Before you rush to get XP 64, the developers have said Flight does not run on it.Hook

This is the correct response direct from the developers:“Maximum settings are available under the following conditions: You have 3GB or more of physical RAM AND you have either a 64-bit OS, or a 32-bit OS with the /3G switch turned on. We highly recommend everyone runs with a 64-bit OS if they can as it gives Flight access to up to 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB. The /3GB switch for 32-bit OSes will give Flight access to 3GB instead of the normal 2GB, which is enough to run maximum settings but it could cause problems with older programs."Flight is large address aware, but it needs to be enabled by both the application and the OS for it to work.Not all of the settings have a "Maximum", I believe "High" is the highest it will go for texture quality and weather.For those trying to get the best performancevisual trade off here are the differences between high and maximum:Shadow Quality: Maximum will render scenery and autogen into all shadow cascades (effectively things have shadows farther). This has a very small visual difference, but a pretty high performance cost.Sharpness: Maximum just increases the anti-aliasing amount over the value in High. This has a large impact to GPU work.Scenery Density: Maximum increases the airport, scenery and autogen load and draw distance. This has a negative impact to load times, and performance but can make a fairly big visual difference.Scenery Quality: Maximum increases the terrain lod radius (basically the distance higher res textures are loaded). This negatively impacts loading times, and will also put more load onto your CPU while flying around.”Best regards.Luis

Yes I'm running XPP32 and will have to upgrade to 7/8/9? in 2014, as that is when security updates will finish, I'll always remember XP as being one of the best, but as said about SSD's 7/8/9 are/will be much better for themTo be fair, Vista SP2 is okay, I do remember when it came out on under-powered PC's with "only" 1GB!I might take the plunge and load up 8CP on a different drive my current XPP32 install needs a refreshIf you install 8CP I recommend Vistart 8 editionhttp://lee-soft.com/news/windows-8-start-menu/

I was looking into my graphics settings, and the Overall setting only goes up to high. I can however go into each setting and set to Maximum, and Overall changes to custom. For some reason High is the max I can adjust "Texture Quality" and "Weather Quality".Running Win7 64-bit. And ATI Radeon 5870 1GB. I'm not sure if there's a reason why I don't get max on the last two settings.

My friend has a GF 9800 and he has most of his settings on MAX.I have ATI 6870 and I only get High Settings.Bit Win7 64-bitFunny thing is my system out rates his on the Windows Peformance Index by 1.4 pts.

Perhaps MS is tired of hearing about framerate rants from those with less than leading edge hardware. If so, this is very clever. Most people will think HIGH is the MAX and may never complain. Out of sight, out of mind!