>Mark,>>To be fair, MS really shouldnt have to worry about other>addons bringing down preformance. PMDG is a great company but>if they were to worry about addons then they should worry>about all addons including Simflyer stuff.>>Maybe PMDG and the likes should start designing there products>to make use of a second core and run within the sim via>sim-connect. Just an out of the box thought.>>>>You're right of course, ironically I've said as much myself before - ACES' primary concern must be out-the-box performance of their own stuff for the broad range of users. My wires were a little crossed - I was thinking more in terms of ACES general committment to keeping 3rd party devs in the loop as much as feasibly possible. They know the 'hardcore' are a lively part of the community.The onus is on them to optimise their code - my hope is indeed that those efforts, DX10, plus the new capabilities of FSX will somehow yield at least the performance we are used to. On his blog page Lefteris has screens of the 744 running in FSX - still a lot to do but I know they are hard at it. Perhaps we may yet even see these hi-end birds flyable with current high end hardware.Either way there MUST be solutions, I just do not see PMDG etc packing it in for the next 3 - 4 years because their products are unflyable.regards,Markhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/747400.jpgXPHomeSP2/FS9.1/3.2HT/1024mb/X700pro256

FWIW this is basically the identical strategy and targets we used for FS2004 when it came out. I gave a presentation on this at the AvSim conference in Reading a couple years ago that goes into the details. (And as for the 10FPS lower bound, that was on our min-spec machine: PIII 1 GHz, 256MB RAM, 32MB video. I doubt anyone here is running with that.)

Right. And as I said above, this the exact same strategy and FPS range we used for FS2004 when it came out. You know, the product that now gets FPS in the hundreds with all sliders right and add-ons?! ;)

>Right. And as I said above, this the exact same strategy and>FPS range we used for FS2004 when it came out. You know, the>product that now gets FPS in the hundreds with all sliders>right and add-ons?! ;)So we should have held off for another year or two on FSX then? ;)

I've always wondered why people blamed ACES for the performance of 3rd party add-ons. Your post here is a refreshing change, Mark.

Co-rrect. See here: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...44694&mode=full

>I've always wondered why people blamed ACES for the>performance of 3rd party add-ons. Your post here is a>refreshing change, Mark.Say what? IS that what people are doing? Or are they saying...that there is no room for addons? Is there a way to have addons like Lvd-D and PMDG 747 and Fly Tampa's airport scenery without consuming processing cycles or to make it use the under utilzed core?Do you know something that others don't?Manny

If you'd permit me a little serious sarcasm, there IS a way, it's called SLIDERS, and there are more of them now than ever :)sigh - I know, I know - I live in hope we will indeed be able to have our Fly Tampas full of AI, traffic and eat our 767 on finals too.regards,Markhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/747400.jpgXPHomeSP2/FS9.1/3.2HT/1024mb/X700pro256

The one that always amused me is adding TONS of AI and saying MS ATC is crap because of go arounds :-lolBetween free and payware we'll bend FSX to our will - like we always do - heck it's already begun in the tips forum...regards,Markhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/747400.jpgXPHomeSP2/FS9.1/3.2HT/1024mb/X700pro256

I'm saying that in the same breath that people are bashing ACES for the performance of FSX tend to say "Even if it's not a slide show now, it will be when I load {SOME ADDON} in there". The flow of these statements make it seem like the responsibility of third party performance belongs to ACES. I agree with Mark's statement that it should be on the developers of add-ons, myself included, to make their programs work within the framework of what is provided, and be responsible for the performance of their own products.You certainly make a valid point, in that the question really is "is there room for add-ons" but the counter question becomes "how much should ACES sacrifice to make room for the possibility of performance heavy add-ons?"

What I see is a FSX that was designed to be ported to XBOX 360I do look forward to the day I can flightsim on my xbox360, BUT NOT at the expense of PC simming. I too prefer to use complex addons.

>Not bad at the top end of that target, but what about when>wanting to use complex addons like a PMDG Queen let's say at a>Fly Tampa airport, let's say with a reasonable amount of AI,Future hardware will open the room for this, for sure.Remember, 3 years ago, when FS9 was released, most machines wouldn't have been able to run it together with most complex addons, full traffic, advanced weather (i.e. weather provided by ActiveSky) and so on.Current high-end machines can run FS9 + a bunch of addons (even very complex ones) with very good performance. Tomorrows hardware will be able to do the same with FSX - as always :)

You are right. Most people missed the whole point. I think 10 is worse case scenerio for the "bucket" performance of your PC! FSX measures your system configuragtion and assigns a default configuration. 10 FPS is the lowest for that configuration. If you slide the sliders slightly back from that assigned default, then you surely will get higher FPS!

Yes. 10FPS is for our min-config machine. 25FPS was the target for "Ultra-High". That's not to say you can't or won't get more, it's just that's what we were targeting. Also, we have many, many different scenarios we test and the actual FPS varies.

>Well, I admit that I don't think the framerates are that bad. >After all the negativity I've heard, I was expecting a slide show.I had the same experience. After reading all of the complaints here I was expecting to have to adjust my sliders and expectations significantly downwards in order to get barely playable framerates. I was very pleasantly surprised to find that my framerates were consistently in the 25-30fps range in the default Cessna Caravan flight in and around Friday Harbor, WA and southwestern BC using medium-high slider settings. I expect performance will improve further once I start applying the various autogen and other performance tweaks that have started to surface.I doubt I will be making the move to FSX entirely for some time - I have too many must-have add-ons for FS9 that haven't yet been ported to FSX - but what I have seen of FSX so far is very promising.Athlon64 3500+2GB DDRATI X850XT