Which is it? I'm confused.

[Guest Camsdad]

Approx 6 months before FSX releasehttp://www.flightsim.com/cgi/kds?$=main/feature/firming.htmAn Interview with Shawn Firminger,ACES Studio Manager for Microsoft Flight Simulator XIt's clear that the new dual core systems will enable you to get the most from FSX, but it's also clear that it will run very well on your existing Windows XP, 3 GHz, single core system. "FSX is a multi-threaded application so by its very nature the performance will benefit from dual-core. We do not benchmark hardware and the test phase for dual-core will not occur until the summertime," Shawn elaborated. Translation: if you're an early adopter and want to run FSX full-throttle from day 1, get your dual core system now. If you don't need a new system, and have a 3 GHz Pentium 4 or the AMD equivalent and at least 1-2 GB of high speed memory and a reasonably fast hard drive, you'll be good-to-go on FSX release day. The choice is up to you. Wait and see what happens with the Windows Vista patch to FSX, or dive in on day one. We will all just have to wait and see what happens when the Windows Vista fog clears. Stay tuned for more news on that matter. http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/It wasn

[Manny 1,293]

Camsdad,With your setup.. You should't run into too much blurries issue. I have more or less similar systems and I got my blurries to reasonable level. Sometimes I can fly at 500Kts and not get blurries or slight blurries but a quick refresh as I am flying past.For FS9, I had to keep the FPS sedt to unlimited. defrag my HD, place the addons sceneries like Megascenery in seperate folder with names like C:AAA_Mega.... and use O&O defragger to do al alphabet sort..so these scenereis are placed on the outermost cylinder of your HD. RAID 0 certainly helps.For FSX. You need fix your FPS. Cannot leave it as unlimited. and you could increaste the FIBER% to like 60% (default is 33% I believe)..But this could cause jerks/pause since the system is going to be accessing the HD more. But this dpepends on if the photoesceries were made using the new FSX methid or not. Meaning.. If you load the FS9 megascenery into FSX or if you use any add on sceneries that uses .BGL files I believe) the shstem tends to access the HD more. However if you youse the new MEgascery made specifically for FSX like their Hawaii...it does not access the HD that much. which solves the jerkies/pause problems when you icrease the FIBER%.Manny

[DadJokeCinema 145]

"Now Shawn says that it is ""FSX is a multi-threaded application so by its very nature the performance will benefit from dual-core." Phil says "It wasn

[Guest WWFII]

So, what NotASenator is saying...When they claim FSX will take advantage of newer graphics hardware, they're not stating that it was designed to take advantage of newer hardware. By its very nature, FSX will perform better because the hardware on the video-card makes it happen.Anyone can make that claim! So, why do it? Of course your software will work better on more powerful systems.From what I gather, there are claims that it will perform better on dual-core -- and that is just not the case. They realized this, and began back-tracking on the issue. Did I not read somewhere that the only multi-threading in the code was during the initial loading of the program?

[PhilTaylor 45]

We do have a thread+fiber system to schedule internal jobs, which gets us some thread usage spread across the cores by the OS. So the app is not single-threaded. And we do some specific work with threads at load to span cores. We dont schedule threads across the cores explicitly during rendering, though, which would make more use of multicore. That is part of what we are trying to address with SP1.The fact is, though, the graphics device is a serializing operation in DX9 since all Draw calls must be issued from the thread that created the HWND and created the D3D device. So we are usually bound in the driver on the CPU, processing Draw calls. This is another part of what we are trying to address with SP1.So just better multi-core usage isnt enough, a systematic approach is required. Yes, this means reduction of the Draw call pressure and better use of multi-core are not the only things we have worked on. A detailed performance analysis of FSX down to the frame level and within each frame is needed to fully characterize the issues and understand them. You cannot do a "10,000 foot view" on this sort of issue, its not as simple as many want to state.

[Guest WWFII]

Phil, don't get me wrong. I have been purchasing Flight Simulator ever since it was developed by Sublogic. I have to admit, Flight Simulator gets better with every release. I just don't care for the hype.I went out and purchased FSX Deluxe thinking I would get decent performance on my system. Fact is, I will have to wait several more months -- before purchasing a new system. I know, today's systems will not even make the cut. I guess, I have become frustrated with low FPS.At any rate, keep up the good work. I want to see FS thrive because there really is no alternative out there...

[soaring_penguin 428]

thank you for sharing Phil.I sure hope your team can pull it off. Jan