CONSIDERING it's an early build demo and CONSIDERING it is far from optimised, it's excellent.Why?1. When you consider how many objects there are on the screen, you actually get better performance than FS9. This is with EARLY code. When you set Autogen Density to Sparce fly over to some tree canopies and you'll find that there are a huge number in small areas.2. The water is a great improvement over the water in FS9, and has little effect on framerates.3. The aircraft graphics such as the default Baron, even in this early stage, look FAR better than the aircraft graphics in FS9. In fact they actually rival many payware addons.4. The trees are far more varied and IMHO actually do look a lot better than they do in FS9. Fly around in the demo for a while and then have a flight in FS9. You'll notice that the trees in FS9 look a bit primitive and repetitive compared with the trees in the demo.5. The flight physics are immediately better. I'm not saying the aircraft have good flight models but what I am saying is that the external environment seems to simulate more realistic wind conditions and the aircraft seem to respond realistically to them. Set up a storm and fly into the clouds, and you'll see what I mean.6. Sound. Already in the early stages of development (as the demo is) the sound is fantastic, and far better than it was in FS9. Not only do the engines sound better but the environment definitely sounds more "alive", and the wind sounds are brilliant.Yes, it is buggy and as plenty have said it's old code. But PLEASE stop whining and whinging about stuff that's not released in the final product yet. A lot of us here are getting VERY TIRED OF IT.It you really don't like it, DON'T BUY IT WHEN IT IS RELEASED. I know I will, and I know who'll ultimately be better off.Oh, and finally, most computer savvy people know that most entertainment software does push the boundary of hardware. It's a fact of life, get used to it. If you can't get FSX to run with max settings at 60fps, then all you need to do is move the display sliders to the left.I am extremely grateful for all of the hard work the ACES team has put into this next version of FS, and I anticipate it's release.James

bt

BTW, whats that ACES team ??

The Microsoft people working on FS.Hope this helps,Jimhttp://www.hifisim.com/Active Sky V6 Development Team Active Sky V6 Proud SupporterHiFi Beta TeamRadar Contact Supporter: http://www.jdtllc.com/AirSource Member: http://www.air-source.us/FSEconomy Member:http://www.fseconomy.com/

I would say, though, this is not an "early build". If it is in GA on 3 Oct, RTM is coming up pretty quickly.scott s..

Got to agree with the original poster, of course it's buggy but b'gosh I'm sold, I'll be putting down my pre-order from what I've seen so far.

Same here, the more I use it, the more I like it. I keep finding subtle new features each time and just say to myself, "well how cool is that?". It's not all about performance. Ian.

Do not judge the completeness of the build by how "close" you believe they are to release. There are surely plenty of bug fixes and even features sitting out on development branches that have not yet been integrated to the main line of development. Even a major new feature can be tested and refined on a branch and integrated very late in the schedule. I do integration management for a living.Generally in the game industry we see "gold" releases between 2 and 3 weeks before shipment. Even if we assume Amazon is correct about an October 3 release, that leaves 2-3 weeks for integrating major feature changes to allow for testing, and up to 5 weeks to include bug fixes if their integration and testing schedules are similar to those I have experienced.-Brian