I've devoted quite a few hours to the XP10 demo (beta?) this weekend, trying to find the "sweet spot" of config settings that give me acceptable frame rates and a good amount of detail in a wide variety of weather conditions.My PC seems to be too underpowered to use the the HDR lighting and advanced shadow settings, but after much tweaking of the other settings I get around 17-20fps rain or shine with "tonnes" of autogen. However, it was pretty painful to get to this point because of the extremely long loading times - does anyone else have to sit and wait a good five full minutes after tweaking certain options? thankfully loading doesn't seem to count towards the demo ten minute limit or I wouldn't have had chance to tweak more than a couple of options before it locked me out.So far I'm impressed with the clouds, cloud shadows and weather effects in general. The lighting at night is also great. However, even with high slider settings the scenery just didn't click for me, I expected to see many more urban buildings in the downtown Seattle area rather than green fields, trees and suburban housing. I can't comment much on flight models, I'm not a pilot and I only fly default aircraft in FSX.I think there is a lot to like and definate promise is being shown. I did come across a few bugs which will no doubt be worked out as time moves on but I find the comparative sparseness of the default scenery a turn-off.

XP10 does seem much slower to load initially and reload after tweaks than XP9, even with similar settings and very basic aircraft. I haven't tried shutting down AI to see if it helps.Painful at the moment, hopefully will improve in time.Bruce H (Oz)

Had the same problems (long loading times - up to 2-3 minutes) here too, even with a super fast SATAIII SSD and default planes/scenery.Can´t see what´s there that would take that long... No photoscenery, no large aircraft files, no high-resolution weather etc.I hope this will improve because I´m used to have even large applications to start up much faster now.

I found the same about hdr-any setting their cripples my rig-but I get similar results with the highest autogen, texture settings and the sim looks great this way.I do get the long loading times-but one thing I really like is any time you change the time of day within the sim the results are instant.

Seems that higher objects/roads/trees settings make the loading times even longer - but I do agree that the sim looks great at higher settings just as you say, the individual ground objects seem to be scaled correctly and are nicely detailed. However something about the "whole" does not gel for me at all. A low and slow flight over Seattle with the scenery settings maxed out (15fps for me!) revealed all sorts of oddities....- electricity pylons marching across roads and railway lines- strange random formations of roads and railway lines- roads that end suddenly for no visible reason- trees randomly sprinkled on concrete lots- little crops of suburban housing where the docks are supposed to be- no skyscrapers downtown and very few large buildings- no buildings at Boeing FieldWhen I dial back the objects/roads settings, downtown Seattle gradually transforms into a handful of vacant green lots surrounded by a grid of roads.I do very much think there is a lot to like in XP10 as I said before - but the algorithmically-generated scenery needs better base data (roads, landclass) to work from and also needs some hand-placed scenery for the downtown buildings. No doubt some excellent freeware and payware sceneries will be developed - the engine itself seems to be very competent - but the out-of-the-box experience is more important to me.

If anybody has seen the first public XP10 presentation from a few weeks back, Austin admitted that the load times were in need of optimization. I assume since XP10 is still technically in beta that they haven't gotten around to it yet.