After waiting for the dust to settle about FSX, I finally installed it the other day, basicly as an experiment to see for myself what kind of issues there were. I went in with an open mind, and come out as so many others, disappointed.It seems the choice's are either great graphics, or great frame rates, but not both. I for one will be keeping FSX on my machine, but using FS9 primarily for the foreseeable future.I bought a 'top end' machine a few months back in preparation for FSX, and I am glad I did. Although FSX does not run the way I want, it makes FS9 rock.To those who are satisfied with the compromises that are needed to run FSX on their machines, I am glad you are enjoying it. For me, FSX is very dissapointing, and I am not going to spend weeks or months wading through and testing tweaks for it.My System:AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 Dual core2 Gigs Kingston RAMGeForce 7900 GTXCreative SB X-FiRaid 0 10,000 rpm drives (140 gigs)And all the rest of the usual bells and whistles

Thats what is so great about Choices. You have made your choice be happy.

I would just like to add something and hope the ACES people read, i have two machines.machine 1 3400athlon64 1 gig ram 6800gt 128megmachine 2 4800x2ath64 2 gig ran x1900xt 512megwhich system runs fsx best.. yep its machine 1, seems to be a complete lottery.But they both completely crash quite often under xp, much more stable under vista but cant run in a window.

"To those who are satisfied with the compromises that are needed to run FSX on their machines, I am glad you are enjoying it. For me, FSX is very dissapointing, and I am not going to spend weeks or months wading through and testing tweaks for it."I don't know about the compromises you're talking about but, for me, I simply used the default settings the ACES Team used for my system and I get great fps (20-30+ fps) unless I'm hanging around Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and some of the other big cities and then the fps will fall to 7-10. I have not used any of the suggested tweaks (okay I tried them but they did nothing for me so I uninstalled them). I did turn off autogen though as they had it set to Medium. I found 7-15 fps are acceptable to me as they are not as jerky or a slide show as it was in FS9 and, once I'm out of the cities, things get a lot better. My AA is set on my Radeon X800XT graphics card at 4 and AF is set at 8 (16 brings FSX to its knees on my system). I have great graphics even though my card is inferior to yours. My system is an Intel P4 3.6 GHz system with 2 gigs of DDR2 SDRAM and obviously very inferior to your very up-to-date system. I plan on upgrading my almost 2 year old system in Jan or Feb when Vista is released and the new DX10 cards are out. Get rid of those tweaks and reset your config to the default settings the ACES determined best for your system and fly!Best regards,Jim

Why Jan or Feb? Vista and DX10 will be available before the end of this month. The official launch tour starts Nov 23rd I believe. Sure it doesn't mean that you can go buy Vista at your fav computer store, but those in the loop will easily get copies. In fact, most software launches, MS give out free copies... so it's worth signing up for launch day in your area.... I did. I've got a full version of Visual Studio 2005 SQL Server 2005, and BizTalk Server 2005 that I got at one of their launch events........ really hoping they are as generous this time around.Oh.... to stay on topic.... I find the compromise too much as well. While it may be luck for some to find default settings that are pleasing to the eye, some of us get FS9 era graphics. It's not the quality or performance of the machine either, it's down to the architecture of several parts, processor, chipset, memory and gpu. While some high end equipment will do well, others dont, even chopping down to the level of machines two years more archaic.So yes. I cannot find a happy medium of quality vs performance. If I judge my settings only by performance to what I think is barely acceptable, the quality is severely lacking. Some people luck out though, some people got it worse.I'm not throwing my copy on the shelf just yet, DX10 results will be just around the corner methinks... as well, I'm sure ACES will fix whatever is causing the severe performance problems.