Owning a relatively good PC myself, after reading the many controversal discussions on these boards I've come to the conclusion that the ones who are completely satisfied with FSX must either have PCs much ahead of mine performance wise (what I simply can't believe), or not think about future add-on developments at all and stay pilots of the default GA planes and the base product.Has anyone asked himself already how the situation will be once such complex planes like PMDG's MD-11 or A320 together with a next generation Active Sky will be? I've intentionally omitted the 9m mesh with 7cm textures, detailed AI and autogen here, let alone setting the sliders for shadows and effects higher and adjust AA and AF upwards.I expect that if you have FPS in the twenties now, you can then be happy if it drops to 10-15 then. And everything that low is simply a no-go.I wonder how companies like PMDG can look so calmly into the future when it's quite forseeable that the major part of existing FSX installations will not be able to run their forthcoming products sufficiently fast enough so that a satisfying user experience is achieved and thus a good part of customers breaks away.Andreas

>I wonder how companies like PMDG can look so calmly into the>future when it's quite forseeable that the major part of>existing FSX installations will not be able to run their>forthcoming products sufficiently fast enough so that a>satisfying user experience is achieved and thus a good part of>customers breaks away.I have to wonder just who'll still be in the third-party business six months from now...

Bill,That does not sound good......especially coming from you.Glenn

Hi ahinter,Well I thought that untill I installed Just Flights VFR Demo as I flew into the VFR area my FPS went up by 50% and back down when I flew out,I also installed Two channel island Airports from Fly Away Sim,They also Gave me an increse in FPS of about 20%. But that is were my knowledge on the subject ends.All the BestRex

That does not sound good......especially coming from you.Indeed. But Bill has reason to be concerned. Add-on developers will not have an easy life during the next few months. All due to the uncertainty of a new OS, a new DX, and most importantly the new hardware to make it all work.One of my greatest concerns during the past year has been the multi-core CPU. I have never been, nor am I today, convinced that multi-core is of any great benefit to FS hobbyists. Much has been written here by ACES team members about the challenges of taking advantage of multi-core hardware with an application like FS. It ain't easy. Yet folks have upgraded and then are often left wondering why their multi-core system is not making full use their technology. It's yet to be proven that C2D's advantage in FS is the architecture, indeed all we really know for sure is that the C2D can be overclocked to insane speeds. But what is all that worth if the architecture doesn't play well with FS.In the past when a new iteration of FS was released serious simmers knew they would have to upgrade their hardware. But they knew that a faster CPU, faster system bus, faster video card would pay dividends. We paid our money and gained increased performance. I'm not so sure we get alot for our upgrades today. The hot marketing from both Intel and AMD is multi-core. ATI and nVidia continue to espouse their dual card technology. Yet how many applications can truly benefit from the technology at this point in time? Very few, and clearly our sim does not. The most important question is will it once the DX10/Vista version of FSX is released? I'm not saying it won't, but I'll be keeping my money in my pocket until I'm conviinced that the new software can take advantage of the heavily marketed hardware.So I can percieve the add-on developers having a challenging time in the near future. Many folks will be waiting to upgrade their hardware, and so naturally will be cautious about buying add-ons for the new sim that in stock form already taxes any hardware combination available. Uncertain consumers have a tendency to sit on their money.Just my 2 cents,Greg

>Owning a relatively good PC myself, after reading the many>controversal discussions on these boards I've come to the>conclusion that the ones who are completely satisfied with FSX>must either have PCs much ahead of mine performance wise (what>I simply can't believe), or not think about future add-on>developments at all and stay pilots of the default GA planes>and the base product.In guess I am one of those that doesn't think about addons making my enjoyment of the sim happen. Don't get me wrong, I have a ton of payware and while I do enjoy many of them, I realised that one of the main reasons I bought an addon was in hopes that it would somehow magically transform my experience into something it wasn't. Well a few did that, but not many (ESDG Citation X, Georender airfields, Misty Fjords (all Holgers work), Aerosoft beaver, Flightscenery).I don't do the heavies, so the performance drop that will happen in FSX with PMDG type products and detailed airports isn't a concern. I'm really enjoying FSX with default and GA type addons, the new detailed textures make the experience as well as better real weather performance. Many of the addon sceneries I used in FS9 work for the most part in FSX, so the experience in FSX works for me and I get many of the new features I dreamed about in FS9 (All I need is better performance now, but it's not unflyable)As a designer and after looking at the SDKs, I do feel for developers. It's going to be a long road and transition to pure FSX design. The loser target overhead which ACES implemented is a big hurdle and then you have the actual design hurdles. If you really look at what FSX has under the hood, you can see that there is room for longer than 3 years longevity, especially when it will take hardware awhile to catch up. There were so many restrictions in FDS9 as to what could be done and there is so much more headroom in FSX as to what can be done, so we'll have to wait and see.personally I think the next few months will be a good show of what developers can cut it to release an addon with as little performance loss as possible. look at the Flightscenery portland and Digital Aviation Cheyenne, they both are EXTREMELY detailed yet, have very little loss of performance in FS9.Regards, MichaelKDFW

Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI-x16 / AMD

I am also disillusioned with this product.To my mine we have taken a step backward to the days we had problems with fs9 fps.One would think that a lesson was learned and that buying fsx you would expect this problem should not occurr.Personally i am totally confused with all the suggestions on tweaking Fsx i am not an expert in this area and at some stage i hope a more simplistic solution may come about.I do enjoy flight simlution but at present i find fsx frustrating so much so i am reverting back to fs9 till things are sorted out.I bought captain sim 757 the other day average fps 5-6 disaster!!!!I like to think that my computer is at the high end for attaining good performance ie pent4 3.20 ddr 2046ram nvidia geforce 6800 series gpu..................robin from down under NZ

"I don't do the heavies, so the performance drop that will happen in FSX with PMDG type products and detailed airports isn't a concern. I'm really enjoying FSX with default and GA type addons, the new detailed textures make the experience as well as better real weather performance. Many of the addon sceneries I used in FS9 work for the most part in FSX, so the experience in FSX works for me and I get many of the new features I dreamed about in FS9 (All I need is better performance now, but it's not unflyable)"Well, that's good for you, but surely the sim should be enjoyable for ALL types of flyers and not just the bush and GA crowd?Maybe it should be renamed to 'Microsoft Bush Flight Simulator'?

One good thing to do is to benchmark your PC to make sure that your PC is running at the optimum setting, FS tweaks aside. In my case, I thought I was until I ran 3dMark05 and found that I am way back with other people with similar components. I ended up tweaking my CPU a bit. But Coolbits really helps in squeezing the best from my video card. My FSX fps is around 15-20 in most regions.M Tan -------------------------AMD Dual Athlon 4400+ @211 2G Geforce 7900GSViewSonic 21" VX2025WMXP SP2

Have a look at the Cloud9 forum to see what flack this excellent addon company are getting on their new airport which is FSX only. I think their responses betray an underlying frustration with what they're having to deal with in FSX. They sound positive but I've never seen such a sparse looking Cloud9 airport before!

Don't worry about the third party addons. There are ways to use the second core for the addon planes. It is just that the developers have to work a little harder.

What is 3dmark05 and were do i get from..........Regards robin

Luckily I am in a position to upgrade my computer to a high end rig, but still it is disturbing the poor performance of FSX on the average mid-level system.What is most alarming is the possibility that this new sim may run no faster in 2008 than is does now if the trend in CPU design by Intel and AMD continues as planned.Ron

Get it here:http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=874-------------------------AMD Dual Athlon 4400+ @211 2G XFX Geforce 7900GSViewSonic 21" VX2025WMXP SP2

Is there much chance the new driver implementation in Vista combined with DX10 will totally reframe the argument, ie that the CPU/memory subsystem is always the limiting factor? Perhaps this is much more the case in XP/DX9/FS9, and so there may be reason for hope for FSX with or without multi-core? Hard to believe the developers couldn't have seen all this in spades during the early phases of product development. Or is is more likely that ACES didn't see multi-core as the trend of the relatively near future?Noel