>The landclass in many places is just dead wrong; the deserts>are bright yellow, places that are jungle in Africa are>semi-arid plains and one more time, the water textures are way>off. I get the impression that the scenery was designed to>look exciting, not realistic.>I could not agree more. Poland for example is a desert country. All yellow sand. :-( Where are the rivers btw??? They existed in FS9, now they are gone.Ireland is also dried up.The "localisation" guys should not get paid. Very poor job and a step back from previous versions.

When I said a solid base I was referring to the basic graphics engine, which I should have clarified. Despite serious framerate problems and some odd autogen choices, I think they've improved on FS9's engine tremendously. We just need much punchier hardware to get the best out of it. In FS9, visibility was handled terribly, mountains popping in and out of the horizon, texture loader could never keep up, white/brown squares, total stutter fest, ground poly tearing, little terrain detail beyond 15 miles from you, VCs that took forever to load on view switching, terrible gauge update rates, GPS that would occasionally get lost and not update for minutes, stupid extended texture ring with stupid colour change where it meets the low rez world model somewhere out around 70 miles....the list goes on and on and on. FSX doesn't do any of that crap, nor does it give me a case of the blurries nearly as much as FS9 did. For that suspension of disbelief, I'll tolerate a semi-slideshow in the near term, if not like it. Probably should have been optimized more, but hey, so should every piece of software ever written. Its what we got, so we make the best of it. That said though, their definition of 12-21 fps as "flyable" is way off the mark I think. 25 is "flyable", 30+ should be the goal.And I have an AMD processor as well, and yes it "underrates" it at first due to its lower reported clock speed just as the dev team said it would, so just change the settings, no big deal.And yeah, it would have been nice to have it geared more towards dual or quad core processing, but if you look at the thread dependency inherent in a flight simulation, it would be a bloody nightmare to do. Even if they managed to pull it off, how would it then run on single core systems? Probably terribly. We're in a transition period in the processor and OS worlds. I'd guess that Aces had to find a way to straddle that particular speedbump, and this is what we ended up with.The land bridges and various anomalies were to be expected by their move to the navteq database, again, it'll get fixed, probably by end users and the addon community before Aces gets around to it. Landclass was never a strong suit, which is why few people use the default landclass in FS9 at all. All the replacements were an upgrade. Yeah the textures are funky, but they were just as funky in FS9, hence the popularity of Ground Environment and FScene. FS9 dayglo water anyone? Glad that's gone. A large body of water is just about the biggest pain in the arse for an artist to recreate. It's the ultimate chameleon, changing its properties based on light, depth, incidence angle, temperature, silt, plankton content, and the position of the viewer. I'll forgive any artist for not getting it "perfect" because no one can. I think they did a respectable job on it all things considered. Not real fond of the "pop" when its wave cycle finishes, but suspect that can be fixed.Its no secret that the addon community has trumped MS's own artists work repeatedly since FS2000. I don't care what art MS puts in it as long as it's efficient, which in the case of terrain, great job, in the case of autogen...eh..not so much. :) The addon developers will probably improve it over time in many subtle ways, and MS knows that. The less time they spend making it look perfect out of the box, and the more time they spend making it run smoother and faster the happier I am.Since FS4, each release of Flight simulator has been more of a "platform" with semi-placeholder art than a complete and finished product really. Much like an OS to its software. Doesn't bother me. Seeing it improve over the years is half the fun.

>Did you notice the multiplayer with shared cockpits, tower>view, missions, smoother gauge response , multiple views and>head latency, better flight models, new avionics (g1000,stec>autopilot), sharper vc views and faster instrument response>there, ability to save multiple cfgs depending on the>performance you want, new detailed airports of shareware>quality....>>Just some differences off of the top of my head that have>nothing to do with textures...>>You might want to check out some of my real compared to fsx>pictures in the screenshot forum as far as how it compares to>reality.>>By the way-I agree on the water. I leave it at 1x not for>performance-I just don't think the fancy water effects look>that real.>http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpgGive DX10 a chance before we go slamming the water textures

This is the first time I've seen it referred to as 'FSuX' on this forum. I also hope it's the last. It's insulting to the team who have worked very hard and long to bring out what is a pretty amazing new version. Best regards, Chris

Let's see. As far as I know there have been 2 Demo versions as well as one Beta version available for the public to download, install and use. You should have tried prior to your purchase. Then you could have used the money you saved for spelling lessons. ce

> Let's see. As far as I know there have been 2 Demo versions>as well> as one Beta version available for the public to download,>install and> use.> You should have tried prior to your purchase.> Then you could have used the money you saved for spelling>lessons.>> ce> >Yes but how does the latest beta compare with the release version performance wise, I'm hearing reports of a 30% drop in FPS between last demo and the release version when comparing them like for like same airport same settings.John

Good question. I can't answer because I have to wait till Tues. to hopefully get the retail copy. ce

HiLet us know how you find the retail version,cant believe I,m saying this But I'm waiting for the dust to settle.Two worries for me1 Is there any changes from demo 2 to retail performance wise2 Looking at screen shots there is a lot of Desert textures in FSX?Some airports stand out like sore thumbs.On the plus side20 FPS is FSX in the DEMO is liquid smooth, I mean really smoooooth:) both in flight and when making those tight turns while taxiing , 20 FPS in FS9 does not compare .5.1sound not many people mention it but It makes a huge difference.The 1Metre textures I've saw them and I cant go back.If the performance is as good in demo 2 as retail I would get it tommorow.Lets see how things go.CheersJohn

Let's see. As far as I know there have been 2 Demo versions as wellas one Beta version available for the public to download, install anduse.NO comparison. I tried the demo which had water, water everywhere. When I bought FSX Deluxe and started at KSEA...ouch I could hear the sound of my fps being crushed because now here was the real deal. Simply could not tell from using the demo alone.