Hello Roger,>I will try the RamDriveNTDid you try it? If yes, have positive results?Thanks in advance

Emile,Not yet. There are severals and I havent find the good one.Roger

Juat want to point out here that at a zoom of 0.65 you my be getting a better replication of the feeling of speed but perspective will not be correct. If you treat your screen as a real window to a real outside world there's only one proper FOV for any givin display width and viewing distance.TonyDigital-Flight

Roger,I agree 100% with you on the demise of the Sublogic ATP simulation program. It was a case where a ton of money has "Not" helped the product. True they have added lots of eye candy but in the process the quality that was in the Sublogic program was lost. I would rather see "Quality" verses "Quantity" when it comes to simulation. Terry

Creative users:I have had good luck with new drivers from soundblaster.comInterstingly, this link works best for me...for my audigy gamer, this link found newer drivers (EAX 4.0 SE) than I found on the site for driver downloads. It's the Online AutoUpdate page:http://us.creative.com/support/downloads/su.aspGive it a try!Best,sg

RogerYou're absolutely right about the zoom ratio. When set to 1.0 you actually are zoomed in. MS did this to improve frame rates but it totally throws off perspective. This is really obvious when following the ILS glide slope; you appear to be comming in way too steep, and also way to slow. Unfortunally people have gotten so used to this zoomed in view of flying that correcting it doesn't look right. Plus it lowers their frame rate which creates a kind of denial. They want to believe that zoom 1.0 is correct because correcting it cuts their FPS. If you're not a pilot (which I am not) just hire someone to take you for a sight seeing flight and then stay right on the GS during landing. Observe the perspective of the runway and then compare to the default perspective of FS9. It's like looking through weak binoculars. David

David,Happy to find some here sharing my experiences.ThanksRoger

Tony,As a film director, having also worked with digital SPFX in a motion ride film called "devils mine ride" we did use light wide angle virtual lenses to get real perpectives. Bu Real perspectives I mean we tried to come closer to what the human perspective is in the reality. I cant say what yours, but I know what mine. The ratio is defined by M$ as 1.0 but it is definitely a long lens ( tele) effect. When directing, I love using tele or extreme wide angle lenses, but in a simulator I just try to come close to what I would see and feel if it would be real.RegardsRoger

Hi Roger,My background is in professional photography and optics so I think we're coming to the same thing from different directions. The basic problem any desktop flight sim faces is the huge difference between a small screen and the capability of normal human vision. Human vision has an extreme effective FOV of almost 180 degrees yet the part of that field that's used to see in detail is quite narrow. In terms of 35mm photography that most people are familiar with the FOV of human vision is close to a super-wide angle lens but natural perspective is much like a 50mm lens. Everyone has seen this when they take a scene with a point and shoot camera at wide setting and say "those mountains looked much bigger then that!" The way I've always looked at this in terms of flight sims is to consider the screen as a real window, as such it has a given width and distance from your eye. That means that to match what you would see from a cockpit with a window of that same size and distance, you have to match the FOV that the geometry of the situation gives you. You can work this out with paper and a scale rule or get the true FOV with the following calculation:FOV = 2 x ArcTan (Image Width X 0.5 / Viewing Distance)When I work this out for my 19" monitor I come up with a true FOV of just a bit under 40 degrees. The FOV you get in MSFS at a zoom ratio of 1.0X is 45 degrees so the default setting is actually closer reality then most people think. It seems narrow because in terms of being an actual window, your monitor is rather small. The view however isn't magnified. You can learn to fly with the distrotions of a wide angle view reduced down to the width of your screen but there are also problems. As with any wide angle view, the view is distorted. Everything is squeezed down so landing strips look tiny even when you're fairly close making it difficult to line up at a reasonable distance resulting in what often feels like a very fast and rushed short final. You also have problems with inconsistencies in object locations when you switch to other views. You run into this head-on if you ever have to set up multiple views and it makes flying an accurate visual pattern harder then it should be. Lastly, there's a distortion in perception of rates. Roll is unaffected but the wider you go, the less any given movement in pitch and yaw is going to be percived to be.To close, lots of people like to fly using wide FOVs because it gives a pretty picture, enhances your perception of speed, brings in more of the 3D cockpit and for some, delivers a better sense of immersion but in terms of the laws of optics and perspective, the FOV provided at the default zoom setting is actually closer to being correct for most setups. For my own sim flying I tend to split the difference. I use the correct FOV setting for takeoffs, pattern work and landings while often going to a wider view for a nicer picture of the world at cruise.TonyDigital-Flight

I've been flying FS now since '99. I have read thousands of posts in that time on how to tweak this and that, what sound card is best, what video card, settings this and that.What I don't understand is why MS, supposedly the 800 pound geurilla of programming, can't find a way to give us a sim that runs well out of the box for everyone. I don't WANT to know what goes on inside the bloody box, I just want to FLY. We spend more time trying to make the thing work than doing what we bought it to do.I don't need fifty answers on why this is, just putting in my two cents.

That's just the right position. M$ does not care at all about our problems. As said here when you make a search in the forum with the key word "Stutters" you are overflown by hundreth of posts. You see the same on other flight Sim related site. And never forget a lot of light user who simply put the soft away from their computer.Definitely M$ is a gang without any dignity. If I had had so much negative feedbacks on my work I would get deeply depressed. They seems to be arrogant an happy about what they did.A shame. Roger

Several years ago I used to say the same thing and then I gave it a lot of thought and this is what I came up with. Think about all of the big name computer manufacturers and consider how many different models each of them have made in the last, say five years, then consider how many configurations there may be for each model. Now toss in all of the smaller name computer makers with all of their models and configurations, and there are a lot of those. Then you have to look at what people have done to speed up or customize their older computers with sound cards, video cards, memory, hard drives, network cards, DVD drives, CD burners, modems, printers, scanners, software, new motherboards, processors, etc, etc. Finally you have to look at people who build their own computers and the endless configurations that this entails and you end up with an impossible task. There is no way that anyone could make a piece of software that works on every system. As an example I looked on the Compaq website and picked their 8000Z series PC and there were choices for 56 items, things like hard drives, processors, video cards, monitors, speakers, operating systems, other software, etc. (I left out the warranty choices and the choices for additional accessories) and given those choices you have the possibility of 36,288,000 different configurations (if I did my math correctly). That is only for 1 type of PC from one company. We have all seen how FS reacts differently to the various hardware and software configs that everyone here has so think of what a daunting task it would be to test a piece of software against every possible configuration. I know you said that you don't need fifty answers to this and I am not really responding to you personally so much as everyone who has not realized the shear magnitude of possibilities for computer configurations out there. I just thought that I would throw this in as a kind of food for thought sort of thing. I will say that I too wish that Microsoft could make something that will work well on every computer but just looking at those numbers makes me realize that it can never happen. I keep hoping though! :-) I do know that if we could figure out a way to do it we would be richer than Bill Gates! :-lol Philip Olsonhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/supporter.jpg

Hi David,If you do the math or draw to scale the layout specifically for your setup you'll find that your ideas about the 1X zoom setting and Microsoft's reasoning behind it are not correct.TonyDigital-Flight

Hum....I'm not sure these are the right maths. Here is why in my opinion:in order to avoid such a configuration / compatibility mess, Microsoft has invented Windows, and relies on the hardware manufacturer to deliver drivers compatible, under msft driven driver guidelines / approval. Then, to control this hardware from a software standpoint (not the OS standpoint), msft has invented Direct X (managing sound / gfx / net etc... in a high level language and a comon programming interface). In this respect, given every hardware manufacturer do the best to deliver very good drivers (or they'll be out of business by there competition), there is little chance (but there are cases sometimes like the recent thread about VIA chipset), that the hardware is the culprit.In my opinion, as shown with many products coming from msft, many products from their labs are not optimized for speed, but designed for functionality. Which is good in the business software. This is also good practise for ensuring maintenance of the code in a more easier way, when shared among a development team. This is not a problem in a world where CPU raw speed doubles every 18 months. Just design a software, and the hardware will catch up later. Unfortunately, when pushing the reasoning to the extreme, you end up with a software which may not be optimized at all, and with a hardware which will not catch up even in 18 months.I can tell you from my findings that a lot of the C++ standard library seems to be of used even for critical parts of the sim data structures, and this only adds a lot of overhead to the sim which could be avoided with custom made data structure strategies for example. It also seems that the many simple functions are not even inlined in the code, which means for doing some simple "a+b" the simulator code calls a function to do it, instead of doing it directly... doing so 10000 times a second for every part of the sim, and you start to get the picture: the cpu spends 60% of the computation time just managing CPU stack, and furthermore, because of branch prediction in P4 type of CPUs, it may even stall the CPU for many cycles before the actual computation takes place.No doubt the simulator could have been further optimized with its exising "for functionality" source code. Even at the level of the compiler only, this would have been possible (meaning without even optimizing - recoding some parts of the source).For now, the only solution is to comply to the marketing strategy: purchase every 2 years a newer computer to run the software which was designed to support the sales of the hardware partner system it is shipped and installed with... :-)Do you really believe in conspiracy theories? :-)

Sorry about stepping in so brutally and with such political uncorrectness.I hope I won't be banned from the forums.Don't misunderstand me, I'm a true sim lover and spend hours on it, but with the way I've lately seen complex and fast paced graphical games running so beautifully, flawlessly and with such exquisit details on my rig (XP2600+ & 9800XT), there's only one thing left to say IMHO:microsoft flight simulator's graphic engine really sucks.Sorry about that. Sometimes you just have to speak out loud, and I'm pretty sure many of you share the same feeling deep whithin, regardless of how much time you've spent trying to make it run decently.luca