I picked up FSX today in the UK and installed it on my laptop - Pentium M 750 (1.86GHz), 2GB RAM, 256MB Geforce 6800Go graphics. I spent a couple of hours scouring the forums here for performance tips and tweaks, and after a few flights with the new FS checking out various areas aircraft and areas I'm starting to think I will uninstall it and return it for a refund after the weekend.Performance... I know this has been done to death already here, and I did not have great expectations in this area. Demo 1 ran horribly on my system, Demo 2 was better. Being conservative with the graphics sliders and using the performance tweaks mentioned in the forums here I can just about get a flyable framerate of 20fps on my system, as long as I stay away from large cities.This same system can manage 20fps in FS9 when running with FSGlobal Mesh, UT, GEPro, ASV6, custom AI, and a complex aircraft such as the PMDG 747, with most of the graphics sliders well towards the right hand side. The framerate can bog down to low teens when flying into a large detailed airport such as UK2000 Heathrow Pro, but in general this sytem can manage very flyable framerates when running FS9 with a plethora of addons. My system can barely manage flyable framerate in FSX with the default aircraft and scenery. It makes me wonder what FSX will be like once the likes of PMDG start putting their aircraft in and the scenery and AI developers start populating large airports with lots of AI.In terms of the graphics themselves, I'm not overly impressed. Flying over my native South East England on an autumn day the terrain textures were pretty horrid, looking nothing like England at *any* time of year. I set up a flight at my local airport (EGMH) to find very innacurate landclass for the area. Manston was surrounded by thick forests of rather garish coloured autogen trees, when in reality it is surrounded by open farmland. The coastline of North East Kent has acquired some new features that aren't very accurate, and flying down the coast towards London I see the Thames has acquired some "land bridges" just west of Central London. Another thing that struck me during my test flights was the visual quality of the terrain in particular was nowhere near as good as FS9, although this is probably due to me using many of the well known FS9.cfg tweaks to get sharper terrain. On the plus side, the new water in FSX is very good, and it seems as though you can throw more clouds at FSX before the framerate starts to suffer than you could with FS9.The aircraft seem to be ok. The new VCs are quite impressive, but as usual with default aircraft, don't expect anything much in the way of systems modelling or detail. Speaking as an avid flight simmer who would like to use FSX as a base platform for expanding upon I am pretty disappointed. It seems as though most of the new features are aimed at enhancing the graphics and scenery fidelity ("eye candy"), yet in order to get a flyable framerate on current hardware we have to curtail these new features, which makes this new version of FS pretty pointless at this point in time. I'm not a software programmer but it seems apparent we have been given a simulator that has now bloated to the point that current hardware cannot cope with it, and it seems this will remain the case for the forseeable future. Perhaps in retaining so much of the legacy coding in the FS series the developers were unable to take advantage of current hardware trends (e.g. dual core CPUs and SLI graphics)?I really would like to find a good reason to keep FSX installed on my system, but as I wrote above, unless I find something to redeem FSX in the very near future I will be uninstalling and returning it for a refund.

I've had the FP Beta since release and I have to tell you, I thought I was going to never use FS9 again, how *WRONG* I was! After a LOT of flying around in FSX, I just find that what you mention is exactly the case. The advancements are not tuned to take advantage of today's hardware which makes us dumb it down. Reflections are great, water is great, traffic is great, textures are great but NONE of them are worth lower frame rates. On top of that I just couldn't fly around anymore without my 777/757 to pick from as well. So now I've got FS9 reinstalled with all the eye candy addons and find myself with the same conundrum. FSX was written with backwards compatibility in mind which is now worthless to those with older systems. The people that spent the money including myself to a state of the art machine who want it all *STILL* can't run with it all or even half for that matter.So again, as you said: "Speaking as an avid flight simmer who would like to use FSX as a base platform for expanding upon I am pretty disappointed. It seems as though most of the new features are aimed at enhancing the graphics and scenery fidelity ("eye candy"), yet in order to get a flyable framerate on current hardware we have to curtail these new features, which makes this new version of FS pretty pointless at this point in time. I'm not a software programmer but it seems apparent we have been given a simulator that has now bloated to the point that current hardware cannot cope with it, and it seems this will remain the case for the forseeable future. Perhaps in retaining so much of the legacy coding in the FS series the developers were unable to take advantage of current hardware trends (e.g. dual core CPUs and SLI graphics)?I really would like to find a good reason to keep FSX installed on my system, but as I wrote above, unless I find something to redeem FSX in the very near future I will be uninstalling and returning it for a refund."

I have seen screenshots of the Thames in FSX (Thanks Roy!). There are strange things in the river that resemble islands, plus land bridges galore.London Bridge is a land bridge (?!)... it looks bizarre. The Thames has "Uphill Water" in places, and looks great for white water rafting ..... :)One bridge is out of position. AI cars would have to jump 100ft in order to make it across :-lolThe Eastern Thames seems to have suffered some kind of "Asphalt Slick" :-lolDid they test London prior to release?! Surely they would have seen these errors!? The approach to Heathrow is out of the question for me .... even FS2002 looks better!! The box will remain shrink-wrapped for now .....

Check out these two threads. They offer a different perspective:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=357915&page=http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=357840&page=Don't be terribly disheartened. Also, like someone mentioned, even turning off autogen provides a fantastic experience.James

I hear what you're saying James, but for me at least, stopping to change the scenery sliders two or three times a flight and chugging round at low framerates totally destroys the immersion for me.I also find it a little strange turning off the autogen. We've had autogen since FS2002, so that's five years now we've had this feature in the FS series, yet we now need to turn it off to get decent framerates? Something is very wrong here.After reading the posts on this and other forums regarding the performance of FSX I didn't have high expectations, but I did think with a little tweaking and not being overly ambitious with the scenery sliders I could get acceptable performance out of FSX. It seems as though I can just about get acceptable performance with FSX if I push it downhill on a good day.I really do hope we get the performance problems with FSX sorted, or that a year from now we really do have hardware that can run it properly. In the meantime at least I think it will be returned to the shop and FS9 will soldier on as my main sim of choice.

I believe the islands come from the mesh. I see the same things around Rotterdam (EHRD). If I choose the higher mesh settings (above 152) there automaticly appear islands in the river. Higher mesh settings give you bigger islands and I believe I also saw a landbridge. Maybe the hight mesh has the bridge hight in it and tries to show it as a hill. Looks weird.Be glad you don't have much tunnels under the Thames. The 2 big traffic tunnels west of my home town are reconstructed as bridges in FSX. Looks bizare!

>I also find it a little strange turning off the autogen.It is not needed, it is an over reaction. What is enough is not pushing the autogen slider all the way to the right. Leave it at 'normal'. With my AMD 3500+ I have no problem with autogen left at this settiong plus in my opinion it actually looks better.Michael J.

I saw all those issues with London with the Fileplanet Beta and was so hoping that it was going to be fixed for the release. I suppose once UT Europe is compatible with FSX then those issues will disappaer hopefully.Have you got a link to those pictures btw?Thanks in advanceCraig

I know how you feel engine room!!It's incredibly frustrating, i am not able to go out and purchase new hardware because i'm currently on an integrated commercial pilot training course, when you've just forked out

I'd keep it if I were you. I will save you the time and effort of purchasing it again in two years when the hardware and add-ons are there to surpass your current FS9 experience/performance.RH

> Check out these two threads. They offer a different perspective:> http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=357915&page="I did so----with every slider in every grouping pegged at maximum.Yes, my FPS was only in the low single digits....One word; MAGNIFICENT!"I'm sure that makes for a great photo op. :-roll No, I have to agree with EngineRoom. I just sent a mail to Tell FS with some bugs and in short my opinion about FSX. I'm not gonna return it, but I won't be using it any time soon, that's for sure.But I still have FS9 and lots of add-ons AND high settings AND great performance...

Hehe, I feel your pain.I just finished 3 years training to be a marine engineer, this August just gone I passed my Engineer Officer Of The Watch exam, but I've still been getting cadet pay. At the end of this month I will be getting my full officer's pay backdated to 3rd August (when my Certificate of Competency was issued). I'm expecting something in the region of

>> Check out these two threads. They offer a different>perspective:>>>>http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=357915&page=>>"I did so----with every slider in every grouping pegged at>maximum.>>Yes, my FPS was only in the low single digits.>>...>>One word; MAGNIFICENT!">>I'm sure that makes for a great photo op. :-roll >Why selectively quote?

Well, I could go into the entire post, but it's not worth it. I don't disagree with the guy, he's right, a 100%. The difference between him and me however, is that when I buy something today, I want it to work today on today's hardware. Not in the future, not on new expensive hardware. It's a great positive post, he's a great optimist. But before you say I'm a pessimist, I'm not, I'm a realist. And well, the reality of FSX is disappointing.And that comes from a "die-hard" simmer. Imagine what John Doe - part of the new wider target audience of Microsoft - feels when he fires up FSX for the first time."View FSX with no features choked

To keep things fair though, FS9 at least for me didn't run well out of the box either. Stutters and low frame rates forced me to drop settings for that as well. I did have a failry mid-range system at the time and have always been one or two steps behind cutting edge so I'll always be tweaking and comprimising to get FS to run within reasonable perfromance levels.Even today, FS9 is not a smooth enjoyable experience as I'm still behind the tech curve. All those fortunate enough to have high end systems running FS9 at 40-60fps through NYC with UT, ASV, FSMesh and the PMDG 737 have to realize and accept that there a few of us that can't obtain that type of fluid performance nirvana out of FS9.I go through this with each release: FS95 is a great example. My machine ran it well but I couldn't pump up the gaudy buildings in Chicago or NY until I updated my system 2 years after release. I enjoyed that full blown bliss for 3 months before I upgraded to FS98, then it all went to .... Back to the drawing board and turning down settings. Fly, Fly2, FS2002, FS9, FSX: Wash, rinse repeat as they say. As far as terrain and mishappen scenery, that's the price paid for modelling the whole world and one may ask if FS is depending too much on 3rd party developers to fix it. Welcome to the quest for the Holy Grail. Ian.