I must say that I am very impressed by what has been shown until now regarding the upcoming FS X and would like thank the FS team for being around on this forum. The major cause of slowdowns I have with FS 9 is the use of high AA settings with multiple cloud layers and/or smoke effects. Will this issue be solved (or not) in FS X by software or driver optimisation (ie telling the GPU not to AA clouds) or will we just have to buy the latest and most expensive video card(s) to solve this ?Jean-Paul

I'm only guessing but with DX9 hardware you'll probably have to turn quite a few sliders down but if you can get even inexpensive DX10 hardware when it's released you'll see a massive performance improvement with FSX.tdragger or PixelPoke I'm sure will provide a much more accurate response.James

Hi James,Thanks for the reply. I do not know if DX10 cards will include such a feature. It just seems to me that AA on clouds or smoke effects is a total waste on GPU time. It would be great to be able to define what you want AA on. Jean-Paul

I know Brian (our graphics/weather) developer did make some changes in the sprite code for cloud visuals to help performance, so you should see some improvement. However, there are some specific DX10/HLSL4.0 features that we want to take advatange of when the time comes.

Thanks Tdragger, that is good news for both the DX9 and the DX 10 versions.Jean-Paul