From this article: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html...W50aHVzaWFzdA==I like this quote:"Within those procedures are limitations of how many objects you can show onscreen at one time in one frame. Objects can be anything in the game, a character or tree for example. Current limitations are around 500 objects in one frame. Anything over that and you can run into severe CPU bottlenecks. The game content developer has to carefully balance the game so they don

> I'm expecting more like a 10+ FPS gain. :) Wishful thinking, I know. Your joking right?

I have an older computer (well, did, until my HD failed last week) and it's a PIII upgraded to a 1.2.I ran FS2002 and it was pretty bad.I ran FS2004, expecting it to be worse, and it was surprisingly better.Why not the possibility of vastly better performance? Yeah... I agree to some point, 10fps gain seems a little unrealistic to expect.That said, I gained noticeable FPS gain plus a much smoother presentation, even at 15fps, than anything before.I feel pretty secure in guessing that optimising performance is also an important thing to the dev team, knowing that most people will not go buy a new computer, or a significant upgrade (50% cost of computer?) just to run Flight Simulator.Most people -here- would, of course, but we're not a representative sample.. I think.Andrew

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/sim/microsoftfl...s.html?mode=allThat link is an interview with Chris Donahue (Group Manager - Windows Gaming and Graphics). He claims that DX10 will cause a 6x increase in performance since it isn't backwards compatible. So, I don't think a 10fps increase is expecting too much. Of course, there will be more stuff so the extra goodies will take their toll.

I'm talking apples to apples. Using DX10 hardware with a DX10 patch, same ingame settings and graphic settings. Just between DX9 & DX10 differences. DX10 takes away alot of limitations and bottlenecks that can hamper performance. I feel that 10FPS is a good estimate, and possibly on the conservative side. On the other hand, once DX10 is enabled, and we get the extra performance, the new DX10 features will add to the eye candy and take that performance away. Which would be ok, as the framerates will still be high, and the visuals will be mindblowing. Vista, DX10 and the games for them are going to be a huge leap all at once. I wouldn't be suprised about a quad-core CPU launch at the end of the year, either (well, I'd be happy for it, although I doubt it will happen until mid-2007). ATI & NVIDIA are going to push out their best for Vista. A OS that works best with DX10 hardware, newer games that are going to use it; I'm sure they are going to put their best foot forward. I'm not too worried on the GPU front.

" I wouldn't be suprised about a quad-core CPU launch at the end of the year"Yeah... but it'll be a Mac... hee hee...----Andrew

10 FPS is not a good estimate, it will be alot greater ;) Even considering marketing factors we can expect a much bigger boost than that. And compared to Xbox, the DX10 graphics will be far superior. Multi core CPU won't even be necessary either.

PC509 said this, and I'll echo it:Just keep in mind that the 6x performance improvements are for certain graphics functions, not ALL graphics functions and certainly not all functions required for a computer program to work. Also, by adding some of the new features that DX10 enables, developers can use that "performance increase" to display better looking effects, rather than leveraging it for simple speed improvements. I'd expect a marked speed improvement if all the "sliders" and features were to remain equal. But if developers begin adding in additional DX10 features that actually USE the GPU as they are describing, I think we'll get similar framerates as we do today but with a DRAMATICALLY improved images. I'd be more than willing to be incorrect, so long as we get dramatically improved images AND dramatically improved frames! :) But the pragmatist in me things, like in most other computer improvements, it's either one or the other. -Greg