>I have not been duped except by that awful ME OP ;-)exactly same sentiment here Randy ;)Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/for...argo_hauler.gifhttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6-banner-beta.jpg

There is a lot of information scattered around in the blogs and forum posts, but this one tells enough:http://blogs.msdn.com/sebby1234/default.aspx"Although BGL files allow a huge amount of flexibility, their dynamic nature does not pair well with today's rendering hardware. Since we cannot assume what the geometry of a model would be from frame to frame within a BGL file, we essentially have to parse the stream every frame and reconstruct the geometry every frame. When dealing with models of a few hundred polygons, the cost isn't too bad but when we start putting models with 20,000+ polygons. The performance impact is SIGNIFICANT! Because of this we have been moving our model pipeline to use a more static geometry format and moved some of the flexibility towards other scripted approaches (such as the part visibility scheme I discussed earlier)."I suspect many other areas of Flight Simulator are redesigned to take advantage of modern video card pipelines as well.This is why I mention above that "you may even start to consider that although optimized from FS8, FS9 has many "code shortcuts" that makes it not as optimized an application you would first think, and then, some of your existing CPU/GPU power may not be fully utilized with FS9." and as an example "Transposing this to FS: say FS9 is only using 50% of your ATI9600 potential right now, and FSX will use 100% of its potential (you know, these video cards can do many tasks simulatenously if told to). I bet you will get better performance with FSX on your existing hardware in this case."Compiling all this publicly available information makes me think that:1) you don't need to change your hardware for FSX, it will run better than FS9 straight from the box (or you will be able to crank up more features for the same FPS)2) you don't need Vista/DX10 for a great (and better than FS9) experience with FSX.3) if you upgrade to Vista/DX10 when available, you may have a couple more features and better performance than WinXP/DX9 (tdragger post below)Conclusion to me: as soon as FSX hits the market, jump on it, you will not regret it! How can we regret something with more features and better performance? If we do, we would still prefer flying with FS5... :-)Hope this helps!

Besides, from what we know as of now the same boxed version of FSX will be usable in an XP+DX9 environment and a Vista+DX10 environment - all DX10 / Vista features will be added through a patch. What exactly is the risk of getting FSX "early" and trying it out on XP?I'm guessing some of those who are now saying they'll wait until Vista and DX10 will feel tempted to give it a spin on their current XP system when the user screenshots start pouring in ;)That is, assuming of course, that FSX proves to be every bit the "next big thing" (Flight Simulator) we're expecting it to be.

Does FS9 use BGL files? What in the heck is a BGL file?Thanks,RH

My understanding is that BGL is a container file format intended for storing files? (sort of like ZIP, RAR, etc) You can find plenty of them in your FS9 installation folder, under scenery directories for example.

I guess we will see if the improvements pan out. I remember before FS9 was released, there was all of this talk about how performance was much improved over FS8, but in real world terms, little performance improvement was realized.Thanks for the information!RH

Hi tdragger,I always love it when you respond to one of my posts - especially with an info tidbit. So FSX on DX10 could be "very interesting"...Thanks,--Tom GibsonCal Classic Propliner Page: http://www.calclassic.comFreeflight Design Shop: http://www.freeflightdesign.comDrop by! ___x_x_(")_x_x___

Actually, there has been great improvement from FS8 to FS9, in having a visually more complex simulator, while showing more frame rates for the sames scenery/model complexity. However, it is not often perceived as it is because "Normal setting" in FS9 (middle of the complexity scale), is kind of equivalent to Extremely Dense in FS8.Having said that, FS8 and FS9 seems to share a whole lot common software architecture, whereas FSX from the information available, seems to be overhauled from the ground up. This alone can boost performance.This reminds me when working on some code to do bitmap rotation. In "just" changing the representation of the data in memory, I've optimized the code by 100% (runs twice as fast) :-) So with a rethought data pipeline and software architecture, you can indeed achieve higher performance on the same hardware, even more in comparision to FS9 if you consider the theory under which FS9 is not optimized at all in some critical BGL/3D key code routines (re: about the new 3D file format and processing described abobe for BGL files).Hope this helps!

But it still leaves a significant (maybe THE) question regarding "very interesting" under DX10, i.e., are we talking eye-candy-only or real performance improvements? I suppose there could be some of both but, personally, I'd rather have a few more frames per second than the ability to see rivet shadows on the stabilizer :-) .Doug

Let's hope you are right. MS have had three years, instead of the usual two, to get it right (or to move more closely in that direction). The screen shots look great. I just hope we get some real, substantial performance boosts from the available hardware.RH

"Having said that, FS8 and FS9 seems to share a whole lot common software architecture, whereas FSX from the information available, seems to be overhauled from the ground up. This alone can boost performance."Actually FSX looks like a rehash of FS9 with updated ground and water texturing. I feel differently as I'd put FSX on the same level of an upgrade path as we saw with FS2k2 to FS9. When looking at the screenshots I don't see anything real spectacular visually over FS9. :-)From the basic look fo the two sims, FSX is far from being a complete overhaul of the code which I'm very happy about (nothing like FS2000 compared to FS2k2). There's allot of room left to improve upon in the underlying elements of the sim we already have(ATC, Weather, SID/STARS, etc). If you go back and look in various forums, most request had nothing to do with visuals and that seems to be where Aces focused on...

>If you go>back and look in various forums, most request had nothing to>do with visuals and that seems to be where Aces focused on...Chris, you couldn't possibly be more wrong... I'll set aside some nice hollandaise sauce to help your words taste better... :-lol :-lolAll in good fun!

As I recall many people have requested better flight models, lessons, AI, SIDS/STARS, ATC, navdata and surround sound too. So you are both half right, and half wrong ;)

>I guess we will see if the improvements pan out. I remember>before FS9 was released, there was all of this talk about how>performance was much improved over FS8, but in real world>terms, little performance improvement was realized.>From what I can remember there were no improvement at all but rather the opposite. FS2004 was noticable slower then FS2002 on the same computer.

>I will install Vista as soon as its released too. I don't>understand why anyone would wait. A simple reason for that could be that they can't afford buying Vista. Buying Win XP is not particulary cheap and I have heard rumours of Vista being more expensive.Another reason could be that Vista requires more of the computer so it would make little sense on the current system.