With MS mentioning new shader technology and a new lighting system, I am wondering if FSX will allow real lighting from such objects as aircraft, cars and airport traffic etc. What I mean by this is, in FS2004, if you switched your landing lights on in front of a building the light would simply be a polygon with a texture that was bright at night and would not actually light-up the building in front or the surrounding environment. Therefore, I wonder if FSX will allow the environment to be illuminated correctly. This also applies to multiplayer aircraft illuminating each other. If something like this does exist then it would be nice to see self shadowing on your aircraft if a multiplayer aircraft taxi's by.All food for thought :)

I'm guessing from reading Taildraggers BLog (:)) that FSX will support DX9 and 10, most importantly the shaders under 10- since that's what the DX team wants to showcase- HLSL 4.0.That also means that to really benefit, we'll need new video cards that suport DX10 and the new shader calls. Consensus is that DX10 cards will be available upon launch of Vista. Whether or not they'll cause our wallets cardiac arrest is still open for conjecture!It's also been stated here on Avsim by Jason, that his screenshots are taken on a P4 with a 256MB video card, meaning (I think), DX9 rendering. Reading between the lines, I think he's not having performance issues with that setup. THen again, he is not piled onto like many of us are!Just try doing a clean install of FS2004 and start flying. Holy smooth framerates!Add your favorite add-on aircraft (for me it's 3- PMDG 737NG, 744 and the LDS 767) You'll still see incredible smoothness!My A64/2400 is still able to keep up with this Frankenstien's monster called FS2004. So mcuh add in scnery and texture replacement, that even I cannot recognize it.There is some DX10 hardware out there- anybody seent the crytek Far Cry DX10 Demo? I am unsure if that is a render, or realtime use of the engine.

<>Er, you might want to read it again.<Did they actually say it was DX10 running on DX10 hardware? I'd be pretty skeptical. But then again, what do I know. It's not like we have reps from ATI and nVidia coming to visit us and telling us directly what's going on. Oh, wait a second... ;)