according to Phil's latest comment on his blog:There will be no beta 5. We are close, and in final test. We will definitely hit the 20% across the board, some scenarios will see 40-50%. Its really going to depend on hw and settings. We expect you can either fly at greater FPS if your machine was lagging(20-50%), or if you already had good FPS you get to bump the sliders 1 tick.http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007...d.aspx#comments:D(I can almost taste it now...)

What Phil's going to say next:"April fools! we were never really working on a patch, we fooled you good!"}( lol no really, looking forward to it.:D

>What Phil's going to say next:>"April fools! we were never really working on a patch, we>fooled you good!"}( ... because true to form the joke was stuck in a protracted beta period for the past month :D

I wonder if SP1 will fix the degrading performance problem? Never seen him answer that but I've seen others have the same problem. I believe I believe I guessed May 15th back when they were saying April. I wonder if I win the date guessing game?

This is good news. As my son would say, I have become "flight sim gay" in the last few months by not doing FS anything while waiting for SP1. Yes, I know that FS9 still works just fine, but after being tantalised by the new FSX features, I have been caught in a halfway land for a while now. Please MS, let the pain be over soon and release SP1 soon!Gary

Challenger - the degrading performance over time problem may still not be fixed. Thats how I read Phils comment here:"There is an issue with FSX, both RTM and SP1, where depending on the settings we just chew thru all the available virtual address space. Yes, we are trying to put too much onto the screen.The point where this happens depends on your settings and machine. How fragmented memory is when the game launches is definitely a factor.The problem on our end is, we dont know this is going to happen until an alloc fails. At that point, we are deep down the stack and it is hard to trap and recover in a meaningful way. The efficiencies of SP1 means you should be able to go farther with higher settings. but it can still happen.We are looking at this, but its too early to promise for DX10.":-( :-(Nels

Thanks for the answer. I eventually need to afford some additional RAM.

Release tomorrow 11th May?

>Release tomorrow 11th May?You gonna tell us where you got wind of this rumor? Is it a pretty solid one, you think?(or was that just guess on your part? If so, I betting no-- I'd guess they'll take another week)

>I wonder if SP1 will fix the degrading performance problem? >Never seen him answer that but I've seen others have the same>problem. I believe I believe I guessed May 15th back when>they were saying April. I wonder if I win the date guessing>game?I had this issue, when I first used the BufferPool tweak recommended by MS/Aces, no matter what the setting was. Once I removed this tweak from the fsx.cfg no more degraded performance, and I can fly hours at a time! Longest flight so far was 16 hours!

Same here. Reverting to a default FSX.cfg also stopped an irritating startup error I was getting.Allcott

When was beta 4 released? The oft-quoted "two week test pass" after a beta is released is a possible date. If beta4 was rel April 27, then May 11 is ...possible.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

Another update-- they are building a release candidate tonight.He says "next week". Couple that with the fact that B4 was released May 4 and May 4 + 2 weeks equals May 18, and I put my money on May 18. That would still be much better than then June release I had prepared myself for.