Hi all,
Years ago I was a big user of MS FS2004 and had bought myself a nice Saitek controller as well as TrackIR rig and a bunch of add-on planes and scenery to fully enjoy the experience. I was even involved to a limited degree with a third party developer and helped create a few manuals for some helicopters.
That was quite a while ago and I haven't touched a flight sim since. Now I'm thinking of getting back into it a little and was looking at X-Plane 10. I've read a bunch on it and tried out the demo which seems to run pretty nicely at 25 fps with moderate detail on my 3 year old gaming laptop.
In reading about X-Plane 10 I think I understand that the whole world is modeled with accurate roads in many areas but the buildings and environment detail is auto-generated around these roads to provide a realistic looking world but not accurately modeled world. Which is to say famous landmarks are mostly non-existent. Is this true? Do I understand that correctly? Also it seems that only a few dozen airports are modeled with any detail and most will be flat and lifeless?
As a primarily VFR flier this might bother me to some degree but I think I could appreciate the fact that the detail in the world could suspend my belief in most areas. It seems that the Seattle area in the demo lacks the expected landmarks but yet the area looks wonderfully populated and alive.
Also, can I expect that the frame rates I'm seeing in the demo to more or less reflect what I'd see typically? I expect that certain busier areas would drag it down some but I could be happy if the framerates were in the 25 fps range like in the demo in most places. Or does the full version take a hit in the framerate right out of the box? My computer has a dedicated NVidia card and dual cores but it is three years old so I'd struggles on some highend graphics games of today.
Thanks for the advice and see you in the air.