Just wanted to point out that MS could've easly saved a lot of processing resources with more optimized autogen trees. We don't need trees that have 2 polys. IMHO, a 1 poly tree is enough providing that it rotated to your view. In essence, the same 'illusion' could've been made with half of the number of polys therefore increasing FPS and processing. Anyone else agree?

to some extend yes. however for those who fly low and slow the new autogen looks alot better than the old one.i guess MS thought, with PC power still growing, why not improve on what we did in the previous version?

The problem is, it drains way too much away from what current hardware is capable of. Even flying low and slow, I think it'd still look good with much less processing. In essence, it's stuff that's just not needed to give the 'illusion' of trees.

It actually takes more CPU/GPU resources to rotate a polygon to face the camera every frame than it does to just draw two of them without rotation.-Adam

I guess that's what the sprite-based clouds do every frame--rotate to face the camera.I guess the autogen is doing that too? Maybe not since the autogen trees seem to be the "crosses" consisting of 2 identical textures...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