This thread is the perfect answer to the op's question. There will never be a product that the community will support 100%. The interest are just too many. Some of us are looking for a game and some are looking for a simulator. If your mind can not see the difference then you will just never understand. That does not make you bad by the way, it is just the hard truth. Our hobby for better or worse is going to split into two paths. That of "Gamers" looking for more entertainment and cheaper products and "Simulator folks" looking for deeper systems and better FDE's and the like and willing to pay the cost to get there. At this point, P3D is the only way forward for us Simulation Guys but their does seem to be quite a lot of hope for the "Gamers"

I paid £3.99 for FSX-SE. How much did you pay for Prepar3d?

What I consider reasonable, considering the large improvments that has been done.

 

I also got FSX:SE during the sale, and am quite happy with that. I probably would have bought it anyway since I collect flight sims. Hopefully we'll see continued development and some desirable DLC as well.

Lets be honest here, both FSX-SE and P3Dv2.4 are just slightly modded/updated versions of the same 8 year old codebase.

 

So how about this for an idea: An overhaul of the FSX engine that will not only dramatically enhance graphics and scenery but will also boost performance...

 

 

 

 

Night-flights only... ;-)

I have all the simulator releases since MS Flight Simulator Version 1.00 way back in 1982. Since then, we had good and reasonable progression all the way to FSX. When Lockheed Martin came on to the scene, I did not hear reports of their first release being leaps and bounds over FSX, either in performance or scenery, so I did not dive in. At this point we began to settle for less and yet paid more.

 

MS Flight went backward, and I have that too ( flew a couple of days ago ). I was on the beta team begging the developers to rethink the strategy so we can move forward. LM did well with P3D V2: DX11 and the clouds were enough for me to support the product, and I enjoy it most of the time. However, its been a bumpy ride with V2, along with the fact that NVidia will keep the flight simming genre at near the bottom of the priority list. Without NVidia to support our new P3D V2, DX11 and our new clouds in V2 are a nightmare of headaches.

 

But Dovetail comes out, and in a few months gives us FSX-SE for $4.99 and I personally go from 22 FPS FSX DVD  to 65 FPS FSX-SE (slider unlimited) at Friday Harbor with a totally green installation default ultra high settings. I have no need for NVidia or tweaking to get great performance in FSX-SE. The question is why couldn't MS or LM do this for us? Its the same engine, right? Well, my theory is that Dovetail is going to try to get us back to good progress w/o having to resort to XP10 barren default scenery and no seasons or  "sign our life away" on a EULA or pay $200 for the base sim and $100 for each plane/utilities for the sake of a EULA- Who here runs a real world flight training operation?  Dovetail may even make a version of their intended release that is boxed out side of steam. Steam is not all bad but I can understand the skepticism and I hope that Dovetail will too for the community's sake. 

 

Dovetail has proven to me that it is not "in bed" with Intel, making us buy I9 PC's costing $10,000 just to get 15 FPS in a rural area. And NVidia can keep their cold shoulder, we don't need them anymore. LM and Laminar Research are clearly beginning to see the benefits of the partnerships with 3rd party companies and are gaining lots of favor and ground, this is good. But now Dovetail has made this simming community a bit more healthy in my view. I have XP10 and I don't like it very much. I hate the fact that every time a new NVidia driver comes out I should expect problems with P3D V2.

 

Just today I flew in FSX -SE from LPPT-LFPG-EGLL-EIDW in the default 737-800 with default scenery. Full sliders except for water, ground shadows, and I keep car traffic at 33. Even at Heathrow and CDG my FPS did not go below 18 with all the air and ground traffic at max. I never quit the sim between flights and made and IFR ATC guided flight plan for each leg with a 20 minute break between each. I used FS Global real weather and had no OOM, no stutters, no troubles at all. Dovetail has my attention and support for now, and as long as the sim they produce is progress like 64 bit and not some "game" like MS Flight, then I think we can say that we are no longer going to just settle for less while we pay more.

 

Now all that has to happen is for the simming community websites (especially Aerosoft Sim News who have not even mentioned FSX-SE at all!)  to recognize the fact that FSX SE is a good "first" step forward, and at least report when an update is released (if they did, I don't see it). If not, then I ( we all should) classify them with NVidia....at least give Dovetail a fighting chance. If they mess up then ok, but lets welcome them with wide open arms until they give us a reason not to, there is no harm in this. 

Can someone explain me the benefits of 64-bit code besides larger memory allocations? I keep seeing it brought up time and time again, but the performance in FSX isn't bottlenecked by it being 32-bit.

 

32-bit applications in Windows 7/8 64 bit are allocated 4GB's of virtual address space (VAS). When it runs out, FSX will crash with an Out-of-Memory (OOM) error. Many, with a lot of addons, run out of memory after about 2 hours of flight in commercial aircraft, in commercial scenery, with a commercial weather program like OPUS or ASN.

 

64-bit applications in Windows 7/8 64 bit are allocated 8TB's by default (1 terabyte (TB) = 1000GB's) which is more than ample space for your 64 bit application. It means you can crank your settings up to the highest levels and run as many addons as you want.

 

That's the way I understand it anyway. It will reduce the amount of OOM's.

 

Best regards,

I have all the simulator releases since MS Flight Simulator Version 1.00 way back in 1982.

           I bought FSX-SE on sale but I have not installed it. I've read that it runs like a jack rabbit upon installation, but what happens when you start piling on the addons? Not only scenery but AI traffic (which we know exacts a fairly heavy toll) plus high end aircraft. Are we eventually going to end up in the same boat where you're down to almost a slide show? I wish someone would create a sim that uses the latest in graphic technology. My fear is that the market just isn't big enough to support such an endeavor

Edited January 20, 201511 yr by n4gix
Removed excessive quote, moved reply outside the quote box!

           I bought FSX-SE on sale but I have not installed it. I've read that it runs like a jack rabbit upon installation, but what happens when you start piling on the addons? Not only scenery but AI traffic (which we know exacts a fairly heavy toll) plus high end aircraft. Are we eventually going to end up in the same boat where you're down to almost a slide show? I wish someone would create a sim that uses the latest in graphic technology. My fear is that the market just isn't big enough to support such an endeavor

Performance wise I don't think they'll be much different, the benefits of FSX-SE is more in the area of VAS management. Here's a video posted today that highlights the point.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUxjBd4xz58

Tom,

          Thanks for the reply. Fortunately, I haven't had a lot of OOM errors on my rig. I own all of the sims and they all have their strong points and their weaknesses. I'm going to wait a bit longer before I install FSX-SE but I'm sure I will at some point.

It is true that FSX or FSX:SE really doesn't make a difference once you fully load it with addons, as well when you are running the latest CPU's at 4.4GHz or more then to be honest the difference become negligible.

 

I still use FSX as my primary sim but did get two licences of FSX:SE so my partner and I can have multiplayer in the same household. For $5 each that has been worth it but trying a few addons with FSX:SE and comparing to FSX doesn't show much difference on my i7-4790 CPU, both run blazing fast

 

I stick with FSX because PMDG and ASN are working fine on it

 

 

I stick with FSX because PMDG and ASN are working fine on it

 

Same here, but once these 2 developers addons are compatible I do plan to switch over. There's a posted video yesterday, that shows at least someone got the NGX running under it (I assume through a manual install)

Fantastic reading. Isn't PD3 2.5 out soon? then V3 will eventually follow with 64 bit down the line. I think PD3 is tipping along just fine.

 

I don't understand the obsession with 64 Bit, of course for "the sake" of moving forward sure it would be great.. X-Plane is 64Bit, I don't see the difference in performance or quality in fact PD3 with all the goodies runs like a dream for me.

 

Took a spin in my Cherokee last evening, pumped with Orbtx, ASN, Rex, amazing very hard to argue with that.

Well state Elaine (Poppet). Totally agree.

 

Best regards,

It is true that FSX or FSX:SE really doesn't make a difference once you fully load it with addons...

Addons have not been improved. The more addons, um, added, the less any improvements in performance show up. D3D9 isn't going to change much, but there's a small improvement to fps in DX10 in full screen game modes with partial or no vsync.

Addons have not been improved

 

Yes of course so for the ones using PMDG, ASN and a Traffic Package their is no benefit of switching yet because the little gain in performance you see when you initially install FSX:SE will be lost on the addons. Also since these addons don't have installers all your doing is hours of wasted time tinkering with them just to get them to work in FSX:SE.

 

I will switch over to FSX:SE when all my third party developers support it, I am in no hurry but I do like the backup and restore feature in Steam as reinstalling FSX is a pain when you have to call India to get new keys twice, once for FSX and again for Acceleration  :rolleyes: