I hear you on the AMD price for their dual cores, really too expensive. AM2 as it is now is not much of an improvement performance-wise, which is why I stuck to socket939 for now. But AMD's quad core processors are definitely interesting. They're also planning on making them inverse-multithreading (my poor way of trying to say that one thread will be shared by more than one core, so the opposite of classic multithreading).AMD will have a rather large problem when Conroe hits the shelves. With the performance and pricing, if it lives up to it's expectations, then AMD will have no choice but to drop their prices on their X2 processors. It's either that or lose an important share of the market. Many are considering an upgrade this year, especially with Vista looming just around the corner. If AMD can't keep up this year, it will have a long and hard road of recovery ahead...Just my 2 cents :)

I think that the obvious has not been stated.Microsoft see FS as a two or three year product. This means that if it were to run perfectly when introduced it would look way behind the times by the end of its run. What they seem to be very good at is delivering a product that will run on hardware that is available on the day of introduction but has the headroom to keep ramping up for the better hardware as it becomes available and plateaus just before the next FS becomes available. I can almost guarantee that you will not be able to have sliders to the right & a good frame rate on any machine that you can buy at the date of introduction let alone one that you can buy now.Microsoft must have very good links to hardware manufacturers & I am sure they know much more about where hardware is going than most of us. Trust me (!!!) you will want a better machine than you can buy when FSX comes out.Chris

Why>develop new products when consumers are happy with the current>one. ? So the consumers keep buying your brand product, no matter who or if there are competitors...Is windows not the only payware OS?

> This means that if it were to run perfectly when introduced it would look > way behind the times by the end of its runMax out the settings in fs9 and then compare the terrain to recent PC titles. Your comment makes no sense. > What they seem to be very good at is delivering a product that will run on > hardware that is available on the day of introduction but has the headroom to > keep ramping up for the better hardware as it becomes available No they didn't plan it that way :-lol The technology simply wasn't developed enough. Heck it took 10 years until some guy realised the graphics processing should be done on the graphics card. With that discovery and a raft of other improvements, we can expect a performance at least as great as the next gen game consoles, and alot better than you anticipate.> Trust me (!!!) you will want a better machine than you can buy when FSX comes out.Everyone is aware DX10/Vista won't be available until the new year. We don't need to trust you :-lol

>> Trust me (!!!) you will want a better machine than you can>buy when FSX comes out.>>Everyone is aware DX10/Vista won't be available until the new>year. We don't need to trust you :-lolChrisE is right, you are wrong.When FSX will come out, maxing all sliders out will yield very poor frame rates even on the most powerful machine available at the moment of release. It's always been that way for every version of FS, it will be that way for the next one. It's a commercial choice, nothing more nothing less.Marco

I'm a "wait and see" on this one.Here's the framework though-Wait until Q1 2007 for a DX10 card/Vista (price/performance of course)Let Conroe shake out (AM2 is only a socket update that will allow for dual AMD processors on that platform- a pair of X2's in one mobo) It's not a CPU archetecture change. Conroe is still not in th hands of 'real' users yet. If you beleive what you've seen, it even toasts and butters bread... Reality has still to set in along with avaiailibility.Decide from there. We know that Video memory=good with FSX. Does that mean 256? 512? Who knows today. We don't even know what DX10 will bring to FSX just yet. Maybe Jason has seen it in emulation, but I saw that Night is not even ready yet (really? not ready? it's only half of the day!) We also know that multiprocessing=good for FSX. So dual core is almost a given.So much speculation, so little time...

>>We also know that multiprocessing=good for FSX. We do?Did I miss that somewhere?Rhett

It was mentioned by (I think) Jason somewhere that FS9 as well as FSX will take advantage of multiple CPU's via Fibers. As for the performance gain, I can't comment since I do not know.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_%28computer_science%29

Hate to say this but I just read some amazing info over at anandtech.com from the Computex 2006 show in Taiwan: DirectX10 cards are gonna need 300watts of power :-eek .....and Conroe won't be available to the masses until 2007 in quantity. Before then it will be eaten up by the big PC sellers (HP, Dell, etc....)...and if you get one, it might cost you a premium.Oh well, at least we can bank on FSX for the holidays :-)

>ChrisE is right, you are wrong.>>When FSX will come out, maxing all sliders out will yield very>poor frame rates even on the most powerful machine available>at the moment of release. It's always been that way for every>version of FS, it will be that way for the next one. It's a>commercial choice, nothing more nothing less.>>Marco>Sorry, you are wrong as well with this blanket statement. FS9 ran better and smoother with sliders maxed on the same AMD 1.8 rig I had FS2002 on when released and I know others with similar experiences. I'm not saying FSX won't run like crap with all sliders maxed, but seeing my past results and what current machines that all the shots, and E3 footage was taken on, I am expecting the best.Regards, MichaelKDFWhttp://www.calvirair.com/mcpics/tfbeta.jpg

>ChrisE is right, you are wrong.Marco,No one is right and no one is wrong because FSX hasn't been released! Please check your facts about the history of FS before you make speculative statements about a future release. Certainly one can guess the next version will be similar to the last, but to say that it will be that way because EVERY version was that way is rubbish!When FS was first released (version 1), it ran precisely at the current spec of the processor. It was so closely tied to the Intel 8088 design that some "compatibles" would not run FS. FS was well known at the time as the acid test for PC compatibility.Subsequent releases, such as FS3, were woefully underpowered compared to the latest hardware. The philosophy at the time was to release for the lowest common CPU, even if it was 2 or more years behind the current CPU technology. It was unimaginable at that time that a customer would buy a program that was designed for future hardware and would have been considered marketing suicide.The concept of FS running better tomorrow than today is a relatively new idea when looking at the full history of FS. Even the invention of tuning sliders is a relatively new idea in the scheme of FS history.With the acceleration in development cycles of graphics and CPUs, I wouldn't be surprised to see FSX reach it's full potential much sooner than we saw with FS9.

> It's always been that way for every version of FS, it will be that way for the next one.So your theory is that history always repeats itself *:-* Next time think before posting..

>I am no expert but surely the number of cores is only>significant if there are sufficient threads to make use of>them. Do we know that FSX will make use of a four core>processor?It is multithreaded. But, the speed doesn't necessarily come from the application using multiple cores. You can have Active Sky running on one core, FSX running in another (or 2), and have the rest of the applications running on the last. Having 2 cores dedicated to FSX and nothing else would do a lot. It would have exclusive access to those 2 cores. Coupled with 4GB of RAM and a nice DX10 GPU with 1GB RAM (or 2 cards with 2GB video RAM in SLI!), you'd have a system that would be unbeatable. And if FSX ran slow on that, I'd be suprised! Even video cards are starting to hit a wall though (http://www.overclockers.com/tips00975/)This has came up as an alternative to the physics PPU. Why do you need a dedicated PPU when you have 4 cores to work with?Of course, we can hardly use 2 cores, much less 4. Power users can gain a lot, though. I'm looking forward to it. Ever hear of Folding@Home? 4 instances on one PC would do a lot of work! :) (Check out folding.stanford.edu or hardfolding.com for more info on Folding@Home). The Core Duo (Conroe) is going to be a sweet CPU. It's taking Intels approach by doing more work per clock cycle and using less power at that.

Interesting Post!RH

It's a forum, that's all.RH