Can XP10 look like this?

[Geofa 108]

I actually hope XP10 doesn't look like wings of prey. I hate their green/yellow tint added for effect. It's lame imho. The texture res is actually less than FSX's (and I think current XP's) but the game looks nice because the tightly packed buildings and trees, as far as scenery goes. Yeah there are some neat damage effects. But all in all the flight modeling, interior and exterior graphics isn't anything too different from FSX or XP. Anyway, from what I've played in the demo, wings of prey seems to be pretty fun.What I'd love to see from XP10 is added ATC and better representations of stock airports, plus AI traffic.

I agree Ryan. Wings of Prey is really fun-but I feel like I am flying over a Van Gogh painting-both land and clouds and agree about the fm's, interior and exterior graphics. It is great for what it does.

[MatthewS 761]

I agree Ryan. Wings of Prey is really fun-but I feel like I am flying over a Van Gogh painting-both land and clouds and agree about the fm's, interior and exterior graphics. It is great for what it does.

The Dover mission in demo lets you start from airfield, and once all the enemy planes are destroyed you get a secondary mission of landing back at the base. Presumably its the same full version.Re green tint and increasing visibility they are in the forums as upcoming fixes :-http://forum.yuplay.com/index.php?showtopic=515http://forum.yuplay.com/index.php?showtopic=775

[Guest djt01]

Evidently this technology offloads work previously done in the CPU to the GPU! So that means FSX is no longer CPU bound, when used with these cards (ATI HD 5000 series).

WOW, so you mean that new hardware magically

[tf51d 284]

WOW, so you mean that new hardware magically “offloads work previously done on the CPU to the GPU” without any changes to the core of the program or the game engine, amazing!The stories in here get wilder and wilder by the day, lol.

Well then how do you explain the massive shift in performance stated in this review at this high a resolution? Here's a quote from Phil Taylor's post"EyeFinity is enough to cause FSX to, finally, have GPU-limited features. 5970 shows some advantage in 5760x1200 mode, HardOCP feels EyeFinity is way cool." If the CPU was still doing the same rendering it does normally, there wouldn't be that kind of performance boost. When was the last time you saw avg frame rates in the mid 40's over Seattle with high settings, traffic, and that high of resolution in FSX?

[Geofa 108]

The Dover mission in demo lets you start from airfield, and once all the enemy planes are destroyed you get a secondary mission of landing back at the base. Presumably its the same full version.Re green tint and increasing visibility they are in the forums as upcoming fixes :-http://forum.yuplay.com/index.php?showtopic=515http://forum.yuplay.com/index.php?showtopic=775

That is the only mission from what I can tell that lets you takeoff (other than 1 training)-and as far as landing at the base-at least for me more planes showed up-after being destroyed the mission ended. I suspect Dover may be the only airfied, and the reason for no free flight is that the areas rendered are so small. As for the dated 2006 engine-did you read Phil Taylor's post? The reviewers stated "out of all the apps reviewed, which include Crysis, GTA4, Need for Speed, Dirt 2 and Left 4 Dead 2, FSX is the second best performing game, only Left for Dead 2 is better perfoming. "hmmm...

[Guest djt01]

Well then how do you explain the massive shift in performance stated in this review at this high a resolution? Here's a quote from Phil Taylor's post"EyeFinity is enough to cause FSX to, finally, have GPU-limited features. 5970 shows some advantage in 5760x1200 mode, HardOCP feels EyeFinity is way cool." If the CPU was still doing the same rendering it does normally, there wouldn't be that kind of performance boost. When was the last time you saw avg frame rates in the mid 40's over Seattle with high settings, traffic, and that high of resolution in FSX?

What massive shift in performance?How has high resolution ever impacted performance on CPU bound games with high end graphics cards? ASUS Rampage II Extreme (1639 BIOS) Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition w/Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme 1366 RTMushkin Redline Ascent 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) (6-7-6-18-1N)Asus/ATI 5870 (Catalyst 9.12)Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1tyWD VelociRaptor 150GB

[gman! 1]

Well then how do you explain the massive shift in performance stated in this review at this high a resolution? Here's a quote from Phil Taylor's post"EyeFinity is enough to cause FSX to, finally, have GPU-limited features. 5970 shows some advantage in 5760x1200 mode, HardOCP feels EyeFinity is way cool." If the CPU was still doing the same rendering it does normally, there wouldn't be that kind of performance boost. When was the last time you saw avg frame rates in the mid 40's over Seattle with high settings, traffic, and that high of resolution in FSX?

The only GPU limitations in FSX are the ones that require shaders, and 2 pass rendering/shading, such as water rendering, bloom, reflections, etc. The reason why they gained performance is NOT because the game suddenly became GPU bound all of a sudden. If your a programmer, you would know that it would take patches and new coding to change ANY low-level features at all. All that happened was there was a GPU, which is many times more powerful than its last generation predecessor with better drivers (everything has to pass through the CPU first before it goes to the GPU, on any game, any application, any OS... ), which decreases CPU load due to better driver coding making rendering faster and more efficient, thus increasing FPS. Also because FSX is always said to be "cpu-bound" it does not mean every single thing is dependent on the CPU. Water, Autogen, Bump Mapping, Specular Mapping, Reflections (exp. rain) are features that have all been rendered on the GPU from the start of FSX, and even on FS9, these features are why you cannot have a Core i7 @ 4GHz, but use a Nvidia 8200, or HD 3200 and get the same FPS as a 8800GTX or HD2900 or higher. Also the autogen and all the polygons are stored in the GPUs memory to be rendered, and then the ROP (Raster OPeration Unit or Render Back-End Unit) renders the scene and handles texturing in conjunction with the Texture Unit (If you want proof compare the texture fill rate benchmarks of different generation GPUs). The 8800 GTX has 24 ROPs, the Radeon HD 2900: 16 ROPs, the GTX 280 28 ROPs, and the 5870 has 32 ROPs. All this contributes to FPS, and these are all GPU dependent features that have been part of the "new" shader model 2.0 features added to FSX, shader functions cannot be performed on the CPU through DirectX, and I doubt it can through OpenGL either. When power doubles, triples, quadruples, etc with each generation, the FPS increases. Also keep in mind that the HD2900 and 3870 had 320 Stream Processors while the 5890 has 1,600 stream processors if I remember correctly. These stream processors perform vertex, geometry (DX10 only), and pixel shading and with each generation the frequency and with new architectures the efficiency (thus increasing performance, even if they are @ the same frequency of a last gen card) increases in general, making shader operations and rendering overall, much much faster, increasing the speed the frames reach your screen, and in conclusion causing more frames to be rendered per second (FPS). In the benchmark that HardOP performened the turned many features up to Ultra High, in addition to weather, and the biggest factor bloom. Bloom is basically HDR, and HDR is soley performed on the GPU (to prove this try turning on AA and HDR on any Geforce 7 series card... it doesn't work because the card cannot do it). Bloom also requires a tremendous amount of shader power and with the increase of shaders and the increase in shear power (the 3870 did 496 GIGAflops, the 4870 - 1.7 TERAflops or 1,680 GIGAflops, and the 5870 - 2.7 TERAflops or 2,720 GIGAflops) makes all these shading, and GPU dependent operations (which have been there from the start of FSX like I said, nothing in the base code has changed for the last 2 or 3 years) perform a lot faster, increasing FPS with these ridiculously powerful cards we have today.

[tf51d 284]

The only GPU limitations in FSX are the ones that require shaders, and 2 pass rendering/shading, such as water rendering, bloom, reflections, etc. The reason why they gained performance is NOT because the game suddenly became GPU bound all of a sudden. If your a programmer, you would know that it would take patches and new coding to change ANY low-level features at all. All that happened was there was a GPU, which is many times more powerful than its last generation predecessor with better drivers (everything has to pass through the CPU first before it goes to the GPU, on any game, any application, any OS... ), which decreases CPU load due to better driver coding making rendering faster and more efficient, thus increasing FPS. Also because FSX is always said to be "cpu-bound" it does not mean every single thing is dependent on the CPU. Water, Autogen, Bump Mapping, Specular Mapping, Reflections (exp. rain) are features that have all been rendered on the GPU from the start of FSX, and even on FS9, these features are why you cannot have a Core i7 @ 4GHz, but use a Nvidia 8200, or HD 3200 and get the same FPS as a 8800GTX or HD2900 or higher. Also the autogen and all the polygons are stored in the GPUs memory to be rendered, and then the ROP (Raster OPeration Unit or Render Back-End Unit) renders the scene and handles texturing in conjunction with the Texture Unit (If you want proof compare the texture fill rate benchmarks of different generation GPUs). The 8800 GTX has 24 ROPs, the Radeon HD 2900: 16 ROPs, the GTX 280 28 ROPs, and the 5870 has 32 ROPs. All this contributes to FPS, and these are all GPU dependent features that have been part of the "new" shader model 2.0 features added to FSX, shader functions cannot be performed on the CPU through DirectX, and I doubt it can through OpenGL either. When power doubles, triples, quadruples, etc with each generation, the FPS increases. Also keep in mind that the HD2900 and 3870 had 320 Stream Processors while the 5890 has 1,600 stream processors if I remember correctly. These stream processors perform vertex, geometry (DX10 only), and pixel shading and with each generation the frequency and with new architectures the efficiency (thus increasing performance, even if they are @ the same frequency of a last gen card) increases in general, making shader operations and rendering overall, much much faster, increasing the speed the frames reach your screen, and in conclusion causing more frames to be rendered per second (FPS). In the benchmark that HardOP performened the turned many features up to Ultra High, in addition to weather, and the biggest factor bloom. Bloom is basically HDR, and HDR is soley performed on the GPU (to prove this try turning on AA and HDR on any Geforce 7 series card... it doesn't work because the card cannot do it). Bloom also requires a tremendous amount of shader power and with the increase of shaders and the increase in shear power (the 3870 did 496 GIGAflops, the 4870 - 1.7 TERAflops or 1,680 GIGAflops, and the 5870 - 2.7 TERAflops or 2,720 GIGAflops) makes all these shading, and GPU dependent operations (which have been there from the start of FSX like I said, nothing in the base code has changed for the last 2 or 3 years) perform a lot faster, increasing FPS with these ridiculously powerful cards we have today.

One I am a programmer, but not a graphic one, I work primarily on business apps. but I'm going by what the review said, and more importantly what Phil Taylor said, who is a programmer and was the lead project manager for FSX said!""EyeFinity is enough to cause FSX to, finally, have GPU-limited features. 5970 shows some advantage in 5760x1200 mode, HardOCP feels EyeFinity is way cool." Note the word finally, as it hadn't had them before!

[Guest djt01]

""EyeFinity is enough to cause FSX to, finally, have GPU-limited features. 5970 shows some advantage in 5760x1200 mode, HardOCP feels EyeFinity is way cool." Note the word finally, as it hadn't had them before!

[Guest Nils79]

FSX has some GPU depended features but unfortunately would need a SP3 and refurbishment.But it's great to see Phil Taylor posting again.Hopefully he won't get in trouble because of advertising an Intel competitor.

[bsupnik 23]

Hi Guys,From the review:"When it is all said and done, 5760x1200 made FSX more GPU dependent, just not in the way we expected. It is also very clear that it, like Crysis, demands a faster video card than exists today at these multi-display resolutions."This is probably true, but not particularly remarkable. Virtually _any_ 3-d application that does non-trivial rendering is going to become "more" GPU dependent when you increase the number of pixels on screen by a factor of 5. That's like saying that X-Plane becomes "more CPU dependent" when you increase the number of AI airplanes or 3-d objects. A true statement, but a function of the design of the sim, not the video card.The Radeon 5xxx series, by allowing you to run at huge resolutions _is_ shifting the relative GPU-CPU balance, but it's doing it by INCREASING gpu use, not by DECREASING cpu use.Okay that above statement is not fully true. I think there is almost certainly a relative workload shift due to increased GPU load in a huge-res setup. It is _possible_ that the CPU is being offloaded due to decreased driver time. We do not know if this is true or false. We do not have any data on this. To know if the CPU is used more efficiently, we'd have to have comparison numbers with older GPUs in CPU bound settings, or we could run Vtune on FS X and see where the CPU time is spent. (Only time in driver is a candidate for ATI making it faster. I don't know what FS X looks like, but I can tell you in X-plane that X-Plane does spend CPU time in driver, so if ATI/NV make things faster, we win.)My point is that there is no guarantee here that your fps will go up - there is a guarantee that you can have more pixels.

[gman! 1]

Hi Guys,From the review:"When it is all said and done, 5760x1200 made FSX more GPU dependent, just not in the way we expected. It is also very clear that it, like Crysis, demands a faster video card than exists today at these multi-display resolutions."This is probably true, but not particularly remarkable. Virtually _any_ 3-d application that does non-trivial rendering is going to become "more" GPU dependent when you increase the number of pixels on screen by a factor of 5. That's like saying that X-Plane becomes "more CPU dependent" when you increase the number of AI airplanes or 3-d objects. A true statement, but a function of the design of the sim, not the video card.The Radeon 5xxx series, by allowing you to run at huge resolutions _is_ shifting the relative GPU-CPU balance, but it's doing it by INCREASING gpu use, not by DECREASING cpu use.Okay that above statement is not fully true. I think there is almost certainly a relative workload shift due to increased GPU load in a huge-res setup. It is _possible_ that the CPU is being offloaded due to decreased driver time. We do not know if this is true or false. We do not have any data on this. To know if the CPU is used more efficiently, we'd have to have comparison numbers with older GPUs in CPU bound settings, or we could run Vtune on FS X and see where the CPU time is spent. (Only time in driver is a candidate for ATI making it faster. I don't know what FS X looks like, but I can tell you in X-plane that X-Plane does spend CPU time in driver, so if ATI/NV make things faster, we win.)My point is that there is no guarantee here that your fps will go up - there is a guarantee that you can have more pixels.

That is very true. Our points exactly :(

.....All that happened was there was a GPU, which is many times more powerful than its last generation predecessor with better drivers (everything has to pass through the CPU first before it goes to the GPU, on any game, any application, any OS... ), which decreases CPU load due to better driver coding making rendering faster and more efficient, thus increasing FPS........