I'm aware of Second Life but I haven't played around with it much myself. It's possible they have a good LOD system that does well with distant objects, though I think you may be overestimating the relative distances being displayed there. Something I should look in to. SL's rendering engine certainly is less sophisticated than FSX, as far as whiz-bang effects/shaders go.

Allcott,I

It's pretty common for PC games to be CPU limited vs. GPU limited. The design of a program's rendering engine will affect which piece is the bottleneck. Ideally it would be 50/50 split, but few games achieve that. In our case the CPU is the bottleneck - it takes longer for FSX to send information to the video card than it takes for the video card to actually render that information. In addition to enabling cool new visual effects, DX10 will allow us to organize the way we send information to the card differently, such that we can effectively send more information to the card and get it to render more stuff in a shorter time frame.

I will buy the simulator.I just build this PC for this one specific task:6600 core 2 duoNvidia 7900 with 512mb vidramRaid 0 (striped) drives for the simulatorOther obligatory bells and whistlesI look forward to playing the new immersive version of FS. When I want to, I can always fly FS9, which I will keep on my hard drive for as long as I choose too, just like I did with FS2002, just removed in the last year.As the old office poster used to say, "Don't let the B***stards get you down. ACES is not killing the franchise by making these design decisions, you're insuring its survival.MHO,bt

>...I analyzed and gave my opinion of what was written>That's not a "you have to think this way" opinion; it was>simply a rhetorical analysis of what was posted on the blog.>If you (or anyone else) take that as insulting or>condescending, sorry dude, you've completely misinterpreted>both my intention and my meaning.Well, thats the problem isn't it? You seem to be pretty intelligent, so I would have thought you would have done a better job of considering your audience. Not everyone here - myself included - studies communication in such detail. Therefor, I would say that it was extremely likely that your message would not be received as intended. In other words, most "normal" people will see the words you used to describe the blog entry, and interpret them as being directed at the people who develop FS. I know I did.I did not take your post to mean "you have to think this way", so no worries there.>P12C said they/Aces don't know what "the problem is...", why>different people with apparently similar setups get different>results, etc. >That's outright admitted ignorance (lack of knowledge, not>stupidity). One would think that those who wrote the software>would normally be most qualified to figure the problem out>best. That they do not have a solution "to hand" suggests>incompetence.I still think you're a wee bit too liberal with your criticism. Especially given no-one outside of the ACES developer group truly knows the inner workings of the sim.To imply that uncertainty on the part of the dev team regarding the source of a bug being a clear indicator of ineptitude is false, or at least terribly biased (not that my point of view isn't).>Now do you understand the rhetoric? Notice, I did not write>the words... I interpreted what was written.Yes, thank you. But the truth is, you communicated your personal "interpretation" using loaded words that were meant to illicit a reaction. I hardly think its fair to claim, after the fact, that you were merely offering a casual analysis of Paul's blog post. >As for reported results... I assume you have read at least 2>or 300 posts by now reporting "results", some good, most not>so good, in terms of FSX performance. Those ARE results.>Sorry... if you haven't you must be new here and I don't think>you are. You're right, I'm not new here and, yes, I have read the very critical posts about FSX. Unfortunately, those posts containing negative feedback regarding the performance of FSX do nothing to support your claim that the beta team was inattentive, unthorough or otherwise ineffective. I don't see how you came to your conclusion.>Don't read into what I write. I DID write my post very>carefully - including both caveats and disclaimers. I also>stated that I hoped my interpretation was NOT what really IS ->however, given the tenor of the blog and the wealth of>"unsatisfied customers" tacitly acknowledged in the blog, I>said I'm sticking with FS9. Simple as that.To each his own. I have no problem with people deciding whats right for themselves...that was never my argument. My argument is that your "analysis" of the FSX dev team's abilities is unfair and biased.>I won't apologize for either my rhetorical abilities or the>lack of such by someone else reading my words. I did not>insult anyone. If insult was taken, that's not my>responsibility.I'm not asking for an apology. But I do feel that it is your "responsibility" for any insult taken. And yes you DID insult somebody. I think you're a little too smart not to have realized how your message would be interpreted.Nick

Yea, what he said. ;-)Thanks, Brian.-Thad

>While others ask why they need to design the thing that way in>the first place? The only bit of the `world` I am interested>in is the bit I'm flying in. You have no need to replicate the>Upper Congo when I'm in British Columbia, or Alaska if I'm>downunder. It's more about data modelling I guess. You need to find a way to move smoothly *everywhere*. In a 3d game where the world is limited but extremely detailed, this is easier, because large chunks of the world can be loaded into memory - and even if not, then small stops when loading a part of the world you just have entered doesn't really hurt as long as it doesn't happen "mid action". In a sim, any pause, no matter how long, "breaks the bubble".This should still work when people add lots of detail to the world (although, we know that it often doesn't, but in most cases, it is then caused by performance problems of the hardware). The software *is* designed to allow smooth movement from a given point A anywhere in the world to a given point B. And if you throw enough hardware at FS, it would do the job without a single noticeable stutter. Only problem: that hardware doesn't exist :)>After all, it's not as if the FS `world` is a true 3d>environment, is it? Cruciform tress and clouds that still turn>to face you ring any bells?Sure it does, but it is still understandable. Who really cares about trees with 100s of polygons in a flightsim? From altitude, the trees look good enough, although I DO agree that a good level of detail reduction would make many ground objects a lot better for bush flyers.At some time, even this will come, I'am sure.But just making the trees look like those in Oblivion wouldn't work :)Even then, it still *is* a 3d world. The fact that a cloud may be composed of a single polygon (at least, when you view it from distance) doesn't change that - that cloud still lives in a 3d world and the fact that it turns towards you is most likely only just another way of performance tweak to keep the polygon count low.Such tradeoffs are necessary, because hardware has limited performance and can only handle a given number of polygons or texels per second. The difficult part is to decide, where to save these limited resources.

>MSFS in my opinion is drifting farther away from being a>flight simulator. Instead, it's becoming a flight game with a>"simulative" component. If it takes to strip all the new>goodies away to get a smooth performance, then something>hasn't gone quite like expected, has it ?>>Also, I was expecting some new things in FSX like more>realistic runway modelling (in terms of looks, friction),>modelling of icing and ice contamination on the flight control>surfaces, better modelling of the wind (x-wind namely), and>great improvements in the flight modelling. Now yet again,>what we get is more graphics content that doesn't even look>realistic to begin with. And this content is eating up all the>HW resources. Pretty "arcadeish" if you ask me. But that's>just me...I agree on that, but it's pretty hard to blame MS or the devs for these facts. Ultimatively, it sums up to: The product must sell. At least, it must sell enough units to make some profit.If MSFS was designed to only fulfill the needs of the so called "hardcore simmers", it would fail like many, many other hardcore simulations have failed in the past. In the 90s, there were a lot of military flightsims which were designed to be "as real as possible". None of the companies involved is still in the business (maybe, with the exception of Eagle design who started the Flanker series back then).If they would tradeoff eye candy for more realistic flight behaviour, which would, in turn, make the sim harder to learn, they would scare away a lot of casual players, because those are mainly after eye candy and pretty effects. They don't even care about all the things you wrote here, not to say they wouldn't be able to tell you the difference.I think that MSFS has done a good job in holding the balance between being a game and a sim. Yes, for many it's just a video game, for many others it is much more. The good thing is that it is open enough to allow 3rd parties to address the needs of the serious flight simmers.

Well, I respect the logic that you explain.However, if MS is (as you say) targeting the FS as much to "arcade people" as to hardcore simmers, then the HC simmer community should stop expecting features that would make it a REAL flight simulator.At the moment I see expectations and frustrations. Coming from inside my own head, and from others as well.If the design spec is clear: let's not make it a pro sim but a nice eyecandy game, then let's drop this discussion and turn the sliders left and start playing with the new ultralights dropping flour bomps to an empty world.Kind of pointless to discuss the features of a Flight Sim, where the actual essence of FLIGHT is constantly lost in issues that shouldn't belong to the customers in the first place.Tero

Let's be honest, FS certainly for the last 2 or 3 versions has pushed the envelope of what a PC can do, I still got lousy framerates on FS9 right up until I built my new rig, and don't know what I'll get on it as I've not re-installed yet, probably won't now either with FSX hopefully due through my front door Friday-ish.We all knew before it came out we were going to need something we haven't got to run FSX smoothly, so why all the ######in' and moaning, some ppl will get great performance and it'll still look better than 9, others never will, I'm afraid that's life. I used to watch my fps go through the floor anywhere within 70 miles of Seattle for some weird reason. I fully expect the same issues this time around. You want to see poor FPS try flying over London UK in FS9 and watch a slideshow, especially facing west towards LHR.Personally I'm looking forward to it, and like most people I'll enjoy flying through the new clouds etc. And for now I'll put up with FPS that don't hit 100 with all the sliders maxed out, because it's not gonna happen, not in this incarnation. How many of you can get the sliders in FS9 maxed and still get decent smooth FPS over say London or New York honestly? I doubt I could even with this baby I've got now.

I thought you were uninterested in what I had to say.I AM uninterested in your trying to pick a fight. I said what I had to say, I explained it slowly and clearly and you still chose to respond as if I deliberately insulted people without cause.We now know unequivocally exactly whose/what "side" you are on based on your responses to my post. Let it lie. We obviously don't speak the same language. Mine, by the way, is English.

FS has been having performance issues since the day it was created.They just want to sell you Vista and once you buy it, you will be banging your head against the wall again. That blog, like all the other official and unofficial sources clearly states they aren't going to do anything to fix the 4fps i am getting on my SLI system that scored 3d mark scores of about 9450!but keep dreaming. i am not buying this until ms includes that nasa computer with each copy. i've suffered enough with each new version but this time, they have really dropped the ball.

This issue can't be resolved currently by "fixing" some code and magically we will get 60fps....More RAM, Faster CPU, DirectX 10 GPU, and Windows Vista is the fix for this...

I think we can actually have concrete hopes; here's what I've gathered so far: a. FS is CPU limited for many people due to its complete lack of dual-core awareness. It's sad to see it run 100% on one cpu while the other is completely idle. It is definitely very hard to make games multithreaded, but most modern games today find something for that other cpu to do. FEAR, Swat IV, and other games I've played recently manage to use both cpu cores. I think there is hope that the team can get something running on a seperate thread: AI, backgrond traffic updates, who knows. I would encourage the community to speak loud and clear that we need this for better performance. b. Regarding the graphics card, I think it's about having more texture memory, and to deal with that there's not many magic tricks: you either have more, or you use lower res/level textures, and the options are there to do so in the game, and a few other tricks out there too.Now, even though believe me, I too feel dissapointed in its performance, the way to at least go by without being upset all the time is to really just forget that the sliders really ever go much higher than you set them. As long as it looks better than before, that some features are that that got improved, I say it's a win.After doing the tree hack last night, I flew a perfect 20fps from KBED to KBOS on a cessna, passing by Boston. I'd say it looked pretty nice, and water looked great (I use the lower Shader 2.x setting).Just my 2 cents. We need to get a dual core patch pronto and then I reckon we'll be able to bring up traffic! (that's what upsets ME the most. I like having lots of flights around)

>This issue can't be resolved currently by "fixing" some code>and magically we will get 60fps....>>More RAM, Faster CPU, DirectX 10 GPU, and Windows Vista is the>fix for this...>>>You're right, but only the first two have any proof in demonstrated fact. The others remain speculative. But those speculations have been repeatedly made by the developers and their representatives, and all I am asking for is proof that Vista (either with or without DX10), will bring the performance benefits claimed. I don't want theory or technical explanations, I want a demonstration than FSX is currently running under Vista better than under XP, on the same hardware. That is what has been claimed.But if the upgrade path to decent performance includes Vista and DX10, as well as the other hardware, then the whole argument about backward compatibility has gone out the window, or should that be Windows? ;)Also, at this point we have been talking generically about `Vista`. While we have the developers ear I would also like to know which version of Vista is FSX optimised for? Only the developers can answer that, but it has serious cost implications for every single simmer. As you may guys will know, there are no fewer than SEVEN versions of Vista planned for release:Windows Vista Starter Edition Windows Vista Home Basic Edition Windows Vista Home Premium Edition Windows Vista Professional Edition Windows Vista Small Business Edition Windows Vista Enterprise Edition Windows Vista Ultimate Edition (note, those are just the 32-bit versions, no mention of 64-bit versions, which I assume will add another three or four variants)PC World in the UK has recently announced its pricing structure for some of the versions:Windows Vista Starter Edition Windows Vista Home Basic Edition -