Hi there all, I followed all the writings and opinions in this forum and thought; I am going to throw in my own two cents. I have been simming since the flight simulator on the Commodore 64 and purchased every version since then. I remember now when I purchased FS 2000 and ran it on a Pentium III with 550 Mhz, how impressed I was, when I finally got 20 fps. FS 2004 in the beginning had a more than mediocre performance on the computer I had by this time, a Pentium 4 2.66 with hyper threading and 512 MB of Ram and a ATI 9200. I remember getting between 10-15 FPS. I purchased FSX right after it came out, on my current specs AMD 3800+, GS 7800 OC 256 mb and 2048 MB of ram I get around 10 fps on large airports ( EDDM, KLAX, KATL) with 50 % of ai traffic from my Traffic X and fsgenesis scenery mesh, In rural areas like the grand Canyon I make it up to 25 FPS, with autogen at sparse and the high detail textures, 100% clouds and dense scenery at 1680*1050. My system is running FS 2004 with all Add ons (Active Sky, GE Pro, PMDG, Radarcontact, Traffic 2005 and Ultimate terrain (Europe, USA) and have been getting around 25-35 FPS depending on the Area, with the limit set to 35 FPS. I made a test flight from EDDM to LIMC on both simulators, both with active-sky, in FS 2004 the Jet ways and ACOF from Jan Martin made EDDM look very neat. Although it can be frustrating to fly and take of at roughly 10 FPS, my conclusions are as follows: - The three dimensional appearance and reality feeling is much better in FSX, the trees, don't look flat like the FS 9 trees, when you are flying at around 1000 feet right after take off it looks like a real forest, not like a flat texture, - The new EDDM stock airport is much more realistic and has as well a much more appealing look as EDDM in FS9 with Add-on scenery although it is hard to describe why also Malpensa looks much better in FSX than in FS 9. - The water and raining effects are hard to beat, the FSX concrete gets really wet, when it raining, it looks really stunning. - The alps without any 3rd party mesh in FSX look just great, much better than fs9 with Genesis and Ultimate terrain, once again it is hard to tell why, but if you fly a lot like my on business it just looks more real than FS9. I agree the majority of the screen shots posted here on the forum are less then convincing to point out the advantages of the new simulator, I think everybody has to figure it out on his own. - finally the weather handling and the influence of weather on the airplane has changed a lot, in FS 9 my plane hardly ever really moved on a normal flight, in FSx the bird moves around all the time just like in a real flight. - the different sound cones are also great, the airplane sounds now different from every angle. Don't get me wrong, I still love my FS9 and all the add-ons, it looks very crisp and sharp, but just not as three dimensional as FSX, it is a new generation and maybe not a 100 % perfect product but a huge step from fs9. I'm sure newer hardware and DX 10 are going to make it perfect within a year, By the way, did anybody try FSX with VISTA RC1, I saw a website, where somebody posted to get 10 FPS more under Vista. I am running XP 64 which is the perfect solution for me and runs FS smooth as silk!! That said, I am gong to fire up the PMDG 747 and take a ride from KSAN to KDFW in FS9.Kurt

Couldn't have put it better myself! Good post.James

Thanks James. Did anybody try FSX with Vista RC1 adn how was the outcome?