Imagine these two scenarios:ACES DEVELOPERS TALKING ABOUT DEVELOPING FSX WITHOUT THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHT ABOUT WHAT HAS BEEN DISCUSSED ON THESE FORUMS SINCE RELEASEOk folks, what are we including in FSX? Well, FS9 max autogen was 300 objects per area so for FSX lets make the maximum 6000 objects. That way users will get alot more bang for their buck. Also ,lets add light bloom and lots of cutting edge effects that make the sim look gorgeous. Maybe all users cant use all of them now but they will keep the game fresh over the next few years. Even if they set their sliders to half way they will still get 10 times more stuff than FS9 ever gave them.ACES DEVELOPERS TALKING ABOUT DEVELOPING FSX WITH THE BENEFIT OF HINDSIGHTOk folks, what are we including in FSX? Well, lets put FSX autogen maximum at 600 which is only double that of FS9. Lets not do anymore as people will complain about FPS. Lets leave out the light bloom and the other cutting edge effects. No point giving them the option of using this incase someone is using a 486. Err..ok, so whats going into the new FSX? Well, lets just add a couple of small things. Kind of like how we did between FS2002 and FS2004. Then everyone can push all the sliders to the right and say "great frame rates". Yeh great idea! i think they do the same on the FIFA soccer game which comes out every year.----------MY POINT: who can blame them for thinking with hindsight - we should have added half the things we did so everyone can push the sliders to the right. The sim would still look better than FS9, we would have had less work to do, and everyone would be loving FSX with its great "frame rates" with everything maxed out.Discuss.

I decided on some framerate therapy over the weekend. Loaded up Fs2002 again. I don't know what the max framerate possible is but at one point it definitely said 211 on default settings. Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.No, I don't want seriously high framerates at the cost of a souped up copy of a previous version. In the Forums we all listed a pile of things we wanted to see in the next version and some have been implemented. Basically you get what you ask for and in my opinion we have gone some way towards that. In a couple of years when we are all running at good framerates and moaning because it isn't as good as it might have been please remember to go back to the postings here now, more would have meant even less fps.Andrew Brown

San, H.Yes.. Good point and I agree with you. I am glad they went with the high resolution textures and bloom etc. inspite of hit on frames.The point folks have been making is... how to merge the divergence of the single threaded app with the processor development that is going multi cores. CPU manufactures could have solved this problem if they had stayed focus on high processing cycles rather than in quad core and what not. If we had a 9Ghz machine...all this discussion may have been moot or less gripe at least.Its the situation that we are in, considering the high cost for MS to rip apart the whole Flight sim and rewrite for 64Bit or multi core (if that is even possible).From my point of view.. the anguish is in the predicament of not much room for addons...and not necessarily dumping on ACES for the choices they may have made. They may as well have a valid economic decision to not rip the code and rewrite it (if that is even possible). We are all on the same boat ..or on the same side of the table...so to speak. Manny

Lets add this to your argument. I think ACES does not want to have their foot in their mouth, so they are not promising much with DX10. But I really think that they are expecting a good increase in performance. But they have to keep quiet abou it. Check the Tom's Hardware Guide article on DX10:http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/10/18/the_new_graphics/Noted this facinating pragraph that leads me to beleive FSX is primed to take advantage of DX10 for performance: "In short, the system will be able to render objects faster and more efficiently. This is a good thing, as games will be able to incorporate this feature to give you more frames per second.......Either way, with more objects or faster frame rates in our current titles, we will all be able to get more from our hardware and DX10. Geometry shaders will also aid the rendering process, by allowing objects to be morphed and re-rendered as each frame progresses. Some objects can be born from a single vertex. In the geometry shader, the laws of physics need not apply, as data can be born from nothing and destroyed by the will of the shader program. This also should increase output of the rendering process. Processes that could take several full passes of the vertex and pixel shaders can now be accomplished by circumventing the vertex shader. The object can be recalled and altered in the geometry shader for the next frame." I really think that a lot of performance is going to be gained for things such as the new reflective water and sun bloom.

Great post!JerryG