FSX is broken...

[Geofa 108]

Screen-shots later tonight, after work.Maybe you need to calibrate your controller if you find ground handling too sensitive. Squealing brakes? If your using a joystick button try assigning the "half strength" brake key, if your using toe brakes on rudder pedals then try calibrating.Placement of autogen objects is not good, but the size and appearance of those objects is much better than FSX.Cartoony instruments, if so its just the artwork, try the BK117 or take a look at the CRJ200 previews and tell me how any FSX aircraft can possibly compare to that VC!Sure FSX might not be broken, but it aint going anywhere. FSX will be stuck in its 2006 rut forever. X-Plane is active development.And yes, X-Plane still feels far smoother than FSX to me! It's performance is better.

I've done all the calibrations etc. Previews are previews-and I have no interest in a crj200-but good luck!Enjoy xplane-I did too-also the sloped runways which haven't been mentioned. I use a sim to train for real though-just not useful to me right now.Waiting for improvements-lots of them. Hope 10 has it.

[MatthewS 761]

I've done all the calibrations etc. Previews are previews-and I have no interest in a crj200-but good luck!Enjoy xplane-I did too.Waiting for improvements-lots of them. Hope 10 has it.

Re calibrations, I'll try the Cessna later tonight and see how my setup fairs, I doubt though I'll get squealing brakes unless I nail the toe brakes to the floor.You think the CRJ200 previews are just "smoke and mirrors"? Those videos are taking in-sim! Nothing in FSX can compare to it. GA of similar quality will be coming soon. Then you can kiss your Carenados (etc) good bye. :( Its very apparent that Laminar Research have been adding features to X-Plane 9 to address its short comings compared to FSX in certain areas.Soon the X-Plane platform will surpass FSX is capabilities, because FSX is stagnant thanks to the death of ACES.

[tf51d 284]

And yet I find X-Plane superior in performance to FSX!

This is what I see at KLAX with the default Cessna's and no AI.X-PlaneFSX

[Geofa 108]

Re calibrations, I'll try the Cessna later tonight and see how my setup fairs, I doubt though I'll get squealing brakes unless I nail the toe brakes to the floor.You think the CRJ200 previews are just "smoke and mirrors"? Those videos are taking in-sim! Nothing in FSX can compare to it. GA of similar quality will be coming soon. Then you can kiss your Carenados (etc) good bye. :( Its very apparent that Laminar Research have been adding features to X-Plane 9 to address its short comings compared to FSX in certain areas.Soon the X-Plane platform will surpass FSX is capabilities, because FSX is stagnant thanks to the death of ACES.

I didn't say the crj200 is smoke and mirrors-you did-I said I have no interest..When a decent light twin for xplane appears I will have interest...still waiting but as I said I use the sim for training purposes. I don't expect to fly a crj200 but I do a multitude of light twins..FSX stagnent?-will xplane 10 be capable of 7 cm textures, or serious "missions" that serious flight schools will be using, or many of the other avenues of fsx/esp that are only beginning to be explored?I really hope you are right cause all I have ever been after is the best sim available at the time. I have never had a loyalty but to the best sim at the time...my record shows that. Right now it is fsx-for obvious reasons stated above.

[LAdamson 240]

- better sensation of movement through the air

I still don't like X-Planes "synthetic" movement in the air. It just doesn't feel right to me. My mind goes blank for filling in those special gaps which a desktop can't actually produce. I won't even give it as much credit as Geof does for the sense of flying. Five minutes is all I can usually stand. IMO, it's still just a fluid magic carpet ride.......... I guess.L.Adamson

[MatthewS 761]

I've attached a screenshot of the default Cessna flying around Naples (LIRN). You may notice the following:-* FPS is 50 and rock solid. No wildly fluctuating FPS or stutters* Airport ground and building textures and are crisp.* Airport buildings do not suddenly disappear at 10nm distance like in FSX* The textures on the mountains in the background are very sharp. No blurries in XP!* Distant mesh is never reduced in LOD unlike FSX, in otherwords mesh does not change shape before your eyes* 3D cockpit gauges are very very smooth and don't look "cartoony" to me at all* Scenery colours are quite natural looking unlike the "cartoony" palette used in FSX* Look how smoothly the visibility reduces in the distance. No hard lines on the horizon or around mountains like in FSX.* Look at the landuse on the mountains, no farms or cities clinging to the sides of those slopes!I've also attached a photo of the Tu444 at Innsbruck (LOWI) I took a few months ago. Notice how the rock faces on those mountains look! Which reminds me, Ben Supnik made an excellent blog post about how the default landclass is derived in XPlane. Basically they developed 1800 rules that determine land usage based on slope and environment. You'll never see farms draped over volcanos like you do in FSX. For XP10 they have new high res landuse data which when combined with their ruleset should produce very accurate default landclass.Cessna at NaplesTu444 at Innsbruck

[Geofa 108]

I've attached a screenshot of the default Cessna flying around Naples (LIRN). You may notice the following:-* FPS is 50 and rock solid. No wildly fluctuating FPS or stutters* Airport ground and building textures and are crisp.* Airport buildings do not suddenly disappear at 10nm distance like in FSX* The textures on the mountains in the background are very sharp. No blurries in XP!* Distant mesh is never reduced in LOD unlike FSX, in otherwords mesh does not change shape before your eyes* 3D cockpit gauges are very very smooth and don't look "cartoony" to me at all* Scenery colours are quite natural looking unlike the "cartoony" palette used in FSX* Look how smoothly the visibility reduces in the distance. No hard lines on the horizon or around mountains like in FSX.* Look at the landuse on the mountains, no farms or cities clinging to the sides of those slopes!I've also attached a photo of the Tu444 at Innsbruck (LOWI) I took a few months ago. Notice how the rock faces on those mountains look! Which reminds me, Ben Supnik made an excellent blog post about how the default landclass is derived in XPlane. Basically they developed 1800 rules that determine land usage based on slope and environment. You'll never see farms draped over volcanos like you do in FSX. For XP10 they have new high res landuse data which when combined with their ruleset should produce very accurate default landclass.Cessna at NaplesTu444 at Innsbruck

Have to say-your shots show exactly the texture problem. Look out the left window of your first shot-the ground looks like someone spilled paint accidentally. If you are a GA pilot and fly mostly below 10,000 ft. it certainly isn't sharp-in fact it looks a little alien. The shots I posted above show this clearly, and mine were taken at 800-1000 agl.As for the cockpit-it is all personal preference, but real instruments don't have that airbrushed neon look and even have glass reflections. I am a stickler for instrumentation looking like the real thing-since I spend many hours looking at it. Add on aircraft, and even some of the defualts for fsx certainly copy instruments down to the finest detail of looks and function-still largly missing in xplane. Want an stec 50 autopilot-it is in the default. Want a Century IV-it is in the Just Flight Duchess..and on and on. This kind of stuff is important for those who use the sim for a serious training platform.You are right-distant mesh is never reduced in xplane-but with the 25 mile maximum visibility is that really such a factor? The reason Fsx has reduced lod is because it allows up to unlimited visiblity and that is how performance is maintained. Xplane made the choice of giving a maximum visibility (and turning that down further if performance is effected). If you are trying to reproduce rw flying conditions, I'll take the reduced lod, but you are right-if you are happy with a permanent 25 miles visibility the distant scenery does look better in xplane.Land use on the mountains is pretty good in xplane and I think does look better than fsx-but probably more due to the default landclass being very poor and therefore not trying to put buildings that exist in the real world on the side of a mountain. Go to cities and urban areas in xplane and not only is the autogen placed poorly but the landclass is poor. Lakes and bodies of water are pretty crude compared to what you can see with the default fsx and especially some add ons. Compare the lakes and rivers in my shots above.In any case-getting back to this thread which is about performance of fsx vs. xplane and lack of add ins, I stand by my comments.Sure there are specific scenerios one can pick where xplane does better, and where fsx does better (and I didn't have the pause button on in my shots). Innsbruck has extra trouble taken with it in xplane-why it is the startup for the sim, and it looks very nice. But there is a whole world out there, beyond Innsbruck and the few add ins available for xplane at present.Right now that whole world and flight experience can be done better with fsx and its present add ins, and setting the sims to comparible rendering and settings fsx has better performance. I look forward to xplane 10, hope it can catch up, and hopefully exceed what fsx can do-but there is a lot in fsx that hasn't even started to be explored which still also has growth potential. Quite honestly, it worries me that there seems to be so much attention to the iphone as of late by the xplane developers. I am sure the market there is very lucrative, and I'd probably do the same if I was in that position. But that ulitmately has to get in the way of the catching up xplane needs to do, let alone surpassing.

[tf51d 284]

Yeah, fps is much different with X-Plane paused then active mode. If that is how you are measuring performance, then your method is flawed.ActivePaused

[Aerodynamic 0]

Geofa, for the record, it's ATI equipment/drivers that seem to not get along well with X-Plane. Nvidia is what you want to have. It has been mentioned in numerous places, plus I also had some issues with my 4870 and X-Plane. I jumped ship to a GTX260 (latest Win 7 64 bit driver) and no issues whatsoever with X-Plane 9.41. I firmly believe your driver is the problem. With a good processor and a decent Nvidia card, you should not be experiencing frame rates that low. Also, I notice in your shot that you have a large number of buildings (objects). Turn those down a bit and your frame rate will increase! As I said earlier, X-Plane renders a ridiculous amount of buildings - to the point where I find it visually silly. Put it on default or low and keep the trees/forests at populated. I think you'll be satisfied with the results. I run comparable settings in FSX with no AI and X-Plane is way smoother.As for blurry scenery, let's face it - there is no perfect solution now in any platform. I would prefer a "blotted paintbrush" look every so often as opposed to LOD rings and obvious tiling. Default to default, I feel X-Plane has the edge in ground scenery. I do wish X-Plane contained seasonal ground scenery, but the night textures look pretty darn good and make up for it in my view.Scott

[Geofa 108]

Geofa, for the record, it's ATI equipment/drivers that seem to not get along well with X-Plane. Nvidia is what you want to have. It has been mentioned in numerous places, plus I also had some issues with my 4870 and X-Plane. I jumped ship to a GTX260 (latest Win 7 64 bit driver) and no issues whatsoever with X-Plane 9.41. I firmly believe your driver is the problem. With a good processor and a decent Nvidia card, you should not be experiencing frame rates that low. Also, I notice in your shot that you have a large number of buildings (objects). Turn those down a bit and your frame rate will increase! As I said earlier, X-Plane renders a ridiculous amount of buildings - to the point where I find it visually silly. Put it on default or low and keep the trees/forests at populated. I think you'll be satisfied with the results. I run comparable settings in FSX with no AI and X-Plane is way smoother.As for blurry scenery, let's face it - there is no perfect solution now in any platform. I would prefer a "blotted paintbrush" look every so often as opposed to LOD rings and obvious tiling. Default to default, I feel X-Plane has the edge in ground scenery. I do wish X-Plane contained seasonal ground scenery, but the night textures look pretty darn good and make up for it in my view.Scott

The large number of buildings(actually the medium setting) was done to equal the same settings as fsx. The point keeps seeming to be missed. I can of course turn down settings in xplane and get better performance as I can with fsx. But running them with equivelent settings fsx wins out performance wise-whether they be low or high.As for blurry scenery-the point is less about the blurry scenery and the fact that xplane is rendering a lower resolution texture in compare to fsx. That helps performance..or should.As for the drivers-I've tried many as well as different cards. 6 months ago there were problems with nividia which caused crashes-I even sent reports to Ben. The newer betas seem much more stable.

[tf51d 284]

The large number of buildings(actually the medium setting) was done to equal the same settings as fsx. The point keeps seeming to be missed. I can of course turn down settings in xplane and get better performance as I can with fsx. But running them with equivelent settings fsx wins out performance wise-whether they be low or high.As for the drivers-I've tried many as well as different cards. 6 months ago there were problems with nividia which caused crashes-I even sent reports to Ben. The newer betas seem much more stable.

I haven't seen any issues with crashes on my system, so that may be card specific. I do use the latest drivers, and performance is anything but stellar in X-Plane with or without objects. I'd like to see some shots (unpaused) of X-Plane showing frame rate on a Windows system, to see if there is a problem or not. Maybe it's a setting(s) that need to be done to make it perform better. I have my AA set to 8S and AF to 16 in the driver just like I use in FSX and my other programs. I also tried turning them off in the driver and using the apps settings, with little difference.

[Aerodynamic 0]

The large number of buildings(actually the medium setting) was done to equal the same settings as fsx. The point keeps seeming to be missed. I can of course turn down settings in xplane and get better performance as I can with fsx. But running them with equivelent settings fsx wins out performance wise-whether they be low or high.As for blurry scenery-the point is less about the blurry scenery and the fact that xplane is rendering a lower resolution texture in compare to fsx. That helps performance..or should.As for the drivers-I've tried many as well as different cards. 6 months ago there were problems with nividia which caused crashes-I even sent reports to Ben. The newer betas seem much more stable.

It is not ideal to compare setting per setting because both sims render different things....well....differently. If you crank everything ALL the way up in X-Plane, it is as demanding as any application you can find. My point is that you don't need to crank everything up to encounter what FSX displays at high/ultra high settings. X-Plane's building and tree placement is overkill and can eat up your resources faster than Homer pounds Duff. I prefer setting my X-Plane rendering options to give me what I was used to in FSX and I am always between 40-60 fps - even at downloaded airports. (I have it set to not exceed the refresh of my monitor, thus I never get over 60 fps to avoid tearing. I never understood those bragging about over 100 fps since they really can't notice anything above 35! I digress. :( ) So yeah, my hardware is still a bottleneck in both sims if I crank things all the way up. I'm not here to bash FSX or praise X-Plane, make no mistake. Both will depress you about the money you spent on a new system. I've had to compromise in both!That said, I still prefer "compromising" in X-Plane . I don't have any complex addons yet - but I have read that X-Plane can really shine in handling these and that developers report not having too many problems keeping the eye candy up with great performance. I know you don't care for the upcoming CRJ project, but this will be a big test to see how successful X-Plane can become. I really love the CRJ series and am very much eager to fly that baby. If I can fly that thing around and still have 40-60 fps, I will be 100% convinced that X-Plane has a tremendous future and I will expect quite a bit of people to give it a try. More people = more development. :( Scott

[MatthewS 761]

I look forward to xplane 10, hope it can catch up, and hopefully exceed what fsx can do-but there is a lot in fsx that hasn't even started to be explored which still also has growth potential.

XP already exceeds FSX capabilities in many areas and so FSX will need to play catch up to XP but of course that can never happen because ACES no longer exists and FSX is stuck forever in its 2006 stasis. On the other hand XP can catch up where it needs to since XP is in active development.Additionally:-- Pausing makes no difference to the FPS on my machine, in both cases it was 50 fps.- The "blotchy" textures are where two different land classes are being merged. The default textures in XP are far superior to FSX.- Use FS2XP to convert FS9/FSX scenery to XPI find XP performance better than FSX when running comparable settings, plus as a bonus it doesn't look like a cartoon like FSX does (check out those FSX LAX pics posted earlier :()

[Aerodynamic 0]

I haven't seen any issues with crashes on my system, so that may be card specific. I do use the latest drivers, and performance is anything but stellar in X-Plane with or without objects. I'd like to see some shots (unpaused) of X-Plane showing frame rate on a Windows system, to see if there is a problem or not. Maybe it's a setting(s) that need to be done to make it perform better. I have my AA set to 8S and AF to 16 in the driver just like I use in FSX and my other programs. I also tried turning them off in the driver and using the apps settings, with little difference.

I still have a lot of family here for the holidays this week, but I will try to post some screen shots for you when I get the chance. I will also post a shot of my rendering options and include a basic listing of my hardware. I am working off a fresh install/upgrade to X-Plane 9.41, so I may not post pics with airport scenery yet. I need to download and convert some scenery and I'm not sure I will have the time for that this week with family and work.Scott

[Geofa 108]

It is not ideal to compare setting per setting because both sims render different things....well....differently. If you crank everything ALL the way up in X-Plane, it is as demanding as any application you can find. My point is that you don't need to crank everything up to encounter what FSX displays at high/ultra high settings. X-Plane's building and tree placement is overkill and can eat up your resources faster than Homer pounds Duff. I prefer setting my X-Plane rendering options to give me what I was used to in FSX and I am always between 40-60 fps - even at downloaded airports. (I have it set to not exceed the refresh of my monitor, thus I never get over 60 fps to avoid tearing. I never understood those bragging about over 100 fps since they really can't notice anything above 35! I digress. :( ) So yeah, my hardware is still a bottleneck in both sims if I crank things all the way up. I'm not here to bash FSX or praise X-Plane, make no mistake. Both with depress you about the money you spent on a new system. I've had to compromise in both!That said, I still prefer "compromising" in X-Plane . I don't have any complex addons yet - but I have read that X-Plane can really shine in handling these and that developers report not having too many problems keeping the eye candy up with great performance. I know you don't care for the upcoming CRJ project, but this will be a big test to see how successful X-Plane can become. I really love the CRJ series and am very much eager to fly that baby. If I can fly that thing around and still have 40-60 fps, I will be 100% convinced that X-Plane has a tremendous future and I will expect quite a bit of people to give it a try. More people = more development. :( Scott

If you notice the shots I presented-some were done with no autogen, some with a reasonable amount, with similar weather etc. In every scenerio not only did fsx outperform xplane performance wise (and visual wise imho)-but a lot more was going on in fsx (high res textures, ai traffic, atc, high res 3d cockpits to name a few) while at the same time giving better performance. So I think a compare is very valid.Now as to one's preference-that is another thing. There are many things xplane can do fsx can't, and many things fsx can do xplane can't-which is why I use them both.But the two mantras one often hears-the xplane flight models being better, and the xplane performance being better, are imho myths.The flight models are different-and there are some things the xplane fm does better than fsx and some things the fsx fm does better than xplane, and some things both neither do well (try a chandelle in each). The way one uses a sim will most likely determine which one is more appealing. Same goes for performance. Sure the sims do things differently, but the percieved superior performance in xplane is based mostly on it doing less. One can also tone down fsx to get similar performance, or tone up xplane to get similar performance as fsx.I am really rooting that the future will be great for xplane-and I hope the Crj is everything everyone hopes for. But in terms of catching up, not only the base product needs improvements to just get what we have now with fsx (detailed 3d cockpits and instruments, ai traffic, atc, worldwide airport buildings, approaches for every airport in the world to name just a few) but also needs a much greater add on base than 1 Crj. That is the difficulty for xplane-can you imagine the effort of just getting every approach for the world, or generic buildings which populate airports in realistic rw placings? ...and that is just to catch up to what we have had for some years now.