I'll admit the screenshots of FSX do look fantastic, but to be perfectly honest the new features seem to be mainly aimed at the "eye candy". Increasing the visual aspects of the sim is fine by me, but I don't see much in the way of improvements to the "meat" of the sim.I've also just read an interesting news story in this month's PC Format (UK) about DX10 and Vista. The magazine contacted several games developers and ATI and Nvidia asking if there was any compelling reason why DX10 will only be available on Vista. The apparent reason is that DX10 works with Vista's new driver architecture. I'm no software developer, but as I understand it - current drivers for XP are built into the operating system. The new DX10 drivers will work seperately from the Vista OS. This is apparently what allows all the new features. However, developers currently working on DX10 games are using a special version of XP that is fully DX10 compliant. The obvious conclusion is that MS doesn't want to make our copies of XP fully DX10 compliant, so if we want the latest and greatest graphics we'll have to buy Vista.But anyway, it looks like to take full advantage of FSX we'll need to upgrade our operating system and our graphics card. That's not something I'm prepared to do just yet.Maybe sometime next year.

These are my system specsDell Lattitude D810 64MB ATI Mobility X300 1 GB mem 80 GB 7200 rpm disc 1.83 GHz Pentium M (equal to a 2.1 Pentium or so).I have found that the performance of my addon aircraft is significantly better in FSX than in FS9. If I turn off Autogen (because of known bug), at Medium High settings plus increasing the texture resolution to 1m, I lock it at 15 fps and it is rock solid there. I could probably turn it up. If I turn up autogen 1 notch, I immediately lose about 7 fps, but after about 2 minutes it settles out and goes between 12 and 15 fps. You have to wait quite a while, but it eventually does settle out. I would really love to see a new version of the demo with the autogen fix. Given that, I believe FSX will, for the same value I get out of FS9 I will get at least as and more likely better performance.My two biggest concerns are that it appears FS98 gauges are no longer supported, and so far I don't like the aircraft chooser menu. Also, the shore lines look pretty primitive. I am used to the UT series and Holger's stuff. Good thing is, if the quality of FS shorelines doesn't improve, the addons will be there to do it. Finally, I'm worried about the interaction of the new textures and the road systems. I really like having accurate roads, and like to have them all on. I'm afraid, however, that the new textures will make this look awful as they will probably have too many roads in them. We'll see. I know Alan Kreisman is working on a product which may have a big impact towards fixing this.The lack of support for FS98 gauges is a biggie. It means Bill Lyons' especially and many other addon aircraft I currently use will no longer have full panels. Along the same lines, many of the textures on Bill's Quad City Challenger don't seem to be working, but that issue needs more investigation and given the state of the demo, I'm not so worried about that. I know he puts a lot of textures in the texture folder, perhaps FS no longer looks there for textures on aircraft (too bad if true). The second issue is pretty low on the radar, but I hope it can be fixed. Hopefully it's not done yet. In FS9 I have probably 80 addon aircraft loaded each with on average 4 or 5 variations or more. The interface does not remember my last filter settings, and none of my addon aircraft have thumbnails. Unless an automated tool is created to make the thumbnails, I would much rather have a text interface like before, and the 3D image up front like before. And it really needs to remember what the filter was set to before. An option to turn off the thumbnails would be nice, similar to the classic explorer interface.That's it so far. I've still got some exploring to do, haven't really tried the missions yet. But so far I am impressed and pretty happy. Overall, I'll think I'll buy it soon after it comes out, and that it will be quite usable right out of the box. I have no intention of improving my computer till probably late next year. I might do it sooner, but cash is a big issue right now.Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)

BTW, my screen resolution is set at its native 1920 x 1200.Yes, the problem with the textures on the Challenger was that the FSX demo does not look in FSXtexture for textures. When I moved them to the aircraft texture folder, it worked. The lack of support for FS98 gauges is still a problem.Ooh, one other niggler. That desktop icon has got to go. It looks awful. :-)Thomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)

Unsigned?Sound advice, thank you.

When fs9 came out I jumped ship with glee - finally I could get rid of fs2002's aweful blue band of a horizon - I really, really hated that thing - blighted the entire fs8 world for me.As a heavy iron guy I've no such compulsion to jump this time - I'm pretty much hitting my personal saturation point re visuals. Visually my main pull in the demo is the ground - it looks like FSX has done for ground what fs9 did for sky. I know fs9 clouds are all spinning bitmaps but they LOOK good :), and the same principle seems to apply in FSX anyway.I too can easily wait as long as it takes for my current payware heavy iron to work (flawlessly) in the new sim next year sometime. Plus I'm really interested in the PMDG A320 and NGX for FSX only - they'll take a while.I may run both just for fun - who knows maybe FSX will finally convert me to GA in the meantime. For now though I am more than content. regards,Markhttp://i14.photobucket.com/albums/a319/mar.../sup_banner.jpgXPHomeSP2/FS9.1/3.2HT/1024mb/X700pro256