Hi Folks,I have been frequenting the forums for the last while now after a long 2 year "seperation" from Flight Sim. None of which was my fault of course. I had moved from Newfoundland to Vancouver, BC 2 years ago, and thanks to the move, I was able to obtain my PPL. However, due to flight training and long work hours, I never had the urge nor the time to fire up the computer and sit down to Flight Sim. Now that I am back to "The Rock" and back to my normal lifestyle, it is time to fire up that sim again and get back to what I love doing most.I have been noticing a lot of mixed views on the latest iteration of Flight Sim, and while I take most of it with a grain of salt, a lot of it is very informative. I take everyone's opinion seriously, and I value everyone's opinion greatly. Since without opinions and advice, what would we have to go on when looking for pointers on which way to turn? I don't see the negativety as "whining". I see it as frustration which may show it's face as "whining" over the bits and bytes of what we call the "Internet". All of this reminds me of all the debut years when Flight Sim came out with a new release. There were always people who were frustrated with the latest release since it didn't run as efficiently as they had hoped on their mediocre machine, while others were fortunate to have just upgraded to the most uber machine available on the planet and was quite satisfied with Flight Sim's performance. Although this year's release seams to be taxing the most highly advanced machines on the market today, I'm sure this will soon be resolved at somepoint either by hardware, software, or from the stellar folks on these forums who give us much enjoyment from the hobby we so dearly love by tweaking or developing third-party add-ons which make Flight Sim that much more enjoyable.I have to hand it to the folks of ACES. From the screens I've seen, it sure looks to be THE greatest advance of Flight Sim yet. So much so that we have to sell a kidney in advance in order to help pay for that super computer down the road when it is released! LOL Just kidding. There are a lot of features this year that makes this release very appealing indeed, despite the issues with FPS, etc. But as we all know, satisfaction differs from person to person. And fortunately for me, I am one that is easily pleased. I always try to see the positives in things while trying to remedy the negatives. Here lies my delemna:Ever since I owned Flight Sim, I always had a habit of flying within my home province of Newfoundland, and at times, across the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, using flight plans and times of our Air Canada (Dash 8), and local provider, Provincial Air (Saab 340). I typically don't fly do any bigger destinations with the uber scenery which may cripple the FPS at the moment. My question for someone is this: what is the scenery and textures like for Newfoundland & Labrador, as well as Nova Scotia? I have a somewhat mediocre machine as far as I am concerned: Pentium 4 2.8GHz w/HT, P4P800 Deluxe MoBo, 1GB RAM running in Dual-Inline mode, ATI 9800 Pro 128MB AGP video card, 2 x 250GB SATA2 drives running in RAID0 config. I have installed and run the demo over the weekend past and that seemed exceptable to me. Do you think I would have any problems running the full release while flying within Newfoundland and/or Nova Scotia? I had heard that the terrain for Canada was mostly "desert-like", although I have not seen any screen shots showing so. Would someone be so kind as to either post or email me a couple of screen shots of the Newfoundland terrain in FSX? Perhaps from CYYT, CYQX, and even CYHZ. If I can lock in at 18 - 20 frames within Newfoundland & Labrador, I will go out and buy it today with no hesitations. If not, I may just as well wait until I can get my accountant wife to approve the upgrade ;-) Those of you who are married know all to well where I am coming from...lol They just don't seem to understand the importance of our hobby :-) Although God Bless her soul, she was the one who agreed whole heartedly for me to go out and get my PPL while in Vancouver, and I will always be thankful for that! Dreams do come true!Anyway folks, I've ranted and taken up enough bytes on this forum for one day. Now it's your turn. Help a guy who loves Flight Sim get back in the saddle (or should I say, cockpit!) again with some good 'ol advice and perhaps a few screens. Either way I look at it, I will buy Flight Sim at some point, whether now or in the future. I'd just like to know if it will run well on my existing machine within the area I specified.Thanks everyone for your help and advice in the past, and I look forward to chatting with you all once again as I slowly get back into simming.All the best,Gord NoseworthySt. John's, NLCanada

I'd suggest you try the latest demo and try to tweak that to get 15 fps on your machine. The beta code is the same as what we get in the box. Fly it every where in try different weather conditions, etc.My guess is that if you get the demo area up to 15 fps in an image quality you like you will get the same in the area's you choose to fly. Maybe the bigger cities will be problematic.If the demo works for you you could buy the full version. I suggest you do this at a store where you cabn return the game if there is a problem. Try the full game without activating in order to have the option open to return it

Thanks Boshar! I was able to obtain around 18FPS in the latest demo on the sand bag drop from the ultra light with most settings at medium-high. I haven't played with the demo all that much yet, but are we limited to just the two missions (bag drop and CRJ approach)? Or can we take a flight from anywhere? I'd love to be able to try the Newfoundland scenery to see how I do. Although, I should do okay I guess if I was able to get 18FPS in the demo, wouldn't you think?Thanks again for your reply!Cheers,Gord NoseworthySt. John's, NFCanada

The demo gives only a limited area around st. maarten. You can start a flight from a few airports in that specific region via 'free flight'.Try some low level flights around the st. maarten island and concentrate on the hills with all the trees and the city. See if you can live with the fps. Also try the crj to make sure the glass cockpit doesn't drop your framerate.Make sure you try all the aircraft and remember that the ultra light is also has the lightest impact on the framrates so try the other aircraft well.Sadly I can't live with the framerate in my area (EHRD) so I returned my copy. I did some tweaks for a friend that likes bush flying in Alaska and he is very happy. So thats why I advise you to try it for yourself.My gutfeeling is that the raw Mhz of your processor is liked by the FS-X engine. My dual core has less Mhz on each core and FS-X doesn't make much use of dual cores so I'm out of luck.

With your computer spec's you would need to do a lot of tweaks. Texture's resized stuff like that. Plus the 1gb of ram may cause you problems also.

>Newfoundland terrain in FSX? Perhaps from CYYT, CYQX, and>even CYHZ. If I can lock in at 18 - 20 frames within>Newfoundland & Labrador, I will go out and buy it today with>no hesitations. Wow, I just got done flying a series of flights from St. John's--CYYT to Halifax (CYHZ) to St. John, to St. Anthony (Newfoundland) to Gander using real weather and the A321. Man CYYT had some serious fog the other day. I had a very difficult landing there...admittedly I had to do a go-around.I can tell you that I saw lots of conifer trees, especially around Gander. I don't know if that is the real world terrain there, but I can tell you that it's not desert in FSX. I think what a lot of people are seeing are the fall (it *is* autumn, and the sim defaults to system date) grass textures, which are light brown/tan. And I agree, they are not great...but 1) in Newfoundland, it wasn't much, and 2) let's not forget that this will change, so its small potatoes.There was a little brown around St. Anthony airport but it was mostly conifer forest that is more appropriate for that part of Canada.With tweaks you should be able to lock at 18 fps with your 2.8 ghz rig. You will have a problem though, if you go to Boston, or over to Montreal. Big cities kill fps in fSX, unless you rename your default.xml file...then you'll get 30+ fps. hehe.Out of the box, no way, you will not see 18 fps. You will have to do 20 minutes of tweaking on your sim, but then it will be golden, as they say. :)RhettAMD 3700+ (@2.5 ghz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (94.47), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Thanks Rhett! Sounds promising for sure. I don't mind doing some tweaking to get this sucker to perform the way I would like. It's what I do for a living anyway. I'm a LAN Admin by trade, so fixing and tweaking is what I like to do, and what I do best. I guess I will take the plunge tomorrow and give it test run tomorrow evening.You wanna know the sad thing here? I have a brand new, never been opened ATI 1900XT 512MB DDR3 video card sitting in my filing cabinet, but I cannot use it until I get a mobo that accepts the new PCIe card (was a going away gift from my previous employer in Vancouver before I left for Newfoundland). And if I get a new mobo, I will need a new CPU and memory. All of which I would not have an issue with, it's just that 1) I need to convince my wife that I need to upgrade, and 2) is it worth upgrading just yet? Or is it better to wait until after Vista and DX10 is available. At which time, my shiney new vid card will be useless to me anyway if I want to avail of DX10. Catch 22 here!Oh well, thanks again. I don't suppose you have any screenies of your Newfoundland and Nova Scotia flight do you?Cheers,Gord NoseworthySt. John's, NLCanada

Yeah, I kind of figured so. I'm up for it though. Brings back memories of the FS2K days :-) Perhaps I should upgrade to 2GB of memory until such time I upgrade the whole system to Vista/FSX standards? Do you think that would help a little more? Perhaps I could even overclock a little to try and squeeze some extra horsepower out of my system. I don't mind the fact that it will decrease the life of my cpu, since I will be upgrading at some point anyway. Unless of course something goes "poof" and I have to upgrade early! ;-) Hmmm. Now there's an idea...lol... Gord says to wife: "Oh honey, come in here and look at all the smoke coming from my computer. I think it's my cpu. Guess I need to upgrade..." ;-)Cheers,Gord NoseworthySt. John's, NLCanada