Tom's hardware just came out with their new comparison grapchics chart. AMD's new DX10 cards gets spanked in FSX but why would 7900 series perform same or better than say a 8800GTX?

Becuase the game is not GPU bound on either of those two cards. What I find most interesting is that even at the lower resolutions the ATI cards perform so poorly. Why their driver/architecture would show such low performance on the CPU bound application is beyond me. Seems the CPU has more work to do with ATI cards.

I wrote this up for FSInsider.com and reference it at http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007...s-hardware.aspxand yes, I found some of the results interesting. On the same CPU, a superior graphics card should still perform better.

I suspect it has to do more with shader two vs. shader three performance. FSX still uses shader two's while most dx9 games have moved to shader three. I recall reading on a forum about how shader two performance has dropped 150% (their numbers, not mine, lol) with each driver revision from nvidia since the 84 series till now. So the equlity in performance between high end and low end video cards may have to do with driver revisions from ATI and Nvidia that cater to shader three perfomance in newer, more high demand games, while shader two performance has been ignored as it is "old". With dx10 and shader four this will change again and you will see FSX benefitting from high end cards as will all dx10 games. And of course I could be totally wrong but it's the only thing that makes sense to me from my perspective.Will