I dare say that this has been covered ad nauseum somewhere, but I haven't really found a thread yet. Sorry if I am duplicating - please point me to the right threads..I am (probably!) going to wait until I can invest in a nice new PC, with dual CPU, SLI, Windows Vista and DirectX 10 before I go for FSX. However, I have a couple of questions that some people may be able to answer even now:1. Re. the above, is it known yet if FSX will in fact be able to take advantage of SLI and dual CPU setups? 2. From the evidence so far, do people think that add-ons like FS Sky, Ground Environment, Flight Environment, FScene and so forth (which I have bought over the past year) are going to be almost redundant in FSX? The screenshots of the out-of-the-box product look 'worryingly' good!! I am fairly sure that FSGenesis mesh, Ultimate Traffic and FS Navigator will still be valuable add-ons, but what do people think about the rest?Early days to give definitive answers maybe... Martin :-)

IMO even though FSX will raise the standard of whats available "out of the box" I think third party developers will still be able to "raise the bar" even further.Once FSX is released maybe there will be just one patch over the next 2 years. Third parties are always patching their own products.So I think you will still want the FSX versions of your third party products when they are released. They will make FSX even better!

<>Seems like that's always been the case and I'd expect the trend to continue. (At least we hope it does.)

ACES have really gone the whole hog this time, with graphics especially.You can see that there is a huge improvement with the VC(look at the A321 VC shots!!), its very close to Commercial Level Simulations.I was speechless when i saw the A21 shots, just image in about two years time when PMDG and LDS release the next gen products, they are going to be out of the world....if you compare the default 747(fs2004) and PMDG 747(fs2004), you can see the great improvement.....fantastic...let the dreams begin......

>>>1. Re. the above, is it known yet if FSX will in fact be able>to take advantage of SLI and dual CPU setups? >Yes FSX will take advantage of SLI and dual cpu's. (That has been confirmed on several occasions.)>2. From the evidence so far, do people think that add-ons like>FS Sky, Ground Environment, Flight Environment, FScene and so>forth (which I have bought over the past year) are going to be>almost redundant in FSX? The screenshots of the out-of-the-box>product look 'worryingly' good!! I am fairly sure that>FSGenesis mesh, Ultimate Traffic and FS Navigator will still>be valuable add-ons, but what do people think about the rest?I think that there will always be room for improvement. FS has been that way ever since add-ons started really taking off with FS98.Rhett

I guess you are right - at least, I am hoping so too!But what about the SLI and dual CPU issue? I haven't read anywhere yet that FSX will be written to take advantage of these - it would be odd if they did not though, wouldn't it?Martin

It's been rehashed here multiple times (there are at least five threads on it that have been responded to). Yes it supports multiple-CPUs. As for SLIed video cards... of course it supports that. FS9 'supports' SLI. At this time all SLI gets you is stupidly-high resolutions for toys like the TripleHead2Go, and 16xAA and Aniscropic filtering, I guess. =)

Hi,> But what about the SLI and dual CPU issue? I haven't read anywhere> yet that FSX will be written to take advantage of theseHmm. I've seen comments that it will work with them, but not explicitly take advantage of them. SLI's still moderately rare but you try buying a new PC these days that's not dual-core. It'd be a shame not to use that; odd indeed. Things like AI, terrain preparation and the like could be done in parallel with the main thread, surely. Oh well, we'll find out soon enough.Cheers,Jim

This is true and of course one can say, for example, the ground textures alone in FSX will far exceed everything now used conjunction to inhance our ground textures simply because of the incredible new max texture sizes. Can you imagine some of those same developers providing us with photo quality chunks of land for FSX? It's gonna be amazing but even out of the box it will rock ;-)................Randy J. Smith................CAUTION! My views represent no one but my own. While I do help companies test products - this in no way means I represent them in ANY fashion.[h4]Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations[/h4]

Actually allow me to further elaborate. It was confirmed that FSX will run with multiple threads handling different tasks (AI, etc).

FS9 may 'support' SLI, but if you browse various available online hardware tests, frame rates can even drop slightly when you fly FS9 with an SLI setup. Of course if programmes are not hard coded to use SLI and multi-core processing, you might as well save your money ("future-proofing" apart).By the time Vista is out, as you say, it will probably be hard to find a single core PC on sale! SLI is rarer, I agree, but those games that can take advantage (Doom 3, Half-Life, etc. I think) show up to 50% increases in frame rates. (Relying on my memory of what I've read, but I think that that is about right).M. :-)

FS9 is most often CPU-limited. Games like Doom3 and Half-Life (Doom3 and Source engines respectively) are far heavier on the graphics hardware but still gain little benefit for SLI. SLI won't get you much love in any of them beyond higher resolutions, as stated above. SLI allows you to easily run 1600x1200 with 16xAA and Anisotropic filtering. That's about it. I believe I said, stupidly high resolutions. ;)Unfortunately my LCD has a native resolution of 16x12, so stupidly high resolutions it is for me.

Interesting. But why do you say that games like Doom 3 and Half-Life hardly benefit from SLI? The PC magazines I have read (testing SLI setups), as well as various surveys online, show quite the opposite, with large increases in frame rates (around 20-40% as far as I recall)..That said, I don't play those particular games: the only 'game' (ugh - sacrilege! What should I call it?) I have is FS9, and I have devoted an entire PC to it. My native screen resolution is 1920x1200 by the way - I run FS9 at this same resolution, and even with AF at 16x and AA at 4x I get great frame rates and superb looking visuals. (AA at 8x produces quite a fps drop).Maybe though, as you say, FSX will not benefit at all from an SLI setup - I know FS9 does not. I would hope though that, assuming FSX will be coded to use it, dual-core will show a good performance increase over a single-core CPU.M.