Microsoft...Ya' didn't KISS.

[btacon 1,829]

Let me qualify this post.* Have been buying and flying the FS franchise since 1984 (Sublogic days)* Am an ex-pilot, ex-air traffic controller (Multiple Sclerosis took my eyesight from my left eye)* Am an avid flight simmer, long-time participant in this forum, and could even be considered a "fan-boy" for MSFS, as there is little, including Pro-Pilot, X-Plane, Fly, etc that even comes close to the potential of the franchise.* Own literally dozens, if not hundreds of payware add-ons. I value the experience, know you must pay for quality* Purchased FSX at 9:00am on Tuesday morning at my local EB. Knew all the FUD going on on the forums caused by the beta/demo/early release. Purchased anyway. Glad I did, cuz there are many good things about this sim.* On the other hand, after spending upwards of $1300.00 to make the "uber PC" for FSX (Core 2 duo 6600, Nvidia 7900 512mb ram, RAID 0, 600mb drive for FS, etc, etc, etc) my FSX experience is decidedly unpleasant. Too much work. Too much effort. Too much disappointment.Compare that to my experience with FS9 on the same PC. Sliders all max, detail exceptional. At least my $$$ and effort did not go to complete waste.My point? On this cycle of the franchise, MS missed the mark. They did not follow the K.I.S.S principle. They did not keep it simple. If I am disappointed, knowing my experience, history, and hardware imagine what Johnny Newcomer will think...two days into the experience, shelf ware...never to be purchased again.MS wanted the "Hardcore" market. Perhaps that is all they will have left after FSX.Not a rant, just my opinion.bt

[Azapata87 173]

I agree, I'm currently in the FAA CTI program, and in my classes there are a few guys who just got into flightsim with fsx.. These are the words of one of them "It's cool, I like it, but it runs slow on my computer"

[aerdt 0]

Agreed. I am well aware that fps is not everything, but I have also invested a few grand to get my rig up to FSX standards and I am getting a mere 12fps on Medium-Low. The visuals are nice, but I have expected more 'dang' out of the box. I don't have the time and energy to browse the forums on a daily basis to apply the latest autogen/texture/cloud patch. If I reduce my settings to an acceptable FPS level, then I am back at a quality level that is almost worse then my FS9 setup - ergo, not much of an improvement here. FSX right now is for me FS9 bundled with my dozen of add-ons (FS Genesis mesh/landclass, GE Pro, FE). On the positive side, the stutters and blurries seems to be history, textures are crisp and much improved, autogen is nice (but... slow), ground traffic is genius, weather is nice.A FS9 PMDG 737 eats a good 10fps on my FS9 setup, so in the wake of a PMDG add-on for FSX, I will be at 2fps? My rig eats up every other game or CPU-intensive application that I throw at it with screaming rates and processing times, but it comes to a grinding halt with FSX. Sure, it's been always that way with any release of FS, but I had hoped for a tad more. I am almost sure that if I throw in my old AMD 3200+ that I could experience similar frame rates as with my new X2 4800+. The new CPU doesn't go any good for FSX. Nada. Zip. Forget dual-core. I guess that is the biggest disappointment, because I bought it for FSX. I don't care if I get 130fps in Half-Life2, but I want at least a stable 20fps to at least enjoy the flight. *sigh*MS knows darn well what went wrong here. Otherwise we wouldn't see the more or less apologetic message on fsinsider.com trying to explain the 'frame rate situation' and explaining in a true MS fashion that "FS is pushing the limits of current hardware". Didn't we know that already. Translated it says "We didn't have the budget to rewrite the FS engine. It might happen with DX10, but we're not sure yet."Why would I need BACKWARD compatibility anyway??? None of my FS9 add-ons work anyway (PMDG, Eaglesoft) or have become obsolete (GE PRO, FE, FS Genesis). I need to purchase a complete new version of FSUIPC for 30 bucks, new add-ons aircraft, new everything. Come on!

[Guest jboweruk]

Unfortunately there's not much for hard core simmers like us either, take away the missions and it's pretty sterile. I thought it was great, but last night I decided to fly the Baron from KLVK to KRDD and I realised that apart from the road with traffic on it looking pretty neat as I flew into KRDD the whole flight left me feeling well, unsatisfied.The idea was great, but I love sitting looking out at the secenery, and last night on a run I've done many times with my CP by my side I found myself looking out the window at miles of Desert, which I'm pretty sure is totally wrong, if I remember rightly most of that Pacific west coast area is temporate and green. They screwed up there, apparently from listening to people Italy and in fact most of Europe is the same, London looks awful, and even though I tried VFR terrain Generation X demo last night it just seemed to make London look worse. So it's aimed at hooking the console generation in, and sorry MS but that ain't gonna happen, not in this lifetime. The 'console kiddies' just want to kill things.My take is that this will finish the franchise, which maybe what MS wants to do, they'll move the ACES team on to console stuff, carry on with their forward plan and kill the PC off for gaming and we'll be left with whatever anyone can do with FSX or FS9 for the forseeable, until someone comes along and realises MS have left a huge hole in the market and produces a fantastic replacement.

[Guest jero]

I am sorry I just do not buy "FS is pushing the current hardware" talk. It doesn't push anything IMHO. How can anybody state that when1. No dual Core2. GPU does not even heat up (I can tell my the fan speeds) the only time GPU even remotely gets going is when the water reflections are rendered. This game does not **Seem** to use the GPU like any other games.I also don't buy any of this "it renders the whole world etc etc"Have you seen "Just Cause" on the PC or the 360? Renders the a whole world (island) that is huge in beautiful graphics with mountains traffic cars boats people all at a juicy 30FPS (360) and 60+ on a PC.That's pushing hardware. All i can say is, if you haven't played it or seen it do so, and you will see what i mean, plus you can fly stuff to boot.No I am sorry, its a bot long on the tooth now all this 0.6 - 10 FPS at airports, it should be at least 20FPS baseline you cant (well I cant) even fly into an KSEA on default sliders as its just to jerky.MY SYSTEM:2X ATI x1900XTX in Crossfire2GB DDR 400 RAMAMD 4400+ Dual CoreSound Blaster XFI20.1 in Dell Wide-Screen Monitor 1680 X 1050Clean Install of Windows XPx64 bit editionI don't think I Deserve 6 FPS in default sliders.

[Guest SoarPics]

Have you seen "Just Cause" on the PC or the 360?And does that game do AI traffic worldwide? Does it allow you to move your position 6000 mi away without any problems (will everything you see at your starting location be there when you move 6000 miles to another airport?). This is an application that covers literally the entire world. Tell us what other game will do that.To be blunt, "Just Cause" is little league stuff compared to how much of the world FSX can cover.Greg

[albx 17]

The demo was a only 2 islands, no planes traffic, animals.. nothing at all and it was still slow... maybe something is wrong with fsx? i still think it doesn't have nothing new and it's just the same old fs with a retouched graphic... maybe after all this years we need something new and not the same old things...Alberto

[Guest]

First of all, I wouldn't call Core 2 duo 6600, Nvidia 7900 512mb ram, RAID 0, 600mb drive for FS, etc, etc, etc a uber PC... (Nvidia 7900? 512 mb ram?) It's a decent pc but not 'uber'. And that is exactly where MS went wrong (well, sort of...): I think I know (and I HOPE I am right) were things went wrong: FS X was supposed to be THE showcase for Vista/DX10, running on Vista/DX10 hardware. I think they made a mistake releasing FS X long before Vista/DX10 is released. I'm pretty sure that WITH Vista/DX10 FS X will be awesome!!!This doesn't change the fact that even if they had waited unti Vista/DX10, all none-DX10 hardware users would still be disappointed in the same way...I only bought FS X because I couldn't wait and wanted to fool around with it. But in the end I bought FS X just because I want it to be on my desk the day my brand new Vista/DX10 computer arrives (sometime next year)! Everything I can do with it now is nice and fine,, but the fun will really start for me when the DX10-patch will be released!

[albx 17]

I don't believe so.. what will you have with DX-10?? new shaders? you'll have a new card more powerful of the today's cards... but i don't want a more powerful engine in my car only because she have square wheels.. I hope ACES can learn that a new engine for FS is needed... How can be so fast other games like Battlefield 2142 with my hardware and i can't decent run the demo of fsx? (please don't say the first is a FPS with a small map and the other is a Flight Simulator, i'm not looking 1000 miles away in the airport sitting on the runway, just at some buildings and the fps are so low...) again i say that the demo is small enough.. not the whole earth.. and no traffic... what's wrong to want a flyable flight simulator? I think that with the today's hardware it can be possible...Alberto

[CanadaOne 36]

>>My take is that this will finish the franchise, which maybe>what MS wants to do, they'll move the ACES team on to console>stuff, carry on with their forward plan and kill the PC off>for gaming and we'll be left with whatever anyone can do with>FSX or FS9 for the forseeable, until someone comes along and>realises MS have left a huge hole in the market and produces a>fantastic replacement.I think that's a bit over the top, really. I have a hard time believing that MS developed this new software at great expense in a suicidal bid to get out of the PC game business.Honestly, I don't understand the gloom and doom. FSX has been out (in general release) for what? Three days? And in that short time people are sheltering in their basement in fear the virtual sky will fall. Good grief. I got it more than a week early and within 48 hours I had already loaded up tips and tweaks giving me an honest 50%+ increase in FPS.I can't wait for a year from now when many of the issues have been fixed and some very advanced add-ons hit the market, we'll be flying the most advanced, gorgeous looking flightsim available and some others will still be in their basements with FS98 loaded up on their ancient computers saying "Oh yeah. FS98 rocks! This beats FSX any day!"Good grief.

[Guest tcable]

I think he means that the 7900 has 512 video ram.It's a pretty high end system.I've seen one game that can use more than 2 processors- Alan Wake. I'm still trying to understatnd FSX multiprocessing- is it 2 threads/fibers? As I undertand it's just a texture preload thread and the main thread.

[gassa 36]

Hi,I have installed FSX two days ago and I have to admit that I'm quite dissapointed.I consider my machine "up to date" (AMD x64 4000+ Single Core, Geforce 7800GT 256MB, 1GB RAM).But FSX runs with 12FPS, sitting on a default airport (EDDM for example) in the default Cessna 172. That's really a poor performance. Think about using a PMDG 747, which takes another 10 FPS for it's advanced system simulation.....there will be 2FPS left. That doesn't look like having fun with an unpatched FSX in the future.I have to mention that all other games I own, like NFS Most Wanted, GTR2, Fifa Worldcup 06, and GTA San Andreas are running with all sliders to the max and 1280x1024 without the shadow of stutters.When FS9 came out, I also had a comparable "Up to date" system. On a default airport with the default Cessna, I easily gained 30FPS without any stutters and with no tweaks installed.I tried all the tweaks that have been mentioned here before. Some of them really helped, but using "tweaks" is not what I'm expected to do when I by a "game" for 75

[McCrash 3]

What he say! :-beerchug

[GHarrall 494]

>First of all, I wouldn't call Core 2 duo 6600, Nvidia 7900>512mb ram, RAID 0, 600mb drive for FS, etc, etc, etc a uber>PC... (Nvidia 7900? 512 mb ram?) It's a decent pc but not>'uber'. And that is exactly where MS went wrong (well, sort>of...): I think I know (and I HOPE I am right) were things>went wrong: FS X was supposed to be THE showcase for>Vista/DX10, running on Vista/DX10 hardware. I think they made>a mistake releasing FS X long before Vista/DX10 is released.>I'm pretty sure that WITH Vista/DX10 FS X will be awesome!!!>>This doesn't change the fact that even if they had waited unti>Vista/DX10, all none-DX10 hardware users would still be>disappointed in the same way...>>I only bought FS X because I couldn't wait and wanted to fool>around with it. But in the end I bought FS X just because I>want it to be on my desk the day my brand new Vista/DX10>computer arrives (sometime next year)! Everything I can do>with it now is nice and fine,, but the fun will really start>for me when the DX10-patch will be released!How so? It has been well documented that FSX was developed with DX9 as that is all they had to develop it with! They haven't even looked at DX10 yet. I wouldn't put all my eggs in the DX10 'basket' if I were you........

[Guest dutton]

Hey Martin, I like the case too - but I enjoy using it better. I have the exact same system as you and my frames are just fine - mid twenties.Just wanted to make sure those who do not have it yet understand that some people are happy with FSX and are getting decent performance with it. Cheers!duttonhttp://dutton.fsblogger.com/