I've been away from FS9 and FSX for several years. I downloaded and played with Flight. It's fun for what it is. I've read most of the posts here as well as the Flight FaceBook page - so I'll not go into the pros/cons of Flight.What I found very strange though, is that for some reason, Flight performs worse on my PC compared to FSX. I have a fairly old system:Dell Dimension 8400, Pentium 4 (3.4GHZ), 3GB RAMNvidia GeForce 6800 - 256MB Graphics.I've not really "tuned" FSX much (no special scenery, not many changes to the .cfg file, etc.). I'll spare you all the detailed settings, but here's what I have:FSXGlobal Textures - Very High, Lens Flare and Advanced Animations OnAircraft - 3D Virtual Cockpit and other settings set to HighScenery - most options set from Medium to High (I know there are specific values, but I'm not listing them here - just giving you the general data). Scenary Complexity set the Extremely Dense and Autogen is Normal.Traffic - most sliders at 25%FlightAll Medium except for Shadow Quality set to Low (anything higher causes stuttering)As you can see, with my PC, I can't run most sliders to max in FSX.But, comparing the smoothness (I don't have any 3rd party FPS S/W to guage Flight's FPS), while I get a consistent 25-30FPS (on average) in FSX, I don't see the same level of graphics in Flight for the comparable smoothness. Also, it looks like the anti-aliasing in FSX is much better compared to Flight. Granted, the stock Kona aiport in both FSX and Flight is dull, but I get a better looking sim in FSX than Flight (autogen helps!). I did NOT expect this. I expected better scenary in Flight due to the small area provided and better performance.Now, I do realize these are different games with many different settings (graphics, scenery, AI, etc.), but with FSX having arguably much more data it's processing during the sim (AI, ATC, dynamic weather, Autogen, GPS, etc.) how can it perform better than Flight? I've read that Flight utilizes the graphics card much more than the CPU, but still, with all the factors above, Flight should look and perform better than FSX, but for me it doesn't.What are others seeing?Jerry G.

Just a snap judgement is because flight runs more on the gpu than fsx does and your gpu is fairly weak by today's standards.

What I found very strange though, is that for some reason, Flight performs worse on my PC compared to FSX. I have a fairly old system:Dell Dimension 8400, Pentium 4 (3.4GHZ), 3GB RAMNvidia GeForce 6800 - 256MB Graphics.

Thats why. Flight is programmed to run better in current hardware. FSX cant properly use current hardware, but it LOVES old hardware. Your well below minimum specs of Flight. I would say a GTS8800 would shift the tide greatly.

and lose the P4.. its heavily old now. im suprised fsx worked as well as it did..i know its terrible advice and i slate poeple who say this, but really you need to upgrade :(

Edited March 3, 201214 yr by james_2k

Thanks. I agree - a more powerful PC would help Flight. I get it - no argument there. But, it's still puzzling to me that Flight runs so poorly when all it's settings are stripped down (compared to FSX).Jerry G.

Because as has been said above, Flight is coded differently. It's a new game, and is designed for 2012 hardware.Your 3.4GHz single core CPU is what FSX likes. FSX is not very well optimised for multi-core anyway, and that P4 has a fairly decent clock speed. That's why FSX runs fairly well.With Flight, they've taken a lot of processing tasks off of the CPU and instead given them to the GPU to process, because nowadays GPUs are much more capable than they used to be, and for certain tasks it's much more efficient for the GPU to do them rather than the CPU. Your GPU just isn't fast enough and doesn't have nearly enough memory to cope with this increased load. Flight is also written to better utilise multi-core CPUs, and as you only have a single core P4, Flight cannot multithread. Hence Flight doesn't perform so well for you.

Edited March 3, 201214 yr by Tom Wright

My current systems runs FSX fairly well, certainly good enough for me with most sliders heavily biased to the right, and very smooth.But Flight on my system, performs flawless with all graphics on the very highest settings.

Great feedback Tom, thanks!