I just got a 8800 GTS and though I've admittedly little flying in FSX to this point and not done any tweaking to speak of, I found my experience so far with the 8800 seems to confirm much of this guy's findings:http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt26326.htmlBasically, I can't seem to find a way to get the 8800 to break a sweat. What settings can I use to utilize the 8800 for more eye candy without adding much CPU workload? (Unfortunately, the 8800 broke my upgrade budget for a while, so I'm going to have to stick with my A64 3800 for the forseeable future)Q about the DX10 patch: Since autogen objects seem to be a major driver of CPU workload, and DX10 is supposed remove the "small batch" problem that adds a lot of CPU overhead when using a large number of objects, it seems to stand to reason that when using the DX10 patch, if you didn't have any of the "bonus" gfx features that will be included with the patch, it should allow some of this CPU bottlenecking to be alleviated. I know its been stated that people shouldn't expect a preformance increase with the DX10 patch since the added efficiency will be used for new eyecandy instead. But if keeping the extra eyecandy out would allow for significant relief for my CPU, I'd love it if the DX10 has the option to turn off any of the extra eyecandy that will be available.

Well for one thing, which may be obvious, use the highest resolution your monitor will support, use 16x Antialiasing, and 16x anisotropic filtering. Avoid 16xQ antialiasing.

I think..he discovered something that ACES and other folks have been telling all along.The CPU determins FPS for the most part..not the Video card.The Video card determins the quality of the scenery rendering. How good it looks on the screen is what Video card and video memory is all about.Manny

As to the DX10 question, DX10 is said to transfer some of the CPU workload to the GPU, and thats in addition to removing some of the old API layers which in its self should mean more efficiency.

>As to the DX10 question, DX10 is said to transfer some of the>CPU workload to the GPU, and thats in addition to removing>some of the old API layers which in its self should mean more>efficiency. What you say seems about right to me wrt DX-10.I did notice that some guy's using older NVidia cards seem to lose about half of there FPS when using Vista. Is it the card or the drivers?With the 8800GTX i see no difference XP or Vista? Yet the drivers are still not up to snuff for the 8800 either.

There are a few games out there which show really poor performance, like 50%, but that kind of drop is isolated to specific titles from what I have seen, and its a driver issue. I have not seen any reports of performance being that low across the board, though Vista does typicially have lower performance across the board.

I know theoretically DX10 would be able to relieve some of the CPU workload. But I was asking more specifically about the implementation plans for FSX. I guess the crux of my question is: In FSX, how much of the CPU workload is dealing with 3D object initialization for various levels of autogen? If even at high levels of autogen, 3D object initialization doesn't rank high on the CPU workload, it is unlikely DX10 could provide much improvement. And actually, there is also the question of physics since DX10 now provides a geometery pipeline that is supposed to allow the card to accomplish physics-type processing that is now done on the CPU. So could ACES use this pipeline to offload some physics work from the CPU?But one of my fears based on what I've read so far is that ACES may indeed be able to reduce CPU load assosiated with 3D object overhead, and that they will also make use of the new geometry pipeline, but they will either bundle it with effects that can't be turned off (thus offsetting the FPS gains that would otherwise have been realized) or, in the case of the geometry pipeline, that they will use it only for new features and not to relieve CPU workload on existing physics-type calculations. But since it seems that ACES has not gotten very far in the DX10 patch development, probably they wouldn't even be able to answer these questions very well at this point.

>There are a few games out there which show really poor>performance, like 50%, but that kind of drop is isolated to>specific titles from what I have seen, and its a driver issue.> I have not seen any reports of performance being that low>across the board, though Vista does typicially have lower>performance across the board. Even if the graphics related work with the 8800's were taking a 50% hit, I'm not even sure that would affect FPS at all. I'm not convinced that I'm even using 50% of my card's power at this point.

With FSX it may be true you are only using 50% of the cards power, since the bottleneck is on the CPU. Even with most other games that are less CPU dependant than FSX I find my self CPU bottlenecked running at 1600x1200 16xAA/16xAF. I run everything at those settings and in nearly all cases performance hinges on my CPU.