People have on occasion conjectured many times here and elsewhere that what needed done was a "complete overhaul" of the graphics engine in the FS series, which had presumably become either out of step with current design approaches or just became bloated, or in any case was thought to be less than optimally efficient. At least that's something I've seen suggested here n there. Does anyone know either how accurate this conjecture is, or if there has been a lot of fundemental change to the "graphics engine," whatever that really means?Noel

Adam Szofran's talk at AvSim 2006 does discuss what was changed in the terrain engine. Thats not all that was changed, but you can get the flavor of just what went into the terrain system in FSX by downloadinghttp://download.microsoft.com/download/c/9...errain_Perf.pps

Thanks Phil downloading now and I appreciate the reply. Adam makes it quite clear "middle settings are for today's high end hardware". With all the increases in quality it is no wonder machines can struggle with it. Kudos to MS for putting in the sort of planned headroom so that high end machines two years from now will run it well with sliders more maxed. This is clearly as it should be IMO.I am one of those folks holding off a while mainly because I have so much into FS9 and it works well and certainly looks decent, but I do plan to come on board FSX when I upgrade my machine in about 6-12m. Again, thanks for this it explains everything!Noel

Have a read here also:http://blogs.technet.com/torgo3000/http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/rxp-pilot.jpg

Great read and nice pics from the multiplayer session. The other big reason I am trying to *delay gratification* is that I am still using Win2K Pro, which runs everything I have just fine. Hopefully after Vista/DX10 have been out a year or so there will be come excellent hardware choices that will really make an upgrade worth the expense and hassle. I've always tried to hold off on system upgrades until there is potential for maybe an increase looking like 200% of my current system. That may take a while I don't know. I've had this mainboard/memory/drives for 4 years now, with a CPU upgrade from 2.53 to 3.05GHz (oc to 3.495GHz now) 2y back, so I kinda doubt this sort of performance gain will be in the cards for me for 1y out from today. Perhaps DX10 will change the argument in a good way.Thanks Geofa for the read.

what does bloated mean and what do you mean by out of step.what a wierdo.

It's what you look like when you try to dance, Cindy. Hey, what's good for the gander is good for the goose.