Torgo 3000

I want to thank the developers for FSX. Most hardcore gamers will know ( at least gamers that have been playing games since DOOM1 ) That PC games such as FS, and any FPS, are on the Bleeding edge, and require the latest Hardware available.

I accept this. My PC was out of date 6 months after I made it.

BTW I am running FSX on a P4 3.2, 1gig of ram, and a AGP 5900XT, and I am getting 24fps constant. I have uninstalled FS9.

Keep up the exellent work mate.

Or you could have tried to predict that some vocal people who like turn the stuff to max are going to whine, this has happened to many titles in the past so it's not exactly anything new.

A more reasonable thing to do if you want to give the ability to go higher than your hardware can handle is to somehow tier the settings eg. a check box "override" needs to be clicked to allow adjusting the settings past what the detection mechanism for suitable settings has found optimal.

And if there is a setting that causes big increase in video memory usage, users often just max it out along with other settings without knowing that they could probably have decent perf if they just didn't touch this particular setting.

One example is Battlefield 1942. It was not at all obvious how much video memory was used with each texture detail setting, only experimentation told that you could adjust everything to max except texture detail if you only had x MB of mem.

I think the major problems are voiced by folks that have just invested in today's top of the line hardware.

Those folks feel like if they can't put sliders full right than no one can.

If no one can, then the advertised functions of the product cannot be realized.

Thus the rub.

Bob

I think the problem is it can be hard to run FSX with the settings minimized, even on my system that is only 1 year old, and I spent quite a bit on it when I bought it then.

With the various reduced res textures and other tweaks I can now run FSX fairly well as long as I stay away from the big cities (which I generally do anyways). The only other problem is the absolutely dismal quality of water data in Canada, but hopefully Ultimate Terrain will be patched for FSX soon and all will be well.

FSX has a lot of promise, and a lot of great new features. The aircraft look fantastic with the new shader technology. Flight dynamics are fantastic now. I love the missions, the automated logbook, and the new interface. The weather dynamics are well improved now too (I had one heck of a bumpy ride through the mountains in a DC-3 today!).

I'll totally agree that there is way too much whining, and the problems are greatly exaggerated, but I'd also say that more could have been done for users with lower end systems (low res texture sets perhaps?).

Either way a year from now I'm sure all the complaints will be done with, much like it was with FS2004.

I wholeheartedly agree with your post. Please keep making new flight sims for next generation hardware!

However, I think the real reason that people are angry is that they cannot run FSX with the same sort of settings and/or environment that they could run FS9. That's what they are comparing it with.

For example, I can run FS9 with almost all sliders maxed (except ground scenery shadows and 3d clouds) with an amazingly complex AI traffic file (more than a thousand airlines plus cargo plus military planes plus GA) on my Core 2 Duo with >30 frames at London Heathrow airport. I can't do that with FSX. There, I get 20 FPS with the default traffic and minimal autogen. I suppose the same would be true with detailed add-on airports instead of super-detailed AI for example.

This means that people have to make a conscious decision between the advantages of the new version and the performance of the old version.

Most people don't like to be forced to make that kind of decision.

You don't really have to make that decision with any other kind of game, partly because other games are not as much a open and extensible platform  as FS is. So actually this is just a symptom of a big advantage of FS but most people don't really care or understand (or care to understand ;).

One simple trick that would perhaps help is to hide the high quality settings in FSX.cfg and not make them accessible through the visual configuration until a patch maybe 2 years after release. That way only those who care can access them, leaving everyone else more happy. ;) Those who don't know any better can turn the volume up to 11 on the pretty slider, even though it's really only a 6. ;)

By the way, thanks for FSX! I really do enjoy it but I certainly hope for a patch that makes proper use of multiple cores but doesn't require Windows Vista! It's a shame to see almost 50% of the CPU time wasted, especially with such a CPU intensive application...

Old time FS users look at any new release with equal portions of excitement and loathing. Loathing for the money they know they will need to spend to get anything approximating decent performance out of it.

It's been said that the performance drop between FSX and FS9 is greater than between any other two versions, and this is absolutely true. Partly due to utterly frame sucking autogen, and partly due to the speedbump in moore's law that has been imposed by the advent of dual and quad core systems. I know it's very difficult to program a thread dependent game like a flight sim for these systems, but they ARE the future, and ACES would be wise to revisit this decision soon, and most importantly patch the current version to take advantage of multiple cpus. Want to end the whining? Give people the real possibility of 30 fps, while maintaining visuals at least a small margin above FS9's.

Multi processor systems have been until now a 3d/server domain, but once accepted by the mainstream, as they have been, they will become the standard. Code for it, hard or not, you don't have much choice.

Two things that need to be changed for future releases:

1. In your print advertising, which is geared towards attracting new buyers (the enthusiasts get their info from other channels) MS needs to start being brutally honest about system specs. It's not enough to say "actual game screenshot". You need to specify either "actual game screenshot, taken 1 year from today on hardware which does not yet exist" or "at 3fps on current hardware".

2. The issue of framerate is more important in a flight sim than in any other kind of game in my opinion. The nuances and fluidity of the flight model and many other facets of the game are entirely framerate dependent. You simply can't get a decent level of immersion at less than 30 fps. It's all well and good for bush fliers to trundle around at 15 fps, for the most part they don't care about framerate while flying something as stable as a brick at 100 knots. This kind of performance is totally unacceptable for those who like to fly helos, airliners, or military aircraft, where the slightest control movements need to produce an immediate and fluid visible result. High framerates are the feedback that makes this possible given the lack of physical sensations.

All that said, I love FSX. My new system arrives in a week, as it has a few weeks after every FS release. :)

> Yeah, but these go to 11

 Spinal Tap! You make sense AND you're funny. :D

It works better when turning down the Autogen, I do get more FPS but FSX still goes to the HD non-stop. Will adding 1GB of ram do the trick or there are some other non-documented tweaking in the FSX.cfg file?