On the brink of the golden age of Flight Simulation.

[Quasimodo 505]

I remember well FS2004 and how I felt, this is it, Flight Simulation on the Home Computer has arrived:

and indeed at that time it had. As we all know or should know FS9 is alive and well. A retired good buddy of mine, 10,000+ hours of professional eclectic aviation from piloting the ministerial jet to water bombing, said until I recently stuck a VR headset on his head with Prepar3D V4.5 HF2, that's where it ended. The Flight Sim genre was one of the most popular in PC Gaming. It didn't take long for it all to go to WORD NOT ALLOWED.

Well in the last few years that has been changing. FSX IMO after my initial efforts with it back in 2006 and 2007 was not worth the effort. But it did get me started on building PC's. My first build was with a Core 2 Duo X6800. If I remember correctly that CPU cost me over CAD$900. Here is a telling quote from a review at the time:

Since we're talking about the high-end, we also need to step back for a moment and talk about what the future holds. Intel launched Core 2 Duo a couple months ago, but they're not done yet. We have already previewed performance of Core 2 Quad, and the QX6700 will become available in about a month. In terms of raw computational power, it is certainly more powerful than the X6800, but you need to run applications and tasks that can take advantage of all four processor cores in order to see the difference; otherwise, the higher clock speed of the X6800 will trump the additional cores offered by the QX6700.

Ah the nostalgia and the poignant of the beginning of the end of the relevance of single core performance. I have often heard that this was the big mistake the Aces team made. They gambled that single core performance would trump mutli-core and they where wrong. It was all way to far along to reverse that decision and we have been living with the consequences since.

In that system if I recall correctly I also had an Nvidia 8600 GTS:

I think that cost me about me about CAD$250.

Funny how at top end CPU is or up until recently about the half the price it was back then and a top end GPU is about 10 times the price i was back then.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I feel that a thread at this time to reflect on where we are at and what we are on the brink of is appropriate.