Phil this is great. I'm ready to purchase FSX. I have been on the fence, but will take the plunge very soon now. Next on my list is a new quad-core processor! Noel

Bits and pieces here and there were surely thought of before. For instance Adam was right there wanting to multi-thread the terrain engine and had ideas. But the implementation is new and has certainly been a learning experience. Its been solid work since Nov from the Graphics and Terrain team. The work includes at least:1)enabled skinning for more objects, 2)done more work on the LOD system, 3)batched more objects to reduce Draw calls, 4)moved batch rebuilding to threads, 5)optimized tree rendering to reduce SetTexture calls, 6)optimized the UI rendering a bit, 7)moved DEM loading to threads, 8)moved terrain texture synthesis ( the process itself is documented in Adams' "Global Terrain Technology for Flight sim paper at http://fsinsider.com/Community/Developers-...t+Simulator.htm, see the bit about the layers and texture synthesis ) to threads, 9)tried to coalesce as much shader state as possible10)front-end texture loader loads full mips when it doesnt need to11)removed redundant elevation queries when scenery complexity is lowthere are a few others, but that is what I can write from memory without searching the tracking db.And other devs have contributed as well, when you see the list of bugs fixed you will know what we put into this release. So dont sell SP1 and the effort that went into it short. We didnt take the easy road and its not recycled bits by any measure; so its not 3 months of old work plus 3 months of new work.

This is awesome info, so thanks for sharing as I was curious about this.

>While its hard to categorize the gains across such hugely>varied configs, we generally expect flyers to see an FPS gain>- enough to either fly at higher FPS or to get a 1 or 2>tick-to-the-right on the sliders with the same FPS.That's great news. I already have the sliders set to my liking: I really do not need to set them any higher (or just maybe the autogen from Very dense one step higher to the complete right ;) ), so that means I will keep what I've got now, but with a better fps! Still, of course it remains to be seen how much better. As I said elsewhere, a 25% gain in fsp is HUGE and I can hardly imagine such a big step, but when you are at 16 fps (I'm at 15-20 in general) this would lead to 'only' 20... Still, I'm extremely enjoying the sim as it is now, so... things will only get better no matter how I look at it! ;)(Hm, come to think of it... the only thing I have not enabled yet is the 'better water'. Would be nice if I could turn that on... Well, we'll see! I can hardly wait...! :) )P.S. BTW I'm also still hoping that nVidia will come up with some good Vista drivers to unleash my 8800GTX...! And let's also not forget about DX10 in the future: don't know how the balance will be between performace gains and new DX10-options, but I'm still hoping it WILL help performance a bit!

Phil, by far you and your team are one of the best in the industry - the level of communication you are demonstrating with the flight sim community is *VERY* much appreciated by us. I'm very thankful that the powers-that-be allowed for an open door policy on the state of FS development. That is a drum that we cannot beat enough!Thanks!-Greg

Well said, my sentiments exactly. Thanks Phil and Aces......