Flight Simulator X Trial Version - Date Published: 9/29/2006 - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads

[frankla 44]

I agree! FSX, at default, without any add-ons and in a sparce area (prince Juliana) is giving my 3.4 GHZ system a hernia!! I also agree that there are no faster processors anounced in Intel's or AMD's road map. Only Quad Cores processors are projected in the next six month. FSX can barely take advantage of a dual core, so what use is there for quad cores? Furthermore, recent advances in Grapchics cards are centered around muliple GPUs which, again, FSX can not take advantage of! So pardon me if I am, also, very pessimistic about seeing this version of FS at high setting any time soon!! By the way, good Performance at 6 GHZ is even optimistic. (So we'll see 12 FPS instead of 6?) :(

[Guest ebk]

Can anyone give me a link to this new demo? I spent about 4 hours downloading at 30kb/sec last night, only to find when I fired it up, that it was the same as the first demo, ie, the Beaver, and no R22!CheersJack

[W2DR 1,860]

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...yLang=en>Flight Simulator X Trial Version . Be sure and copy this entire link including the last five words. Doug

[Guest ebk]

Thankyou, now downloadingJack

[bic 44]

I would be interested to hear peoples Aquamark 3 benchmarks, which is a DirectX test. My Athlon 3200+ / Radeon 9800 XT get's 40,000, while my E6300 OC'd to 2.45 ghz with a 7600 GT get's a score of 93,000. I tried FSX on both systems, but they seemed to have the same default settings. I jacked up the scenery detail to 1 m and water to 2 on my E6300 and it started to get some sluggishness, but the scenery was much more photo realistic.

[Guest cwright]

This new version is a big improvement. Many of the widely-reported problems are fixed. 1. The road traffic is fixed and looks pretty good - though in a way I miss those naked chassis trundling along. However, I did notice that at some places the cars vanish into thin air for no obvious reason - and appear out of thin air at other places. But that's pretty minor.2. Aircraft navigation lights no longer flash at insane rates.3. The well-known dynamic blurred textures problem was much better, though I haven't done much testing yet. Flying at about 100 knots there was virtually no sign of the blurries (on Demo 1 it was very bad). The setting FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.33 is now present in the cfg file by default, and this almost certainly has a major effect on the blurries. However, this setting may reduce frame rates a bit. My overall impression is that frame rates are a bit lower in Demo 2 and this may be why. This setting may well allow users to find a good compromise between frame rates and acceptable blurries. Well done, Microsoft.4. The reflection of the sun's light in the water now works correctly. In Demo 1 the daylight reflection effect somehow got linked to the moon and not the sun (in fact someone published a fix for this: to set the date to coincide with new moon!)5. In Demo 1 some classes of objects appeared in front of clouds, obviously caused by an error in the drawing sequence. This appears to be fixed in Demo 2.6. In Demo 1, sometimes the aircraft navigation lights became detached from the aircraft (particularly noticeable in dustant control tower or flyby views). This appears to be fixed in Demo 2. Unfortunately a few errors/defects remain:1. The mouse buffer does not get cleared when going to other views or menus when using mouse view. As a result, after a small movement of the mouse after returning to the VC or spot view, the view jumps to a completely arbitrary view direction which forces the user to re-center the view. THis should be fixed by clearing the mouse buffer after returning to any view that uses mouse look.2. When accessing the menus, there is still an offset of about an inch between the mouse pointer and its point of action.3. No self-illuminated gauges. (At least, I don't think so. For example if I switch off the cabin lights at night - the L key - then all the gauges vanish). Not very impressive. tdragger implied that there would be self-illumined gauges (when I asked him the direct question his reply was that they were saving the best till last!) Will they be in the final? I hope so.... Overall I'm very impressed by the demo. If you have broadband it's well worth getting even if FSX is only a couple of weeks away. The demo is about 100 Mb bigger, but it took only 50 minutes to download (the Microsoft server was running at about 2 megabits). You also get several new aircraft. Best regards, Chris

[DescendDescend 25]

ChrisAre you sure that FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.33 is in your demo .cfg. I did a search and could not find it so I added it in. When tweaked it does not seem to have a significant effect on frames for me.I did get my lost frames back by setting water to low 2x whch looks okay to me.

[Guest]

Dude, this is the final version. Any bugs you see now have already been cut onto the retail dvds!

[bursco 14]

Here is a avi file messing about in the R22 - warts and all.No editing at all.Everything is at ultra.My spec is a :AM2 4200 asus msn32 sli deluxe2 gigabyte 7900 gt cards1 gig corsair ddr2600 watt p/supplyruns ok with FSX and even when low FPS seems smoothhttp://rapidshare.de/files/35213008/FSX_and_R22.zip.htmlIts 57 meg

[bic 44]

terrain.dll problem fixed. I did several things, (not sure which one actually fixed it):Followed instructions from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/837195/en-usplus doing this:1. uninstalled FSX2. reinstalled it3. install of DX 9.0C again4. updated nvdia driversAs to fps / performance issues, I ran Aquamark 3 benchmark, a DirectX benchmark, on my Athlon 3200+ / Radeon 9800 Xt and got around 40,000. On my E6300 Oc'd to 2.45 ghz / 7600 GT, I got 93,000. What does everyone else get?And yet, in FSX it seems to have selected similar detail/performance options on both. I made 1m detail on my E6300, but it is somewhat slow. Obviously more tweaking will be needed.

[Manny 1,293]

"FSX can not take advantage of! So pardon me if I am, also, very pessimistic about seeing this version of FS at high setting any time soon!! By the way, good Performance at 6 GHZ is even optimistic. (So we'll see 12 FPS instead of 6?) "Yeah.. We can turn the "Bloom" on.:) j/k j/kManny

[Guest ianrivaldosmith]

runs terrible in my opinion, very choppy and blurry, with no autogen or road traffic on!AMD AM2 x2 3800ATI X1600XT 256mb1gig DDR2 667MHZ RAMIm fairley gutted if this is what final release is like :(Ian

[hangar 661]

not that this thread needs anymore replies, BUT.... :-)I too have noticed an improvement in this demo as far as performance/overall smoothness. I really cant tell if its an actual fps improvemnet or just the fact that it flies much smoother at higher settings than i was using in the first demo, but in anycase its better now on my old p4 3.06 gigger...the things that made the biggest difference on my setup was the water detail (have to settle on either 2xlow or 1xhigh) and the AI aircraft traffic in view.This being said, i have to admit that even though ive found settings that let the demo run quite smooth for me now and cant for the life of me understand how its truly going to run in an acceptable manner once we start adding in the much more resource hungry payware aircraft and then fly around in much busier scenery areas away from the tropics, and add in some ai traffic taxiing around to boot...theres no doubt in my mind that the word "slideshow" would be an understatement...at least on MY machine. I know ill be able to get it to run ok using the stock aircraft but thats gonna be about it for now im afraid.If DX-10 will change this for the better then ill investigate at that time, but i just cant see how its going to improve the graphics AND give better performance at the same time to the point where itll make a big difference...i mean heck, better graphics and better performance are pretty much oxy morons arent they?, lolDave

[Manny 1,293]

If it makes you feel any better Dave, The latest Core 2 Duo OCed ain't doing much either... Manny

[Guest cwright]

>Dude, this is the final version. Any bugs you see now have>already been cut onto the retail dvds!Of course, I realise that. But I hope you're not suggesting that when the final is released, nobody should mention any problems that may be found! The forum would very quickly get boring.... Best regards, Chris