Hello people, Just read a thread on the GameSpot forums about performance issues with ID Software’s Rage which features new megatextures in the ID Software Tech 5 (generation) graphics engine. Issues have arose regarding texture tearing, image popping and blurries, sounds familiar... Well, the interesting bit was what the ID Software Community Manager said on the forum... "The texture streaming is limited by the performance and number of cores of the main processor (CPU). The higher the resolution at which the game renders and the higher the anti-aliasing setting, the more texture data is needed to texture the environment. If you do not have a high end CPU you may momentarily see blurrier textures and texture popping when the view changes quickly. If you have a processor with few cores and you have a high end NVIDIA graphics card then you can try turning on the 'GPU Transcode' menu option in the video settings menu in RAGE. By enabling this option a large percentage of the texture calculations are moved to the graphics\ processor (GPU). However, this option is not available on all graphics hardware and may not appear in the menu if your hardware does not support the necessary features. On processors with few cores without the ability to turn on 'GPU Transcode' you can significantly improve the texture streaming performance by adding the following to the RAGE launch options in Steam: +vt_maxPPF 16 The launch options can be found by right-clicking on RAGE in Steam and selecting “Properties”. Then click on “Set Launch Options” in the dialog that pops up. If you have very few cores like a dual core processor then you can set a lower value like: +vt_maxPPF 8" It's wonderful now we're getting real examples of games utilising Nvidia's Cuda and ATI's AVT technologies to enhance texture rendering. You would think maybe these games should make full use of the cards out the box, but I'm all for a bit of optimisation up front as I can see the architecture for Graphics cards involving and nothing would be worse if we end up with something like Crysis 2 out the box which had next to no graphical settings and missed a lot of supported features until later patches were released. Historically Microsoft has always been slow on the uptake of using the performance of the Graphics cards, even in FSX similar titles appeared to achieve more graphics fidelity. I have no doubt with performance a key ingredient for Flight and building for DX11 from the ground up we'll see some solid use of the graphics card in Flight but I do hope they let us tinker a little as well like the Rage boys can do... Would be interested to hear your thoughts, should Microsoft open up Flight like ID software and provide us with the ability to change rendering options in particular to levy the performance of the latest Graphics card features and processing power? Cheers,Dave.

"I have no doubt with performance a key ingredient for Flight and building for DX11 from the ground up we'll see some solid use of the graphics card in Flight " Where did you get the information that performance is a key ingredient for Flight and it is being built for DX11 from the ground up?

Hi Mike, Ok I don't have any proof but performance has been mentioned frequently by Microsoft most prominantly in the PC Pilot articles earlier this year. As for the DirectX support. I came to that conclusion but process of elimination. The target audiance for any Graphics card support is predominantly the OS with the largest user base. However given Flights performance requirements I can't see Microsoft developing Flight for an older generation of Windows XP using Direct X 9.0c especially given that they attempted DirectX 10 in FSX . On the subject of DirectX 10 and FSX. It clearly wasn't finished, and I'd be very supprised if it ever was finished (for Flight that is). DirectX 10 was also the host graphics platform for the much maligned Microsoft Vista and I'd expect Microsoft to be getting users off that platform as quickly as possible ! Microsoft DirectX 11 actually came out sometime ago in October 2009, which as the host developer must really sound like a very long time ago! Fundamentally then this is comfortably early enough to incorporate key design descions into the rendering process for developing a title like Flight so I'm 100% convinced Flight will come out using DirectX 11, no doubts whats-so-ever Cheers,Dave.