performance much. (Higher CPU clock speeds are likely to be far more beneficial.) As to SLi, it's not supported for a very simple reason: SLi technology is incompatible with the multi-monitor displays that many flightsimmers have come to love. ACES had to choose between SLi and multi-monitors, and they decided to continue supporting multiple monitors. I don't think it's hard to understand why, given how many users love this type of setup, plus the fact that FSX is more CPU-bound than VPU-bound. You can't blame ACES for the limitations of SLi's basic design! As with all its MSFS predecessors, FSX benefits the most from higher CPU clock speeds. I'm holding out high hopes for the clock speeds that are predicted with Intel's new line of 45 nm "Penryn" CPUs, due out in a few months. If we can get a bit better performance from SP1, and faster clock speeds in the 5 GHz range from "Penryn," then it seems likely that performance issues will be dramatically reduced. People seem to forget that this is almost EXACTLY what happened with our much-beloved FS9 when it was first released! DX10, with its capability to offload tasks from the CPU, may be icing on the cake, but nobody really knows yet.

That was never the issue. The issue is that, `dumbed down` to near-equivalent settings as a hevily-modifed and tarted-up FS9, the frame rates were/are nowhere near similar.Its a simple enough experiment. Go somewhere reasonably complicated and default in FSX that you have complex addons for in FS9, and set the settings in FSX to approximate those you have in FS9 - 5m resolution, autogen at sparse (which is supposed to be the equivalent of the highest level in FS9), same mesh setting, etc, etc. Check the fps meter. Mine are 12 v. 28. Res Ipsa Loqitur.And then wonder how the supposed 20% increase in frames post-SP1 patch is supposed to provide enough overheads for the complex scenery and addons mentioned above? It just won't be enough to increase fps from 12fps to 15fps. It needs a near doubling of fps just to retain parity with a heavily addon-filled FS9. And no way a patch is going to be able to deliver that.ACES also appear to be about to drop the ball on the backward compatibility promise that is made on the box and all over the web, and in the runup to release and I won't be the only one who finds the evasive excuses from Phil Taylor passing the buck to the aftermarket developers more than a little distasteful. Rivers filled with rocks in city centres is not what I signed up for. Allcott

These are all some good points, and since I clearly have not tried the simulator myself, my observations will be pure speculation, so please excuse me if I make a false assumption:I

Well, I can't speak for the rest of the team (I work out of my house on the East Coast, so don't see everyone elses machines everyday :-> ), but in the beginning of FSX development, I was using a P4 2.4Ghz Laptop and a Xeon 3.0Ghz desktop machine (Dell Precision). Eventually I built myself a couple of new machines, mostly to increase my build speed (a full build of the entire product was taking over an hour, very annoying if I had to change one of the header files that's included by everybody else :-> ) and upgraded to Pentium D 3.2 Ghz machines with 4GB Ram (build speeds went down to about 20 Minutes for a full build).

>Well, I can't speak for the rest of the team (I work out of>my house on the East Coast, so don't see everyone elses>machines everyday :-> ), but in the beginning of FSX>development, I was using a P4 2.4Ghz Laptop and a Xeon 3.0Ghz>desktop machine (Dell Precision). Eventually I built myself a>couple of new machines, mostly to increase my build speed (a>full build of the entire product was taking over an hour, very>annoying if I had to change one of the header files that's>included by everybody else :-> ) and upgraded to Pentium D 3.2>Ghz machines with 4GB Ram (build speeds went down to about 20>Minutes for a full build).>>Just out of curiosity, what did a build consist of? was it 'just' FSX.exe?

<A full build includes the .EXE, all of the .DLLs, the .SPBs, the .XZPs, plus the first pass of our build environ generates a lot of header files and whatnot from other data files that later build passes use, so its a lot more than just the .EXE :->. A build doesn't include generating scenery files, aircraft gauge .CAB files, etc (we have a special build machine that generates those and checks in the output to our source control system, and then we just sync against those).Tim

Im sorry, but this thing about ACES building FSX to have "room for growth" makes absolutely no sense to me at all. It sounds more like a sloppy excuse for the fact their game was rushed out the door before it was finished. Here is my basic line of reasoning as to why this method of developing FSX to have room for growth on future hardware makes no sense. YOU RELEASE A NEW FLIGHT SIMULATOR EVERY TWO TO THREE YEARS FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!!! Why on earth would you want to build a game today that is designed to be ran on future hardware that will be available about the same time you release your upgraded version of the same game? This excuse would be totally acceptable if you released a new flight simulator every 5 years or more. But I think we can manage to do without all the flashy new hardware benefits that may come out in the next two to three years before you are able to get the next version of Flight Simulator released.Here is the release dates for the last four Microsoft Flight Sims:MSFS 2000 - October, 1999MSFS 2002 - October, 2001Century of Flight - August, 2003FSX - October, 2006The longest gap between any of the simulators was the three year gap between "Century of Flight" and "FSX", and this was only a three year gap. Why would you develop a game to have room for growth when you are going to be releasing an entirely new and updated version of that game in a few years. This makes absolutely no sense.They should focus on building there current game to be played on currently available hardware. You can worry about giving the game "room for growth on future hardware" when you develop the next version of the game in 2 - 3 years. This business practice does nothing but create havoc in the flight sim community. We all get mad because we can't run the latest version of the flight simulator at an advertised performance level on our current PC's. Then, about the time we finally get to a point where we are able to run the most recent version of FS on our upgraded systems, MS announces the next game in the series, and the cycle starts all over again when they release that next title. We are always chasing our tails it seems. In fact, many simmers have already figured out that there is no need to even think about upgrading to the newest MS flight simulator until it has been out for a year or more, and are happy enough staying with the version they currently have running. Build today for today, and then build tomorrow for tomorrow. Simple as that.I have decided to completely sack any plans for building a new Vista/DX10 capable PC until late this year or early next. It makes no sense to build a Vista/DX10 capable machine today if all you need it for is gaming. There are no DX10 games available (and probably won't be until 2008), and now we are finding out FSX won't even be DX10 capable for several more months either (I won't be surprised if that update fix won't be out until 2008 either). I don't even have FSX installed right now. We can only hope Microsoft decides not to build the next version of this genre for at least another 6 to 8 years so we can avoid these train wrecks until then.I have to agree with Josh. This latest stunt on releasing this game in its current condition, then telling us it will be months before they release a patch to improve performance by about 20% when it needs improved by about 50%, and then putting the icing on the cake and telling us it will be even more months before we will get a DX10 patch is just not acceptable. It stuff like this that gives the entire PC Gaming industry a black eye. I love Microsoft Flight Simulator, and I appreciate the work ACES puts into it, but something went terribly wrong in releasing FSX its current state.

What would be nice is Aces could possibly answer this thread so that we can all go back to sleep waiting for the patch, the patch, the patch? ;-) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Look into my eyes, not around my eyse, into my eyes, you are going into a deep sleep brought on by waiting for SP1, either that or those transatlantic flights in the Queen do get a bit boring during the middle bit.!!:-wink2 :-sun1

Oh ####, #### and ####, I'v spelt 'eyes' wrong. Oh well, u know what I mean.