OK cool, but keep in mind, I use my computer for other things than FSX (believe it or not, LOL) SO, again my question is why do i NEED VIsta? And "the cost of a G80 card?" I just spent $2,800 on a new computer, not just because I just bought FSX and it looked awful but because I had a 5 year old Presario, and it was time. I wanted a machine that could handle most every task well, and, incidenally, run FS reasonably well; I got just such a machine I'm very very happy with it. (Its a Dell XPS Core Duo 2.13GZ/2GB RAM/NVIDIA 7900GTX(512MB)/500GB SATAII HDD/20IN ULTRASHARP DIGITAL DISPLAY (1600X12000). And I can tell you, this machine running FSX, compared to my old P4 1.6 running FS9, what a world of difference. Not to mention I can do other stuff faster and prettier too :)So, bearing in mind DX10 will be late, and so forth, my contention is, wait. We don't NEED Vista (or DX10). I would guess, oh, three years or so everything will shake out. Till then, resist the hype.

Anything related to DX10 is pure speculation at this point. Noone has seen DX10 in action and therefore it is impossible to predict the performance.I very much doubt that we'll see 40+fps in FSX with a shoddy old processor and a DX10 card. I also doubt that I'll see 40+ fps with the new DX10 shaders, textures and all that additional bling, because then MS would pretty much render their own product, the XBox 360, obsolete. I pretty much suspect that the "delays" (if there are any) are based on a purely economic background - namely the console gaming business and an increased Vista hype.The *only* current performance boost in my eyes, is to optimize FSX for multi-cores. Aces has jumped the gun on that one big time. Single-core CPUs are history and if MS didn't expect this a year or two ago then it is probably the biggest faux-pas of MS since they under-anticipated the Internet 10 years ago.Also don't underestimate their competitors - X-Plane v9 is due to be out soonish cutting a pie (although probably not that big) in the FS market and I am sure that the guys from Apple and other newer/older OS developers (AmigaOS, Linux) are just waiting to snap some OS market share from MS. Vista is vital for MS and, if it not hyped and marketed really carefully, could lead to substantial problems for MS. After all, it's all hype, no substance. Look around here: Everyone is taking for granted that DX10 will be that single best performance increase since jumping from a 486 to a Dual Core.About a year ago, people thought that Vista would be the ultimate OS (with WinFS). About 6 months ago, people thought that FSX would be the best thing since sliced bread (with DX10). Amazing how some views have changed since then. Yes, they are improvements, but have they really met or exceeded your expectations and the hype? Hardly. I am sure, we'll be talking in about a year again on how disappointing the DX10 release was.We haven't seen ANY DX10 benchmarks, NO demos, NO movie, NOT even a DX10 render (the FSX/DX10 shots are retouched studies), NOTHING concrete. Nada. Zip. Nichts.We have two components that are available and cannot "talk" to each other to release their POSSIBLE full potential, but run like Ferrari on a dirt road (sorry, used that analogy beforem but it's the best how to describe this mess). But we have also a another Ferrari already in out computer, namely dual-core, which is currently idling for every other cycle while running FSX. I think this is what MS/Aces should concentrate on, because we already got it.Pat

Lets face it, in any program, dates always move to the right and the longer the plan the further those dates move. So given that the dx10 patch is planned for the end of 2007, we can expect it mid 2008 at the earliest and imagine the graphics cards and cpus that are going to around then. So it looks like the dx10 'patch' will be a roaring success if only because the hardware it gets showcased on will be twice as fast as the fastest available now.Happy New Year

>If they could have gotten any more performance from fsx don't>you think they would have done it in the three years that they>had during development? If any of you seriously think that>there will be any real performance from this patch then you're>going to be disappointed. The only REAL performance patch that>there is for fsx is a core2 machine. They need to stop wasting>their time on a patch that will do nothing for anyone and>concentrate on dx10.You think a core2 is a performance patch? The core2 can't even run FSX out of the box without major tweaks and quite frankly for all the people who ran out and purchased a c2d machine just for FSX (including me) were suckers. For this reason i'm waiting until the summer to pick up a DX10 card and waiting for some sort of patch from Microsoft before I drop more money for FSX. And honestly i'm not putting too much faith in the DX10 patch or DX10, the only real fix for us right now and most likely for the next few months is the tweaks that are posted or going back to FS9 :|

>If they could have gotten any more performance from fsx don't>you think they would have done it in the three years that they>had during development? If any of you seriously think that>there will be any real performance from this patch then you're>going to be disappointed. The only REAL performance patch that>there is for fsx is a core2 machine. They need to stop wasting>their time on a patch that will do nothing for anyone and>concentrate on dx10.Astrodave indeed...I hope that is not correct. While my rig runs FSX really well outside of the big cities, it would be v nice if things could be improved in those small areas.Probably you are essentially right in that possibly some of what will be in the patch will be things that most of us already know. Such as...adjustments to BufferPools, FIBER_FRAME, and possibly adjustments to shaders and so forth. But your average FS user doesn't know about those things, so the patch might very well help the average user quite a bit. That's a lot of FS users.I know if I hadn't learned about all the tweaks, keeping FSX the way it was out of the box, I would not have liked it one bit. I'd wager there are thousands of FSX users out there, who don't know about a single tweak.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

>>You think a core2 is a performance patch? The core2 can't even>run FSX out of the box without major tweaks and quite franklyI think he's running 25-30+ fps in major cities with his tweaked Core2 setup. That's pretty good.I think that is not quite to the holy grail yet, but it's very promising.To some extent I think a combination of patches, tweaks, and brute force hardware are going to gradually wipe away FSX performance issues.But it will take more time than it did with FS2004, because FSX was designed so far ahead of the hardware curve.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

heheh. Yes we don't NEED dx10. But if it makes things look better with the same performance, we WANT it. :)RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian