Microsoft...Ya' didn't KISS.

[Guest cschmokel]

bt,Thanks for the post. For all of those people tripping over themselves to excuse this product, keep a few things in mind. These aren't the same gripes you heard with FS2004. There are fundemantal performance issues with the FSX engine. For one thing, the new autogen is completely bugged. Tremendous performance hit even on sparse settings.My hunch is, when ACES saw low FPS, instead of digging into the engine to unravel performance glitches, they assumed that the engine itself was fine, it just needs beefier hardware. Well guys, that hardware hasn't even been invented yet.I saw tdragger asking where all the tell_fs emails were if performance was so low. Does he think that your average Joe will call up/email FS if their performance is bad? Nope, they'll just shake their heads and discontinue use of your product, assuming it's a problem on their end.

[Guest dutton]

My hunch is... you are wrong. duttonhttp://dutton.fsblogger.com/

[W2DR 1,860]

The problem with "the patch", of course, it that in addition "the patch" one also needs Vista and a DX10-compliant video card. For 60+% of the worlds machines the new DX10 cards will also require a new motherboard as they are now AGP-only. The new motherboard, in turn, will also require the replacement of the CPU. And don't forget a new power supply as the requirements of the DX10 cards and RAM exceed almost all the existing PSU specfifications. Also, one needs to also upgrade to 2GB RAM to run most anything reasonably well with Vista. So, add all that up and it equates to a new, and fairly expensive, computer. I really feel sorry for Joe Average who was just looking for a good experience with FSX right out of the box.Doug

[Guest davewins]

> The problem with "the patch", of course, it that in>addition "the patch" one also needs Vista and a DX10-compliant>video card. For 60+% of the worlds machines the new DX10 cards>will also require a new motherboard as they are now AGP-only.>The new motherboard, in turn, will also require the>replacement of the CPU. And don't forget a new power supply as>the requirements of the DX10 cards and RAM exceed almost all>the existing PSU specfifications. Also, one needs to also>upgrade to 2GB RAM to run most anything reasonably well with>Vista.>> So, add all that up and it equates to a new, and fairly>expensive, computer. I really feel sorry for Joe Average who>was just looking for a good experience with FSX right out of>the box.>>DougAny links to where you got this information from?? I would like to see where I stand with my current machine. Thanx.

[Cedhed 0]

"Thanks for the post. For all of those people tripping over themselves to excuse this product, keep a few things in mind. These aren't the same gripes you heard with FS2004."Actually they are fairly similar. Low performance and issues with autogen. The autogen on fs2004 was horribly bugged and had many people deleting the default autogen files to alleviate it, just like is happening now. It was later patched and worked great.Currently the autogen is not bugged, just overly dense. I don't have the link handy but there are lines that can be edited in the fsx.cfg file that really help with this. And I doubt there is anything fundamentally wrong with the FSX engine. Texture sizes are too big for what they are. Autogen is set too high, and some other settings are poorly decided. But the code on the FSX engine seems pretty solid once that is rectiified. And once again, I had to do similar tweaks to get fs9 working properly once I first got it.

[Chock 17,769]

The comparison with FPS games is an interesting one, but a little flawed in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I bought Far Cry the day it came out and it's true it looks great and plays great too, but you would be fooling yourself to believe that it is accurately processing an attempt at a real environment, realistic weapon balistics or vehicle physics, or even human behaviour for that matter, all of which you could argue it would be the game's job to simulate if the FS/FPS comparison were a valid one. So when you let rip with an AR-15 in Far Cry, there is no calculation for recoil, air temperature, humidity, ballistic drop, windage, ammo type, gun condition, barrel wear, recoil gas settings, how well you are holding the weapon, whether you have it tilted off the vertical, how you are breathing. And having fired the bullets, are they then assessed for ricochet, penetration, fragmentation, damage to internal organs? Nope, they are not, if they were you could compare what Far Cry does to what a Flight Sim has to consider. This isn't even getting into having to calculate all that for the enemies too. Or what the effect of the weight of carrying the weapons is, and this is merely one aspect of that physical world an FPS attempts to convey.So what you have is the difference between being ABLE to K.I.S.S. and aiming for much improved flight fidelity, regardless of eye-candy.All first person-shooters do in terms of advancement is look prettier, I defy anyone to really point one out that has markedly more human-like behaviour for the bad guys than the ones that were around 15 yers ago, or more realistic physics for that matter, this would be the real benchmark for progress in that genre.I'm not suggesting FS can't be improved, but to compare an FPS to an FS, is to compare Apples and Oranges.

[Guest brian4FSX]

I had no issues what-so-ever with FS2004 right out of the box. The reason being I have a NVIDIA 6800GT. It ran GREAT! The menu load times worry me a lot With FSX. Note: I went back and Installed driver ver. 91.31 from NVIDIA. This would have been the driver out during final development stages. The laggy menu got a lot better, but not 100%. Remember microsoft has "apprived" video drivers they use. Please if Microsoft programers see this I'm not complaining. Hopefully upgrading from 1 gig to 2 gigs of DDR400 ram with 2 lat. will help. If anyone knows any info could you please share.Brian

[Guest captandy]

>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>I agree with u 1000% see my post FSX4SALE similar findings and I also was around in the SUBLOGIC days.I am dissapointed to say the least with their latest effort.They "MS" would of been better off scaling FSX down to an expansion pack for FS9 @ say 39.00.There they could of produced a program with user friendly switches to enhance they ever popular standard FS9.ThanksAndy

[Guest Len]

Correct me if I am wrong but I remember a lot of the same problems when fs2004 came out. The fourms wrere flooded with people getting stutters and poor performance on high end (for the time) machines. Autogen was a large part of the issue then as it is nowAbsolutely false and this refrain is getting tiresome. I carried my P4 2.8 GHz 512 mb ram, ATI 9700 128 mb card over from FS8 to FS9. I remember distinctly posting that the only REAL frame buster in FS9 compared to FS8 was the volumetric clouds. If you maxed the defaults out in terms of settings then you'd get a major frame hit. Other than that, I did not notice any significant frame issues. Shortly after FS9 was released there were bit friendly clouds developed to deal with this issue. So my system faired rather comfortably in the port over. Why I moved, a couple of years later, to my current system is to take advantage of some great addons such as the PMDG planes and EagleSoft products (Citation X) which were the cause of fps hits - not FS9.I think it's a disgrace that numerous aspects of FSX are fps hitters. it is as if (which indeed is the case) that the coding for these extras was tacked on to the current engine without any real thought to optimization. This entire series needs to be reworked from the bottom up. Take 4-5 years if necessary I say and start over.

[Guest jlmurc]

Hey Guys,As somebody who returned it to the store for a refund after 2 hours, I do wonder if this will be like Age of Empires 3, it took a number of patches to bring it up to a good playable standard. In a little over a year it has already reached version 1.09.I really wonder if MS are becoming more concerned with things that run on consoles?John