After a couple of years I finally bought a new computer with an AMD quad core and AMD grahics engine. My frustration with fsx continues. I think the worst thing MS did was to withdraw support for the fs 98 gauges. The question now is, what does sp 1 and sp2 do for the sim? Can I run it successfully without those "upgrades"? What does the acceleration pack do for the sim.? If you can point me to archived posts or answer me directly i would be happy. Does anyone know what is in store for the FS communtiy with the pending release of the new sim? Thanks, Paul

HelloYou can run FSX successfully without SP1 and SP2 but it will run a lot better with them installed.In fact most Addons these days require these in order to work.Acceleration adds more aircraft and some detailed airports plus updates the sim in other areas including adding SP2 as part of its install.You would be well advised to update to SP2, why would you want to miss out on all the bug fixes that address some of the problems with FSX RTM?

After a couple of years I finally bought a new computer with an AMD quad core and AMD grahics engine. My frustration with fsx continues.

FSX is an old program and is very demanding on hardware. Ideally for FSX you would run a Sandy Bridge 2500K (or better) CPU OC'd to 4.5+ GHz coupled with an nVidia 560 (or better) video card. ATI/AMD video adpaters are fairly horrible for FSX (especially with many clouds present) again due to FSX's fault (uses Sader Model 2 instead of today's Shader Model 4.2), but you can have FSX tweaked automatically to replace Shader Model 2 with Shader Model 3 here.

I think the worst thing MS did was to withdraw support for the fs 98 gauges.

To be fair, FS98 is 4 versions behind FSX, so backwards compatibility has been mainteined fos a very long time.

The question now is, what does sp 1 and sp2 do for the sim? Can I run it successfully without those "upgrades"?

You really need to upgrade to SP2 as it runs FSX a lot better (especially so with a multi-core CPU as FSX can use the additional cores to load scenery.

What does the acceleration pack do for the sim.?

Acceleration is the payware name of the free SP2 upgrade. The difference is Acceleration adds a few new aircraft (e.g. the P-51 Spitfire), multi-player pylon racing and turbo control for advanced piston engines.

If you can point me to archived posts or answer me directly i would be happy. Does anyone know what is in store for the FS communtiy with the pending release of the new sim? Thanks, Paul

No, but most of us are happy to speculate about MS Flight. To a limited extent you can see what MS is planning on the Flight web here. The videos look very nice!Cheers,- jahman.