You got this one wrong Jim, if a company build a sports car (XP-10) that use regular gas only (one card) but can't use high octane gas (SLI) when the builder know that high octane gas is available why not building the car for high octane gas, it's like saying "We know we can get more MPH (FPS) and better response from the car (AA, resolution) on high octane gas, but since we built the car just for regular gas why don't you just floor it half way (not maxing out the sliders).....Now I understand it's not everybody who can afford the best sports car but the one who can should not be punished because of it and as I always said, there is no such thing as overkill in the world of PCs.

Maybe you missed the part about not being able to use the high octane gas.

I just love these analogies...Maybe a better one in this case is 'but I don't need high octane fuel that costs 3 times as much, as my car is 99% of the time in gridlock!.. Bottlenecks.Ben Supnik was kind enough to send us all this explanation. He sent it in very little time, it shows he really knows his stuff, I spose as you'd expect, but impressive nonetheless. Really, I think we are in very safe hands and should stop all this speculation - just wait/salivate. Also, I recall a recent post from Ben that shows we should all be looking forward very much to PCIE 3 - that upgrade pc might not be too far away for me after all!http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/10/whats-this-whole-pcie-thing-about-anyway/I won't be on-passing any more speculation/questions to Ben unless it is earth-shattering, of the extent that I WON'T have my head ripped off by him for bugging him any more!Some of Ben's explanation:"- LR has never shipped a product where GPU fill rate was the bottleneck.  X-Plane 9 cannot max out my 2-generation-old 4870 even with the res set up to 5760 * 1080 and all of the shader options you can find.  V9 is just not fill rate intensive by modern GPU standards.By comparison, CPUs never got fast enough for our CPU/driver-batch intensive way of drawing cities with tens of thousands of objects.- For version 10, we have done a ton of rendering work to fight this existing bottleneck, so that you get a speed benefit.  We have _not_ done any work to support SLI.  We put our finite performance tuning time into the places in the code that would have the most impact...Performance tuning things that don't actually affect framerate is a pointless waste of developer time.  So GPU fillrate tuning _may_ be useful in the future but there has been no hard evidence that we've needed it in the past.  We have to ship a CPU-efficient implementation to decide that the GPU fill rate is the next thing.  Until then, we're not going to delay the release of X-Plane 10 or trade off other features for the possibiltiy that SLI support _might_ be important in the future.In my report on ATI performance analysis, note that the 7000 line is coming out and we haven't tested on them, so there is more fill rate in a single card package coming out in the near future; note also that I had not had time to do serious shader fill rate performance tuning, and note that we were running a lot of effects at a larger resolution at flyable framerates.  So that all indicates that "wait and see" is better than "jump on SLI/CrossFire" ASAP."

I'm sure Austin and the gang would love to implement all of these things and have the time to polish the code to perfection, but they're a small outfit and don't have Microsoft's millions behind them. I suspect that a large part of the reason for a hard release date in December is because they're running out of money for development and need to generate some revenue to keep things going.

HelloWhen Austin sells the Cirrus, the Ferrari and the 50th Anniversary Vette, I will know they are running out of money LOLhttp://www.x-plane.c...rrus_howto.html

I didn't say they were literally running out of money, I said "running out of money for development." If Austin expects to turn a profit on XP10 then there is a practical limit to how much he can spend on development, and I suspect they're getting very close to that number at this point.

So that all indicates that "wait and see" is better than "jump on SLI/CrossFire" ASAP."

No problems, if one can use a top of the line PC maxing out XP-10 at very high resolution on 3 monitors over a big city at 60FPS + SLI will not be needed, more power to XP-10, my CC is out and ready.

Here is the short backround of why SLI is not so easy to implement for X-Plane 10. Essentially Ben Supnik already wrote it in his Blog, but obviously not many were interested in the technical part:http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/10/x-plane-sli-and-crossfire/http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/10/x-plane-10-and-gpu-power/The keyword here is "deferred rendering". A special rendering approach - but a quite modern one - to save the graphics cards a lot of work.And its not only X-Plane, which can't easily combine this with SLI .... its an algorithmic/technological issue, which affects many other modern games too, which all need some extra work to make it work (if they manage to do so at all). Just google for "deferred rendering SLI"For example see here:http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=344768

Many games nowadays use deferred rendering. UE3 is a deferred renderer which is why they have problems with AA under DX9, UE3 + Frostbite is used in BFBC2. Also Metro 2033 uses a deferred engine and a lot of games in the future will because deffered rendering saves a lot of performance when using many different light sources with dynamic effects. In many games CFX just works perfect, it always depends on driver support and developer support for multi-gpu. Take shift2 which didn't work with cfx until EA released the new patch.Also if differet games use the same renderer, let's say a deferred one, doesn't mean they use same postprocessing techs. That's why even when a new UE3 game comes out, we all know how old UE3 tech is, it still may have problems with CFX and drivers like Bulletstorm had with the 6000series cards. I'm glad we now have CAPs and don't have to wait for new driverer releases every time. You should also blame developers for not working CFX on release day, if they would work closer with GFX manufacturers and give them final builds to do their driver work, games like the witcher 2 would have working CFX.

And as you will read, all this doesn't means that "deferred rendering" makes SLI impossible entirely ... but that it brings a lot of problems, which are often not easily solvable. So, thats why Ben states in his Blog, that he will need too look into this alter, when time permits (and that "deferred rendering" can always have some "snake pits" which make it hard or impossible to optimize it for SLI).

I can only speak for myself but if X-Plane 10 is better then i'll happly move over, if Flight is better then (and it will hurt me) Microsoft will get my money. From what i have seen so far i would say X-Plane is looking the better sim. But appealing to hard-core simmers is one thing, Microsofts mass marketing is another. Unless it's vapour ware or seriously bugged then i am 100& certain it will out sell X-Plane, even if it turns out to be FSX SP2 Now with extra Hawaii scenary. Unfortunately it's a little bit unfair, X-Plane will have to be significantly better and have the sales to move 3rd party people across to develop for the platform, but it may struggle with sales until the 3rd parties commit; there is no doubt getting Aerosoft onboard was a huge leap forward, getting somebody like A2A or PMDG would, i believe open the flood gates.

Some of that debate also really boils down to wich operating system you prefer. I love OSX and abandoned Windows completely very early; today i don't want to install Windows on my machine, that is mainly used for my business work, just because of a software like a flight sim - wich basically is, let's all be honest to ourselves, a game. I started with Fly! and later switched to X-Plane version 8. I am sure a lot of Linux users share that view.And all the other stuff, like maxed out settings with maxed out AI and the most beautiful plane addons - well, that always is only a bonus to what the core of those games is about.After xplane version 8 and 9, those new "bonus" features are really great improvements FOR X-PLANERS (everybody else will be able to try the demo and decide): wheather, AI, ATC, better autogen, you name it. But basically I am still having fun with Xplane 9.(disclaimer: I'm also not into airliners, so that "it gotta be PMDG-like systems"-discussion also fails on me. A working standard six combined with a believable flight model and great 3D-Cockpit makes me happy.)

I can only speak for myself but if X-Plane 10 is better then i'll happly move over, if Flight is better then (and it will hurt me) Microsoft will get my money. From what i have seen so far i would say X-Plane is looking the better sim. But appealing to hard-core simmers is one thing, Microsofts mass marketing is another.Unless it's vapour ware or seriously bugged then i am 100& certain it will out sell X-Plane, even if it turns out to be FSX SP2 Now with extra Hawaii scenary.Unfortunately it's a little bit unfair, X-Plane will have to be significantly better and have the sales to move 3rd party people across to develop for the platform, but it may struggle with sales until the 3rd parties commit; there is no doubt getting Aerosoft onboard was a huge leap forward, getting somebody like A2A or PMDG would, i believe open the flood gates.

There are a couple of key points that are very important to make. Flight will very likely outsell XP10 simply because of their distribution method. MS sells software to Best Buy, Target, etc., which is a huge volume and counts as sales for MS. In order for these retailers to move the product, they advertise in their weekly circulars and such, therefore, moving the product into the hands of many people who have a casual interest in the product (they are not nutty like all of us in this forum). But this is not really the point. The point is, if Flight is a Hawaii only title, and does not really support easy third party development, then Flight will hit the wall pretty quickly in terms of what matters to the serious simmer (again that would be us). Sure, Flight would outsell XP10 in this scenario, but that is not the point. Serious simmers would purchase XP10 in significantly larger numbers compelling more high quality third party developers into the XP ecosystem.If Flight, however, is a global sim and MS does a good job, MS would very likely outsell XP10, just due to MS's distribution channel, even if Flight is not as good as XP10. In this scenario, the good news is XP10 would have likely caused a major shift in the market, and there should definitely be sufficient market potential for third party developers to produce high end, quality products for XP10. Also, the longer it takes MS to get something out the door, the larger the XP10 community will grow.Either way, the XP community will benefit.

Great shots....I believe Flight will outsell XP purely because MS has always had a larger portion of the market share. I personally think flight looks good but if it stays Hawaii only per some the rumors I won't be buying it.What I am excited about (as well as XP10) is P3D, essentially FSX but with new developers working on it.

I KNOW MS Flight will outsell xp10, for the same reasons that Pilotwings for Nintendo outsold xplane 8.

I KNOW MS Flight will outsell xp10, for the same reasons that Pilotwings for Nintendo outsold xplane 8.

Better flight modeling?

hehe, guess again

One small thing that works against the "plausible world" scenario for me is the placement of a couple of houses on a patch of green space between freeways. It looks and is very artificial (at least down under )I'm sure the issue could be addressed with an additional rule laying out minimum land parcel size.I also hope the overhead traffic advisory signs scroll something other than X-Plane ad's. And for crying out loud, where is the graffiti on the expressway walls?(Just kidding about the last two points guys. Don't flame me please....... )CheersBruce H (Oz)

If this sim. run as good as it looks .....FSX is dead in the water.

As well as the Hawaiian Flight version! :)

>>The very worst thing Laminar can do right now is push this out of the door in its present state, Microsoft will look at it then match or exceed every feature before releasing Flight!.<<And duplicate it using DirectX? LOL