>So you don't think these two panels are comparable in quality?No, I don't, especially when viewed in full resolution on a good monitor in real time.Look, for example, at the gear handle on both pix. The one on top looks like a gear handle, The one on the bottom (the VC) looks like a tinker-toy. Look at the odd appearance of the elongated FMS boxes in the VC view...looks much better in 2D on my other monitor (as does the Radar Contact or other dialogue windows). The ASI and RMI both have that skewed-off painted on the face of a warped surface look. Like I have been saying...looks like a cartoon to me...great if your into Anime.And that's just the static shot. Never have I seen a VC that's as fluid as its 2D counterpart. Some VCs are fluid enough to use, but the 2D is virtually always better.RegardsBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VSantiago de Chile

>And that's just the static shot. Never have I seen a VC>that's as fluid as its 2D counterpart. Some VCs are fluid>enough to use, but the 2D is virtually always better.Hi Bob,actually RealAir VC's are much better than any 2D panel I know, even framerate-wise, as well.Though, if we talk about heavies, I still find 2D panels more usable and smooth than any VC I've seen. We'll see if Airliner XP is going to change that.For the rest, I agree with you: for the immersion of flying, a bigger monitor "real-estate" is certainly better than any VC.Marco

I'm consideer myself a hardcore simmer which been flying since FS98.FSX is not for hardcore sim flyers, its been mostly developed for VFR flyers who want to see a lot of useless eye candy.It should of been made for Xbox instead of PC platform and calling itself a simulator. When FS9 was released, I imediatlly saw the improvements over FS 2002 as a simulator and the direction 3rd party developers were able to take to an even better simulator, FS 2002 was off my machine in about 2 months. And I never looked back.After installing FSX and seeing hardly no improvments as a simulator,but a great visual game that's not compadible with todays hardware.FSX now collects dust on another drive and I'm back to FS9. Hoping that the next edition will show great improvments in the hobby of flight simulation and leave the games to PS2 and Xbox.Bill M

FSX looks great in 2D still shots at least. It's great if you want a flight simulator slide show :)And I agree going from 2002 to 2004 was a great improvement and at least at that time if you had an old machine, and you wanted to by a new computer for the 2004 upgrade, they actually had computers ou there that could do the work 2004 required. But in the case of FSX this does not seam to be the case.It's really a blunder on Microsoft's part if they were hoping to impress the true flight simmers out there?I consider FSX a downgrade. I have read that some say "it's before it's time" but this doesnt make sence if you can not run it well with a modest to upper-end machine. A rock band or automobile can be "before it's time", you can still listen to it on a cd player, or drive it on the road, respectively. But it's stupid to say a software application is before it's time if you can not run it on a computer very well. By the time the hardware catches up with FSX, we'll all be looking at the adds for FSXI!:-outta

Each to their own I suppose - the tinker toy is in the eye of the beholder! I do agree that you need spare horsepower to run VC over 2D, but although my new rig is not fast enough to run FSX at any high pleasure levels, it is certainly fast enough to take the overhead of a complex FS9 VC in its stride.One outgoing thought as I now bow out of this off original topic discussion is that the VC works very well with spanned displays. It will please you greatly that I oft have an undocked 2D view of the FMC on a blank area of the screen, as I am regularly mashing said item's buttons to make some sort of semblence of navigational accuracy. Who'd have thought VC and 2D could happily coexist in such a manner ;-)http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/166374.jpgGary

I'm running FSX on a P4 3.2 Northwood, 3 GBs memory and a Radeon 9800pro (older card). To me, it flys much better than FS9, but I have autogen turned off, ship and road traffic turned off, airport traffic down to minimal, AI aircraft at 100%, 2m/38m mesh and running at 1024x768. It doesn't look as good as FS9 which I'm running at 1600x1200 with everything maxxed and a lot of add-ons, but the aircraft fly as good or better, I get decent frame rates and a good flight, just not the eye-candy. It's a trade-off right now. I imagine in a year or so on a new system, I'll get the eye-candy to go with it.BTW, what system are you considering going to 3GB? For many good discussions on memory (as well as other hardware), you really need to check out HardOCP's forums at http://www.hardforum.com . It's one of the best forums when it comes to hardware.