Here we are less than a week before the "official" release of FSX and it is deja vu all over again. It's like the Bill Murray movie "Groundhog Day". The alarm goes off and you hear that same Sonny and Cher tune over and over again. People are threatening to not buy FSX because it does not perform like FS2004. We heard the same thing when FS2004 came out because it did not perform as well as FS2002. People threaten to leave the hobby because they refuse to buy or can't afford to buy a new PC that will run the sim to their liking.I've figured out that there is a proper way to enjoy Microsoft Flight Simulator. There is a method to the madness of this hobby we all so dearly love...It is a fact that today's hardware will not run FSX the way it should be run. But look at how well today's hardware runs FS2004! It is a mature product, has been patched, and the addons are plentiful. To me FS2004 is a complete package for TODAY. FSX is a sim for TOMORROW.Wait until Flight Simulator 11 comes out and then buy a new PC or upgrade hardware. Windows Vista and DX10 will have been out for a few years. You can then run FSX on the OS and hardware it was meant to run on. You'll be to say..."I just bought a new pc that runs FSX and all these great addons and I get 60FPS."Buy the newest version and enjoy it the best you can on your current PC. When the next version comes out, buy a new PC or upgrade your hardware with the intention of making the prior version scream. At that point the prior version will be mature, patched if needed, and the addons will be plentiful and awesome. It will be the sim for today and the new version will be the sim for tomorrow. Enjoy the current release and prior release side by side with an understanding that there will be limitations with the current release until hardware can catch up. FSX will someday be the complete package like FS2004 is today.Buy the new version when it comes out. You are supporting the product and the developers so the Flight Simulator franchise will continue to have life injected into it. If we don't, then we can say goodbye to any new versions. Look at history. There are so many software titles that have come and gone. No other software game title can say it has a 25 year history!

I disagree here : FSX does not even use current hardware to it's fullest. I have an E6600 with 2gb and a x1900xt.From that config, the only hardware that gets fully used is the memory.FSX only uses 1 core, the other one just sits there doing nothing. You can easily see this in the taskmanager. Furthermore the 48 shaders units in the x1900xt card, do not even get a slight work out. If i run FSX for 30 minutes the ventilator on the x1900xt still runs in silent mode. By comparison ; if i run Company of heroes for 5 minutes, the card really heats up and the ventilator is blowing away at high speed. The ventilator not even speeding up is a very good indication that the card is not at all maxed out.So waiting for the next generation of hardware, while the current one is just on the market, will not help much.As long as FSX leaves half of your cores doing nothing, and not even utilising the current graphics cards to it's max, upgrading will not improve anything.So next year with your 4 cores cpu, FSX will happily only use 25% of your performance ! FSX could have been a showcase of what current technology can do, as it is now it does not even use half the power that you have.FSX is a rushed and failed product.

Read this before complaining:http://blogs.msdn.com/tdragger/default.aspx The Last Word on Dual CoreWell, my last word, anyway. It seems there's quite a bit of anxiety on the FS boards about whether or not FSX will "take advantage of" multi-core CPUs. I've tried to provide some explanation but it's quickly drowned out by the waves of claims, opinions and speculation. So I thought I'd try one last time to explain the real deal. After this, I'm done. First off, let's just all own up to the fact that multi-core CPUs technology is no silver-bullet magic voodoo that automatically gives you twice (or four times) the performance of a single-core CPU on all applications. Despite the hopes on many 20th century authors and futurists we do not yet have "thinking" computers that can look at an application, figure out what the programmer meant for it to do, and automatically optimize it to make it work faster. The programmers gotta do the work. And that work ain't easy for a game where you need to spit convincing images to the screen dozens of times each second. So what, really, needs to be done? Simply put the programmer needs to divide up computational tasks in such a way that the operating system can "farm out" the work to multiple CPUs. In computer parlance these are known as "threads". The notion of so-called "multithreaded" applications is nothing new since multiple CPU PCs have been around for quite some time. It's only recently, with the advent of multi-core CPUs bringing multi-CPU computing to the masses, that the topic has garnered much interest from gamers. What makes programming a multithreaded application, especially a game, difficult is the interdependecies between tasks. For example, take AI aircraft in FS. I can't count the number of times I've read "why can't FS just use the second CPU for AI traffic?" Well, what's involved in rendering AI? For one thing the AI occasionally need to know "am I on the ground?" For that, some process has to be able to figure out where the ground is--i.e., the terrain system. There's one interdependency right there. Another interdependcy is the AI's use of ATC. ATC needs to track the AI planes as well as the user's aircraft. And the list goes on and on. The net result is that, no matter how many threads a program creates in an attempt to "take advantage" of multiple CPUs, at some point the work on one thread is going to have to stop and wait for something else, likely on another thread, to happen. This is especially true for a game where the application needs to update the screen. Server-applications that can treat requests independently from one another are less affected. Suppose, for example, that AI rendering was delegated to a thread that was dependent on the terrain system on yet another thead to provide it with infomation. What happens when it comes time to render the AI's position? Do you wait indefintely for the terrain system? If you wait too long you'll see a stutter. Do you simply not render the AI but rendering everything else? Not unless you want the AI to appear and disappear and jump around the screen. Hopefully you can see that a multithreaded game like FSX consists of a numerous start, wait, and complete sequences. The big problem here is that when you get too many of these then nothing gets done because everything is waiting on everything else. So where can you use multiple threads? You use it where the interdepencies are loose and indeterminate wait times aren't readily noticable. In FSX we use multiple thread for texture decompression and certain types of file I/O. Consider terrain textures that must be loaded and decompressed as you fly along. Normally new textures are needed for the area at the edge of the visual scene. Using low-resolution versions for the initial display and then loading higher resolutions in the background works because texture swapping in the distance is not very noticable. In other words, it doesn't a matter if a texture is available immediately or several frames after it's requested because you likely won't notice the delay. The good news is that these threads can be "farmed out" by the OS scheduler to multiple CPUs or cores. The bad news is that requests are made with varying frequency so the overall CPU utilization will also vary. In other words, those of you running the FSX demo and looking for 100% utilization on all your cores can just stop--you're not going to see it. You'll see a lot of utilization when you first load a flight (and we force requests to complete) and less as you fly along. As we continue to evolve the code base we'll continue to look for areas where thread offloading makes sense but changes in the area can have unexpected results so it will take time to decide what works best. And, oh, when you find a game that does use all that horsepower all the time, please let me know.

>People are threatening to not buy FSX because it does not>perform like FS2004. We heard the same thing when FS2004 came>out because it did not perform as well as FS2002.Hi,With all due respect, you couldn

I understand the difficulties of programming for a multi-core setup, however other games seem to be able to utilise the available processing power much more than fsx. Does this mean that MS has bad programmers ? No of course not, just not enough time / resources to fully make what FSX should have been.Furthermore the biggest dissapointment is not so much the underusage of the available cpu-power, but almost total lack of use of the abilities of the current crop of top graphics cards. As i said before, my x1900xt is not taxed at all by this game. Therefore i think that throwing extra hardware at FSX in the future will have little to no use :- Increasing the number of cores, as seem to be the strategy of both Intel and AMD, will have little to no use at all in increasing the performance of FSX. - Buying a DX10 card when the come out has no use at all, since FSX does not even use the abilities of the current top DX9 cards. As both nvidia and Ati are focussing on more and more shader units, 48 already in the x19x0 ati series, FSX will not benefit as it does not seem to use much of the available power of today's cards.FSX is not bad, it is the best civil flight sim for little money. However MS has focussed too much on backward compatibility instead of producing an graphics wonderpiece.For me a civil flight sim should be all about the graphics, let face it what else is there to flying around a bit on a PC ?It used to be that flight sim's on the pc were at the cutting edge of technology. The Janes series, Longbow2 and Falcon come to mind. Unluckily nobody seem to make any militairy flight sims anymore.The only flightsim on the horizon was FSX, and that has not impressed at all.*sorry for any spelling mistakes, english is not my first language*

Problem is that they never realy had the time to explore and implement beter multi-core support. Read the even later latest word on multi-core support:http://blogs.technet.com/p-12c_pilot/archi...ce-Anxiety.aspx"Better multi-core support was seriously considered but the risks associated with taking that route were too great to dive into when trying to finish the product. For us we had to get the product stable for shipping and trying to debug such a complex product on multi-core would have de-stabilized all of our efforts and pushed out the release date an unknown."

>- Buying a DX10 card when the come out has no use at all,>since FSX does not even use the abilities of the current top>DX9 cards. As both nvidia and Ati are focussing on more and>more shader units, 48 already in the x19x0 ati series, FSX>will not benefit as it does not seem to use much of the>available power of today's cards.It was claimed by an Aces team member that the new DirectX 10 API (which is very different from previous DirectX API's) will improve the flow of data from the processor to the GPU and this seems to be the biggest bottleneck at the moment.Don't know if this wil help us in the end. It would take an upgrade of the OS to Vista and new DirectX10 Graphics hardware to find out. In my mind there where many promisses of improvement in FPS after our first reaction to the demo and Beta. Seeing the end product run on a friends PC I feel those promisses where somewhat empty.

I would have to say I agree with this statement.Dave

Falcon 4 Allied Force is a stellar example of a flight sim using dual core.

I read the title, and thought this thread would be about running FS while drinking some good tea. "Proper" tea, that is.RhettAMD 3700+, eVGA 7800GT 256, ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, etc. etc.

Personally I'm hoping that we have another AvSim boycott, a la FS98. Or was it FS2000? Anyway, that was awesome.

>Personally I'm hoping that we have another AvSim boycott, a>la FS98. Or was it FS2000? Anyway, that was awesome.Mike,You need to consider hiring a PR guy. It obviously isn't working for you.Jim

Yep kind of an odd thing to say to thousands of consumers.:-( Must be a joke hope so just missed adding the smilies face.

>With all due respect, you couldn

>Yep kind of an odd thing to say to thousands of consumers.:-(>Must be a joke hope so just missed adding the smilies face.I doubt if the smilies are missing by accident. Mike has been making numerous sarcastic posts that are not doing any favors for his former team mates. And as an "old timer" developer, I do not appreciate it.Jim