I am disappointed with FSX. The tweaking to flying ratio is the most frustrating part for me. I should not have to become familiar with scripts and obscure adjustments to frame timing and texture loading. All to get 10 fps flying a default aircraft over a major city with no clouds and no traffic. Then throw in the leveraging of DX10 with Vista as an additional thumb in your eye. Overall a poor job of balancing playability/performance with quality by ACES. Overall a poor job of providing developers with a stable platform and interface (SP1/SP2). And that is why so many people are staying with FS9 and why many developers are continuing to develop for FS9. Bob..

I bought FSX the day before release at Best Buy. Initial reaction was large disappointment with many performance problems. Spent lots of times with tweaks and brought my sliders all down to what could be done. Was happy (at a minimum level) and pretty much stayed with FSX. Love the new camera system and the new improved ground textures.Then SP1 came out and I was able to move up some sliders (kept the same FPS, wanted more eye candy). This was beginning to be fun. Then purchased the Real Air SF260 and I need to put out a warning to anyone considering purchase of this aircraft. Be aware that once you fly this bird, you can't hardly go back to the others! That's right, RealAir has raised the bar. I love this plane and even when I try to fly another, there's old N15KP sitting there all dressed up in white with a blue tail saying, "Where you going? Come fly me!" Oops - back on subject. Last month my old machine's video died so I decided to go for a new computer. The old was Dell P4 2.8GHz, 1 GB Ram, ATI 9800 Pro 128 MB, 19" CRT display. It was five years old. Ordered a new DELL online on Wednesday afternoon and it was delivered via UPS on Saturday - 54 hours from purchase to delivery. The new Dell is E6700 2 core 2.66 GHz, 2 GB ram, Nvidia GTS 8600 256 MB, 22" widescreen flat panel. Oh yeah, ordered with XP Home edition.What a difference - now for the first time I am running great! Scenery and autogen at extreme dense, texture resolution is now set at 1M (old was 2M), airline traffic at 70% (with home grown traffic.bgl from FS9), road traffic at 25%, no boats, and water at 2.x low. Locked at 25 FPS and smooth as can be. Before anyone says do this or that, no thanks, it is set just the way I want it. Most flights in and around Houston Hobby KHOU.For me with the new machine it is like a whole new experience. Sometimes, life is really good. Phill

Yep, great story, Mike.Your story is pretty much the same as mine, Phil. I counted the days until FSX came out. A few days before the release date, I don't know how, but it was on the shelves at Best Buy the weekend before the 17th. I nabbed it hoping no Best Buy employees were aware that it wasn't supposed to be out yet. I bought a few other items to add some distraction factor, (and the wife wanted some dvds) and went the register and purchased it. I was everjoyed! Felt like I robbed a bank and got away with it. I took it home, installed it, and loaded up a flight with the Baron at my home airport KBUR. Well, when the shoe dropped, and I looked at my FPS and it was like..4. Blurries everywhere Lol.I had just bought FS9 about three months before FSX came out cause it was 26 bucks at Target and I have always wanted to try it, so it wasn't a big transition for me to FSX. Tweaking was the order of the day, and I've never stopped. That is, until I built a new computer replacing my old P4 3.0 system. Now, a year later I am finally getting the experience that I had anticipated a year earlier. It was fun in between, but nothing like it is now.

I like FSX a lot. It sure is hard to believe its been a year.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

I have not flown a proper flight end to end in almost a year. Yup.. I am neither in FS9 nor in FSX. I am in flight sim purgatory! In Holding pattern.I am spending more time reading about FSX. :(FSX is awesome for the environment. The water, the sky and the new Clouds from FEX and the buzz surrounding the new Flight Environment from Tim. But, hardly any Addon airports for FSX and the blurries is killing me.The only two area I keep flying are Hawaii and Princess Juliana.MannyIf Only I can get the Flight scenery Portland over and the MEgascenery PNW, Fly Tampa airports. Then I can switch to FSX and move on.

Yes, time does go fast nowadays...I pretty much tried to get FSX to run smoothly on my Athlon 2.4ghz and X850XT during that year. I am a patient man. But overall, it wasn't possible to have FSX run stable/smooth on that PC. Had the chance to buy a new system and went for it: C2D 3.0ghz and 8800gts 640meg and it is a whole new ball game now. I don't have blurries nor do I use tweaks. It is FSX and SP1. I use UTX US/Can, MyTfcX, BeaverX, SF260 and all is well. My objective was to be able to fly in the big cities at a comfortable level ( definition: no slideshow) and I can. For example, NYC at max settings gets me between 20 and 30 fps. So I can do my VFR and IFR flights with FSX.Still use FS9 and Xplane which run even better now.Pierresystem: C2D e6850 (3.0ghz), Asus P5N32E-SLI, Corsair 800 2gig, eVGA 8800gts 640meg, video drivers 163.71 & RiveTuner

FSX has been a mixed bag for me. I started to like FSX after SP1 came out and some of the 3rd party apps (most notably ASX, UT, MyTraffic) started to appear. Right now, I am anxiously awaiting SP2.However, I am disappointed in some of the 3rd party developers: Nothing from PMDG, nothing (yet) from Airsimmers, a lot of great apps have not been ported (FS Passengers, FS Flight Keeper). I expect that some of the add-ons (especially aircraft) to be made compatible with FSX and I don't think that you have to re-invent the wheel and go through 12 months of developing to make something compatible, because plenty, plenty of complex products have already been ported: LvlD, ATR, some Wilco products, some Eaglesoft, Carenado.Most disappointing (sorry to say): PMDG. I seriously don't get it that PMDG hasn't ported the 737 for FSX. There is no good payware 737 (*the* most popular short-haul airliner) for FSX, one year after release and we're probably in for another year without one. The A320, which they already started to "market" a year ago? No sign of it. Not even a mention of it in the latest updates (at least, that was the last time I checked). Disappointing.Pat

Other than the "free FSX" fiasco after last year's AVSIM conference, I'm a happy FSX user one year later. I've had every version since the Sublogic Apple IIe monochrome version of Flight Sim back in the 80's. This is the FIRST major FS upgrade I've been able to run without updating my hardware. I'm amazed that I'm able to get a min 20 fps even though I have an older motherboard with an AGP video card with TripleHead2Go at 3072x1024! And since it runs on my older hardware, I can wait for the DX10/Vista/Video Card development to mature in the mean time.Would have never thought MS would release a version that didn't absolutely need a hardware upgrade. Like the BigMac, I'm lovin' it.

Not much for new aircraft. SP2 did help a lot with my computer's performance. Somewhat disappointed overall. But I guess in time all will get better.

>Then throw in the leveraging of DX10 with Vista as an>additional thumb in your eye. Overall a poor job of balancing>playability/performance with quality by ACES. Overall a poor>job of providing developers with a stable platform and>interface (SP1/SP2). And that is why so many people are>staying with FS9 and why many developers are continuing to>develop for FS9. >FSX overall, has just looked too good, for me to stick with FS9 exclusively. I prefer the "default" higher resolution mountain/city textures, the bump mapping for aircraft, the clouds, and notable improvement in the sense of feel regarding simulated flight through "simulated air".Yet, I realize the FSX lack of overhead for complex addons, and keep running FS9 side by side for just that reason. If FS9 could do everything mentioned above, with great fps, and without a ton of addons, it would be no contest. But..........it does not... L.Adamson

Waited till you lot said it was OK to buy, sobought 2 Core E6600 GF 8800 GTS 4gig ram withVista FSX SP1 in July 07.Going great! No blurries, photo scenery, defaultplanes, full weather,up settings, no OC, nocfg tweaks - just waiting for the big jets!Peter Sydney Australia

I received my freebie FSX copy a couple of months after the AVSIM conference in DC, and was so disappointed in the out of the box performance (even on a C2D 3.2GHz, 2G RAM, 7900 GTO 512M system) that I was glad it was free! Up until SP1 came out, I only spent time in FSX tweaking to see if I could get it to run at FS9 level performance at FS9-equivalent settings, but I was never able to achieve that.SP1 eventually arrived and the performance fairies sprinkled my setup with new hope, but at that very point the FSX addon market was very barren, so now FSX was a good technology concept generator but not a serious flight simming platform proposition.Fast forward to now and the FSX addon has improved, but still not to the point I would have liked after a whole year (and expected given MS's supposed closer workings with the addon community with this release). I now have a handful of addon aircraft (LDS767, CLS DC-10, MAAMSIM DC-3), a weather and environment engine (ASX/ASG), flight planning and tracking (FSBuild, FS Commander), and VATSIM (FSInn), which satisfies 95% of my flight simming desires.The remaining 5% of FSX functionality that is either broken or missed I don't think will ever be fixed in FSX's time, namely the sudden wind shift issue and the ability to fly near big cities / airports without performance dropping to unacceptable levels (ie. < 10 FPS with mid-low settings). For those areas, and the sheer quantity of already-purchased addons, FS9 still reigns supreme and will therefore stay on my hard drive until FS11.I note a similar flavour to a lot of the posts to this thread already. My hope is that ACES realises that FSX was a "bitten off more than they/we could chew" release and that FS11 development is more concentrated on fixing age old issues and consolidating what new capabilities FSX offered into a well tuned performance package. By all means put some new eye candy in, but please don't do so if it means a repeat of the FSX RTM performance disappointment that many of us experienced.Gary

I like the look of FSX and for VFR flight, gliding, and helicopters it is pretty good even if the peformance is still poor near cities.Unfortunately, the lack of PMDG and quality add on airports make it very disappointing when flying the heavies. Lack of UTX Europe does not help. So for fluid quality flight in the heavies at max settings FS9 rules.

For me, FSX has been fun, it has been a challenge (Tileproxy programming wasn't easy), has stressed my hardware to the limits and beyond and it has provided some awesome views on scenery that I hadn't thought to be possible on a PC.Also it is the game that used the most hard drive space so far. A whopping 15 Gigabytes (and that's excluding any addons).Looking forward to Accelleration's release to do some heavy lifting and hoisting.

I went from 1-4 hours of flying FS9 per day 4-6 days per week, 10-11 months per year to............one flight per 3-4 months over the last year, if that. ACES left too many of my fav. addons behind in their forward thinking, thanks for nothing.Randy Jura, KPDX