Hi all.I hope this post dose not upset anyone,Reading around forums simmers are saying that they are waiting for Vista and DirectX[10] before they upgrade their PC's. Well it looks to me, for those of us who use Flight Simulator, it will be a big mistake to upgrade to vista,I beleve that vista will be more cpu reliant than XP and will reduce gameing speed between 10 and 15%The only games that will benifit are those that will be built to run with directx[10]and GPU's that are DX[10]ready that leaves our FSX in the cold,Regards.Rex.

I don't think Vista will have a big impact on the FSX either way - but it is just my opinion (call it a 'gut' feeing). Of coures for those with not enough RAM and since Vista will gobble more memory - yes, there may be some penalty.Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/for...argo_hauler.gif

You say that people are waiting for Vista and DX10 BEFORE THEY UPGRADE THEIR PC's. After that you say it's not wise to upgrade to Vista... period... As if Vista itself is THE upgrade of the PC.Why do people wait with upgrading their pc's until Vista and DX1 will be released? Because at that time the right hardware will be there too! DX10 compatible hardware! Why else should you want to wait? The real upgrade will be the HARDWARE. And in the case of FS X the very important FS X DX10 patch, which will make run with hat DX10 hardware. And with the right DX10 compatible hardware, Vista/DX10 and the DX10 patch I'm sure FS X will run better. How much better remains to be seen of course. ;)

Hi,For guys running Dual Core:Hopefully Vista will be nicely multi-threaded. So if a thread pops up to take care of some chore while your flying FSX it will run on the Core that is not being fully taxed! I agree with Michael J., gut feeling is that RAM will be more of a concern. Equip your Vista/FSX system with 4 GB's of RAM!Personally, I'm more concerned with Vista's licensing scheme. Two installs(one on original hardware then one more on different hardware) and then you have to buy Vista again the next time you upgrade your hardware? If that turns out to be true then it will be 'Just Say No to Vista' for me.

Hi I hope you are right,but in the last five hours brousing there as been no mention of a patch for fsx to bring it in line with DX[10]it will require FSX to optermised for far more than a patch can do.But most of the imformation came from the microsoft site on Vista.regards.Rex

Hi When I saw the results I was getting From fsx I said to myself that when Vista is released it will be better,I was going to run Vista 64bit as 32 bit vista will still only reconise less than three GB of ram.But after what I have just been reading about Vista it as realy upset me,But At least I can now Fly the sim.RegardsRex

From the official MS FAQ on fsinsider.com:Does FSX require Vista and DirectX 10?No. Once Vista and DirectX 10 are released we'll release an update that will enable Flight Simulator to take advantage of all their new capabilities.Should I wait to upgrade my hardware until Vista comes out?If you're thinking about upgrading your hardware, you might consider waiting until Vista and DirectX 10 are released, as there will be new hardware that Flight Simulator can take advantage of.

Hi again.Thank you for clearing that one up for me,I can now once again have something to look forward to.All the BestRex

OK,So if we stick with Windows XP at 3GHZ PCUpgrade the video card to(512MB)Keep current DX9Upgrade system memory to 2GbWe can get the full MSFSX experience / good FPS?Waiting for Vista and DX10 plus the DX10 (costly) video card would add what to the current FX flying experience?I am asking because I do not really understand Vista and DX10 improvements.

I don't see much reason to "wait for vista" for hardware. I've mainly been waiting because I was on the fence for C2D between Intel 965 or NVidia NF5 based MB. I can throw in a 7600GS or even 7900GS and do much better than my current system, and worry about DX10 cards later.scott s..

There are several issues combined here.There are the theoretical benefits of DX10. There are the actual benefits of DX10 as measured by multiple hardware vendor's products.And then there is the Aces DX10 Update Plan.Only the 1st issue can be talked to at this time. Thats because the early hardware was way late and is too immature to define the performance envelope and the actual benefits as compared to the theoretical benefits. And that means the Aces DX10 Update Plan is in a "refinement and groundwork" stage, we are actively prototyping features and making infrastructure changes to accomodate the update.In terms of theoretical benefits, these links http://www.gamedev.net/reference/programmi.../d3d10overview/http://msdn.microsoft.com/directx/presentations/contain content to help explain what the feature set is and its benefits. Its now dependant on IHV implementation skills to see the promise of these API details realized with a hardware implementation.Stay tuned for more details in the future.

Thanks (Phil & Ivan) for the excellent follow up.I think I just may stick with the current plan to upgrade current hardware ($600) and worry about Vista and DX10 a year or so down the line.What we have now ... IMO ... hardware wise ( with required hardware upgrades) , will do the job with FX just fine.Better than a new PC for $2700 and possible bugs in Vista and DX10 to delay things a bit. Plus the cost of Vista.

Vaughan,In theory, DX10 paired up with compatible hardware can result in a performance increase of about 6X. Again, I say in theory, since nobody has conclusively demonstrated this on anything but notepaper. DX10 has been completely stripped of a lot of legacy code that dumped a lot of rendering instructions back into the CPU. That was necessary when GPUs were small and relatively weak. Now that GPUs are effectively larger than the CPU, the legacy code is actually hindering performance. DX10 is the fix to that bottleneck. You need to buy a DX10 compatible card for that very reason...the protocol has to assume you have a GPU able to keep up with it.Thing is, it's not too often that you get that kind of performance boost without using it, right? So most likely, the performance increase will immediately be gobbled right up by some of the DX9 features that we've been unable to enjoy up until now...features like HDR (Yes, I know...I've been banging that drum for far too long ;) ) and the infamous "light bloom". In FSX, I suspect that ACES is currently experimenting with the new hardware right now to determine exactly what the capabilities truly are. If the performance increases are as much as the theories claim, we may see support for some minor new features, like voluminous clouds, better water surface effects, light ray effects, or HDR landing lights and solar glare. If the performance boost isn't quite up to par, we will probably not see any new features and simply get to enjoy whatever performance increase there ends up being. We'll just have to wait and see if ACES is willing to drop any information on us over the next few months about what they've found.-IvanEdit: Or what Phil said, lol. Always happens.

Throughout the lifetime of videocard chipset releases the theoretical performance expectations always came close to the actual performance gains. I expect no different to DX10 cards.Even if software doesn't take advantage of DX10, there will still be huge gains in texture rendering performance for existing DX9 software.I'm very confident that DX10 cards will give us the performance gains we've been waiting for in FSX, with or without a DX10 patch. You can quote me if you wish.James

Hi Phil.Thank youregardsRex