I'm reading some messages on different forums and I'm very disappointed.Every time a new FS version comes out we have the same problem: PERFORMANCE or FPS.I hope someone can answer this question: "What kind of computer should I have to fly FSX with maximum details with a frame rate of 30fps or more?" Why FS is the only software which don't take advantage of the hardware (video cards, processors) like the other games/software?Many games take advantage of the new Intel Core2Duo cpu but not the NEW FSX!!! Why?Thanks.Regards,Max

Max; Read this by Torgo3000, aka Adrian Wood, of the MSFS team, just posted will answer most all of your questions.http://blogs.technet.com/torgo3000/pages/F...rt-1_2900_.aspx

>I'm reading some messages on different forums and I'm very>disappointed.I can imagine - it must be depressing to read all those negative posts while ignoring (or simply missing) the important ones which actually explain why things work the way they work (or link to blogs that do so). I'll try to give you a summary of what I've observed :)>I hope someone can answer this question: "What kind of>computer should I have to fly with FSX with maximum details>with a frame rate of 30fps or more?" As the developers themselves have explained, there is currently no such hardware or combination of hardware around that could fluidly run FSX with all sliders and features at their maximum settings. This is by design; this is the way it is supposed to be. You can throw as much money as you want at the problem and you won't get that kind of performance out of FSX at those settings.The reason for this is that FSX was designed to scale up as hardware gets better over the coming years. I believe the official word on this topic was that with current top-end hardware you can expect to get roughly half-way on those sliders and still achieve acceptable performance.On a personal note and purely in hindsight I think Aces should have shipped FSX with the range of all visual settings cut down to half, then silently offered a "patch" that enabled the full range. This way ordinary Joes could boast about being able to run the simulation with all sliders to the right at 30+ FPS, while the enthusiasts, ever searching for ways to make the product both look prettier and perform better, would have eventually stumbled upon the "patch" and had their hands full trying to balance between visual fidelity and fluid framerates with the full range of detail levels.There's just something about those sliders that make ordinary Joes unable to resist jamming the knobs all the way to the right. For the life of me I can't figure out why. Maybe Aces should have just reversed the sliders. That way Joes world over would experience great performance...Anyway, I'm rambling ;)>Why FS is the only software which don't take advantage of the>hardware (video cards, processors) like the other>games/software?It does, actually, and that's part of the problem. FSX *finally* supports shader model 2.0 and on the visual side of things everything (or so I've read) in the game is run through shaders. This was done exactly because of the reason you mentioned yourself - "because every other game does it already"; FSX simply couldn't afford to be left behind the shader train. The unfortunate downside is that in using shaders FSX actually performs worse than it would have performed without them (once again: "or so we're told"), but naturally without the shaders many of the new and improved visuals we're gawking at (albeit at low framerates) would not have been possible. Not even when DX10 comes around, because shaders are what make for pretty games these days. Considering that hardware WILL absolutely get better over time, but completely re-writing the game's rendering engine at a later time will absolutely NOT happen (the next re-write will be, if we're lucky, FSXI), it's clear why Aces chose to implement shader support into the engine from the get-go and lose some performance in doing so, instead of going for higher performance but fewer visual goodies and figure out how to implement shader support later (if ever)....and we all know what the community's response to THAT would have been (but then again it seems it's the community's response no matter *what* the "problem" at hand is - whine, whine, whine ;).So why exactly doesn't a "billion-dollar" high-end video card accelerate FSX to whole new levels of performance even though the game supports shaders which are purely GPU domain? Because the CPU can't feed the GPU fast enough; if the GPU doesn't know what it's supposed to do it can't do its job any faster, no matter how much "stored potential" it has in its chips and circuits.>Many games take advantage of the new Intel Core2Duo cpu but>not the NEW FSX!!! Why?This is indeed an unfortunate setback, as I was one of those who was fully expecting FSX to support multiple cores (despite the fact that I don't yet have a dual-core system). Long story short, the developers simply ran out of time (as always, though: "or so we've been told"). I'm not a game developer so I don't claim to know how games are developed (aside from "under great stress" no doubt), but apparently the FSX devteam needed to finalize everything BEFORE they could start working on splitting the workload over multiple cores. I guess it sort of makes sense. If a specific function of the game works "this way" early on in the development cycle but completely changes to work "that way" later on, making it multi-core aware early on is a waste of time since you have to do it again. I think. I don't actually know for certain, but that's how I understood it.Someone on these boards (could have been a developer) mentioned another problem - apparently FSX basically runs in a looping thread where every portion of the game - sound, visuals, AI, networking, physics, etc - is given a set amount of time during each cycle to do its thing. In order to translate this over to multiple cores, the loop would have to be broken which would mean changing the whole thing drastically. Assuming this is correct, I imagine by the time they thought of it they simply couldn't do it in time. Could be a hundred different reasons for all I know.Supporting multiple cores would no doubt have gone a long way towards feeding those hungry GPUs, though.

Hi Janne and many thanks for your answer.Anyway I think the FS story should be changed because according to MS theory FSX should go at the max details and fps by 2-3 years when everyone will have a "super pc". But... ya there's a "but"... because every 3 years when the simulator starts to go at the top MS release a new version with "some improvements" and some "horrible bugs"...look at italian scenery in FSX... Italy is like a desert peninsula!Well sorry for my bad words... but I'm a little disappointedBye, Max

I too am a little disappointed for all the reasons above.I have already picked-up FSX retail and don't have any regrets cause heck, I'm a flightsimmer. I'll always support their efforts.However they could have easily waited to release FSX till there was dual core support.I wish they would have simply made a few improvments like multiplayer, tower view, flightplanner, missions, atc, AI, etc.. and still allowed our addon planes compatibility, now that our hardware and cpu power has caught up.Then once the multi core support, expected hardware improvements, Windows Vista and DX10 came along, they could have released a new flightsim with zero compatibility.Seems to me to be a NO BRAINER !!The way it is now there's too much unnessary frustration.

I agree--its a major mistake that dual core isn't supported, for a couple of reasons. First, current gen dual cores are at a severe disadvantage in a single threaded app. My FX-60 is essentially reduced to a 2 year old FX-57 running at 2.6 Gigs. If I had known that when I paid a $1000 to purchase the FX-60, well you can guess I would have changed my strategy. Second, MS claims that FS is geared for future rigs. Well...no it's not. Not at all. Why? Because the future is dual core and even multi core processors. Manufacturers have basically hit the wall with how fast they can get a single core to run without causing a computer to go supernova. So they make multiple cores split up the work and POOF! you get waaay better performance. Several game developers are working on games that utilize this, as we speak. If FSX is single core, well it's gonna be stuck in the past pretty much. We'll never get this thing to run full on, because the tech will never exist to do it.I'm not a tech engineer. I'm a banker. So alone, I am not qualified to make these claims. However, I've spent ALOT of time researching the subject and talking with about half a dozen folks in the industry that all validified my research.FSX is amazing in many ways, but the fact remains that mistakes were made in favor of achieving a deadline. That deadline was set not for fans (who are pretty happy with FS9 and the thousands of $ worth of addons many of us have with it) but to satisfy the bottom line of the company. From a banker's perspective, I don't blame them. As an avid flight simmer (and a CFI who uses this software in my business) it's a major disappointment.

Oh god, I saw the image at the bottom and assumed it was tdragger!