After looking at that article I'm not convinced it's legit... :-roll

It's the Inq. At best they're right 50% of the time.We alrady know that FSX SP1 will be to tweak DX9 performance.We now that the DX10 update may be a year away- hopefully with that, there will be minimal pressure to release (like getting FSX out for the holidays 2006).There are numerous bugs in FSX that probably should have been squashed before ship (lighting on the aircraft *ahem*) but had to slip due to other considerations.It's still a huge upgrade from FS9, and I can;t wait to have a PC up to the task. (Sometime in '07- quad cores are coming at human price points!)

I can see why lots in this businees would be frightened.

>Sad to hear all this, why do those marketing guys get us all>hyped up and then get out the pin to pop the balloon.Because they are marketing guys :) It is their job to get you hyped for something and they even get paid for it. In that case, the guy has done his job well and deserves an extra bonus :)

>I don't know where you got dx10 patch late next year from???>AFAIK there has been no timetable on it other than ASAP. It is>in MS's best interest to get it out sooner rather than later>seeing as they are hyping vista as a gamer's OS and there are>no other 3rd party games coming out for it until q2 at the>earliest since the delays of alan wake, crysis, and halo2. If>MS wants vista to be taken seriously as a gamer's OS then this>fsx dx10 patch NEEDS to be out by march at the latest.Nope. Because FSX isn't a "major player" among gamers. Yes, it is probably a good overall seller, but think about how big the MSFS community is compared to the 3d shooter crowd (I'am not talking about a single game, I'am talking about the *entire* segment). It's not even 1/10.Still, the DX10 update would arguably a good way to "spread the word" and show people how nicely games will benefit from DX10 and Vista. Time will tell, but I think that your "by march" is very, very optimistic.

They have a HUGE opportunity to be the flagship dx10 game for vista. That alone would sell umpteen many more copies to people that would just like to see what a dx10 game looks like. They would be fools if they missed that opportunity. March if they have any business savvy at all. It only makes sense that MS has the first dx10 game to market. I hope they understand the importance of that and get it out Q1 like they planned.

>You have to take this in perspective. I can promise you that>most of us here on the forums know more about the status of>FSX than many webzines. Look at the first sentence:>>"WE DON'T know the exact date but we know that Flight>Simulator X, one of the first DirectX 10 patched titles has>been delayed.">>FSX a DX 10 "patched" title? Huh? FSX is not "patched" for>DX9 much less DX10!!! :-lol >>First, FSX was positioned as a Vista flagship gaming release. >Now, when MS made that announcement with great fanfare many>ASSUMED that a Vista flagship title will take advantage of the>things for which Vista has become known, ergo, DX10. >>As it turned out FSX has absolutely nothing to do with Vista>and as a Vista user, ironically, FSX seems to actually>performs WORSE on Vista than it does on XP!All games and literally *every single program* will perform worse on Vista, given the exactly same environment (same hardware, same DX version, etc.). All that new stuff comes at a cost. A similar statement has been said by some aces member a while ago - pretty much similar to the transition from Win 98 to XP which came with s small penalty on performance for many games. Does anyone care today about this little loss? Certainly not. XP is now standard and things have improved greatly over the years. A small loss of a few percent can very well be compensated by optimized drivers and a single hardware upgrade will send the few percent into the void anyway.Dedicated CPU benchmarks (which test ONLY the cpu speed and do not depend on any driver optimization level, available memory, disk fragmentation or whatever else) show up to 5% loss on Vista. The OS simply needs more resources for its own purposes. This is perfectly understandable - the Vista kernel alone is more than 50% larger than the XP kernel. This added code does run somewhere and it does eat CPU cycles. There is NO way around it, plain and simple. Still, in some areas, Vista performs better than XP (e.g. desktop operations when composite mode is enabled), but this is a result of new and optimized code which takes benefit from modern hardware.Now, DX10 changes the architecture internally and comes together with a new video driver model. MS claims that this new architecture will perform much better as it will put less load on the processor and accelerate almost every single Direct3d function call. If this is true (and it sounds perfectly reasonable from a technical point of view), DX10 may accelerate *any* DirectX game. Even DX9 games should then run faster and if things come together nicely, this increased DirectX performance should overcompensate the minimal loss, caused by Vista itself.I guess, this is the plan. They really should make this plan work, otherwise Vista won't be very popular among gamers and simmers in a year from now.

>I can see why lots in this businees would be frightened.EXACTLYThe vista dx10 fiasco will cost the industry a fortune, really vista should have been put back another year and fsx delayed to sort out dx9, but that would have looked really bad for MS and the bean counters.To me it all makes sense if you take the view that for most of its development fsx was aimed at dx10, then near the end they realized that dx10 wasnt going to happen and had to make it fit dx9 (which they were going to anyway but didnt consider it that important as dx10 would have been the showcase). However not long before release they realized it would have to be a dx9 title but didnt have the time to do it properly (again the bean counters decide the release date) so out comes the version we have now. So on a positive note, maybe, just maybe the dx9 patch will be something that actually has a significant impact and transforms the experience.... well I can always hope.The whole situation is a bit of a shame and frustrating but I really dont think there was anything that could be done. I mean delaying vista even further would have been very bad publicity for MS and a lot of people would have lost a lot of money through share options losing value.Merry Christmas everybody :-wave

>I don't know where you got dx10 patch late next year from???>AFAIK there has been no timetable on it other than ASAP. It is>in MS's best interest to get it out sooner rather than later>seeing as they are hyping vista as a gamer's OS and there are>no other 3rd party games coming out for it until q2 at the>earliest since the delays of alan wake, crysis, and halo2. If>MS wants vista to be taken seriously as a gamer's OS then this>fsx dx10 patch NEEDS to be out by march at the latest.Why dont you just try reading the blog?http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/default.aspxThere's going to be patches for FSX this time around. Patches, plural. The questin as to whether a paych will actually make the game playable on current hardware is a different question. Vista is uncertain as a gaming platform and certainly won't be `certain` until DX10 and all games developed for it are working without problems - but that will rquire more hardware than we have now anyway. So the future of Vista is afr from being tied to its function as a gaming platform. That's the least of its worries right now! Allcott

Hi Smarti 05Agreed it is going to cost the industry money,but this news is also going to cost the general public money. This is the second time we have been let down with Microsoft. A lot of us updated before FSX was released only to find out that Microsoft had not made FSX compatable with the latest hardware, and now a lot of people have paid out a lot of money for the new GPU's that will be compatable with DirectX Ten and 3D graphics API only to find out now the GPU they have bought will not give anymore improvement in FSX than the ones they have discarded. By the time that they will be in use they will have been superseeded by a later addition and they will be only worth half what they paid for them.But that said, I have just spent 30 miniutes at Stanstead airport by Garry summonds in the large control tower in Traffic by Just flight with fsx set at 75% and the claim by fsx, It is as real as you get. Well it is, it is unbelieveabley good.Merry Christmas and a Happy new year to you allRex

Not sure where you are getting this idea from (that the 'performance' patch is just an excuse to delay the DX10 patch) - I'm guessing you don't think there are any performance related problems then :-> GD&RVVFEven at the AVSIM conference (a few weeks before we released), we were saying it would be 6 to 9 months after release before the DX10 patch came out, because at that time we still had not seen any DX10 hardware and didn't know exactly when we would get any.Not sure where this 1Q 2007 target everyone seems to think was written in stone came from :-> We did say we expected to have the first SimConnect update available in that time frame, which is being rolled up with the "performance" patch we are now working on, so maybe that is where the confusion came from (in the past, if we mentioned a patch, there was probably only one; folks must be getting confused by us actually planning to release several patches in advance for a change :-> ).Tim

hmm..the title of the site says "misinforming people for years" #####?

where did you get late next year? I searched and searched

Tim are you with ACES?

do you really think quad cores will help your FSX performance?