>> One of the things they really hammered on was multiple>versions of FS.>> Since i dont fly any jets in FS, just GA and Bush flying.>They wanted to know if i was in favor of "FS GA" or "FS Bush">or if you were a heavy fan "FS Tubes" j/k>> This seemed like an important issue to the MC. I left with>the feeling that this WILL happen someday. Personally, am already flying a GA Bizjet only FS with FS9. Removed all jets except Eaglesoft Citation X, which can use 3000 ft airfields... Removed all AI for Jets, including ProjectAI, except for Bisjets. Installed GA-Traffic, and even converted all Bizjet aircraft to AI using GA-Traffic. Then, moved all GA aircraft but the one I'm flying out of the aircraft folder to C:aircraft Removed the click in the Traffic box for Commercial. This resulted in a 10fps increase for me in FS9 I'd go for a GA version anyday which was even faster. Even one which had all large commercial airfields removed, though many others might not. As I only land at fields with airstrips of 3000 feet or shorter. But, I'd want the MESH resolution improved to at least what it used to be or better, and preferrably less than 9 meters...

Within weeks someone would come out with a pirated copy of the card and sell that with a "free" copy (of course also pirated) of the software.Hardware piracy is old, it happens all the time. If you don't hear much about it it's because the volume is usually rather low and it's mostly limited to fringe markets (what with the low cost of hardware).

It's an interesting thought. PCI, as someone said, is too slow these days. However, PCI-express is just starting to appear and that might solve the bandwidth problems.My concern would be the actual benefit of such a card. FS2004 is just like any other computer program - it contains a lot of general purpose code which runs best on a general purpose CPUs like Athlon, Pentium, G5 etc. The CPU doesn't know it's calculating things related to ATC or physics modelling since the instructions are exactly the same as for a racing game, shooter or raytracing program.With 3D cards it's much easier to make a specialized chip. The only purpose of the GPU is to determine the colour of all pixels on the screen. To achieve this it uses a number of fixed, hardcoded functions for processing textures and polygons. This makles it much easier to move those operations off the main CPU and on to a "GPU", optimized for those particular operations (multiple paralell pixel pipes, specialized Vertex Shader units etc.). It may be possible to create a chip for a very specific set of FS-related instructions, for example a "flight dynamics chip" with specialized hardcoded functions that take the .air coefficients as input and outputs the flight dynamics data but the R&D costs for developing such a chip would be astronomical. The last option is to simply add a card with a second CPU, Athlon or Pentium. However multi-CPU motherboards already exist. The real benefit would come from optimizing FS for multiple CPUs which should be easy to do since there's a lot of potential for multiple threads in FS9 (one for scenery, one for AI, one for flight modelling etc.).