Rumour - Gamasutra - Report: Microsoft Makes Big Cuts At

[ChrisHunt]

Hi Ben, more cores gives improved performance in certain areas, such as rendering, scenery loading etc but it doesn't provide that much in the way of FPS improvement, which is where it really does count. Raw speed is what is need for better FPS and that doesn't appear to be what we are going to get for some time to come. An example of this is that for FPS faster dual cores are better than slower quads, although quads do offer advantages in other areas. I think that it comes down to the simple problem of FSX being crocked from the start so cannot take true advantage of CPU efficiencies or numbers.

Regards,
Chris

[gmthomas]

One thing that seems to have been missed perhaps?

You should expect us to continue to invest in enabling great LIVE experiences on Windows,
including flying games.

Is it possible any new version of FS on the PC will be an on-line only version? How would that work with add-ons?

Glyn

[Quixoticish]

LIVE isn't on-line only. It's a stats tracking and matchmaking service for all games, including single player titles. To be honest moving to the LIVE service would make sense, it would mean the ability to generate rather useful online log books to share rather than the current system that stores it on your PC. It would also make finding a multiplayer session a million times easier than the current, rather awful, Gamespy system in FSX.

[Vulcan_to_the_Sky!]

If/When Flightsim develops into whatever it becomes, It would be good if it did become one of the Windows Live Games.

This way, you could keep track of what you'd achieved a bit better online, which other flightsimmers could also see, ok so it would make flightsim a little bit more of an "arcade" style for completing missions, but it might entice more people into the hobby that had previously not been interested.

As a side note to the FSX Quad-Core debate heres what I have noticed on my Laptop running an intel Core2Duo,

FS9 Medium settings, default scenery,plane etc 15fps

FSX Medium Settings,as above average of 20FPS or more.

Ok so neither are zipping along, but its enough for to see the planes moving about smoothly.

So for me even though I still prefer FS9 (hence why its still installed as a lot of addons dont work under the "dark side" of FSX), I can still fly about in FSX and actually notice a performance *increase*

[auster]

Just a couple of points about this very interesting thread.

As I understand it, the profit that Microsoft makes from its flight simulator products is microscopic compared with its main core profits, probably a few tens of millions of dollars per annum compared with its overall profits of one billion dollars per week.

Clearly, as Microsoft has grown over the past 26 years, its flight simulator section has become increasing vulnerable and I can imagine that they could feel that it really wasn’t worth bothering with anymore.

Secondly, a number of posters have mentioned X-Plane as being the only possible substitute in the future. There were about 100 employees in the Aces section but I believe that the X-Plane team has only 4 members, so anything that they produce may be a long time coming.

However, I may have missed it but I did not see any reference to Storm of War: Battle of Britain by Oleg Maddox and his team. OK, OK, so it’s a combat sim and I don’t do combat sims. I, like most people thought it had died a death, but there was an article on in the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of PC Pilot magazine and it appears that it is steaming ahead to the point that there is hope that it maybe released sometime this year. The illustrations are absolutely superb which, of course is not to say that product will be, but in view of the quality of IL-2 all those years ago, there is no reason to think that it won’t be.

Now, here’s my point. With the demise of the MS Flight Simulator, it may open a whole new area for Oleg Maddox and his team because the good news is that his products do not require top class hardware to run them. Also, he is moving over to the idea of open architecture, although third party software providers would have to be approved.

I know that in the past I have said that I feel as though I am the world’s worst sim pilot. Well things have improved immensely due to my new rig. I now have one of the D-Box motion control platforms which been modified to the same standard as those supplied to various RAF Stations. It has a moving pilot’s seat that can pull anything up to 2G (though not sustained G) complete with a full sized joystick and realistic rudder bar (for big boots) with toe brakes. At RAF Shawbury, they use them for selecting future helicopter pilots before they ever get anywhere near a real aeroplane. They find that if they find someone who masters the flight simulator quickly, they vastly improve when they start real flying, because of the improved visibility and spatial awareness. They have 6 of these units and they work them 6-7 hours per day and make big savings on training costs.

My new spec:

Intel Quad Core 9650 Extreme 12MB Cache
Gigabyte X48 Motherboard
4Gb DDR3 1333MHz – Matched Pairs
GE-Force GTX280 Pci 1Gb Graphics Card
Creative Soundblaster Xtreme Audio X-F1 Card
Two Western Digital 1Tb 32Mb Cache HDDs
Two DVD Drives
Tagan 1300w PSU
Three NEC 22” LCD Panels
Samsung 17” Synchmaster 720N
Matrox TH2G Module
TrackIR


Ralph

[Sl4yer]

As a side note to the FSX Quad-Core debate heres what I have noticed on my Laptop running an intel Core2Duo,

FS9 Medium settings, default scenery,plane etc 15fps

FSX Medium Settings,as above average of 20FPS or more.

Yes, FSX SP2 unloads some of the scenery loading onto the other cores, improving it's performance against a single core machine. FS9 will only ever utilise a single core. I would still suspect some rogue setting in your FS9 though to be honest - it should be faster.

The point was that CPU clock speeds aren't really increasing. So in the next year or two, we won't see significantly better performance from FSX. This contrasts with it's predecessors. Whilst they might have been awful on average equipment at launch, they ran very well on average equuipment 2 or 3 years down the line. FSX won't improve until core speeds improve, even with a 32 core CPU!

James

[Chris Sykes]

Reply to Ralph,

There is a huge difference between combat sims and flight sims, im sure you can list the differences but its too much to just give up flight sims and jump into a combat sim and say the "Its ok ive got a substitue!" cos its not... This is no rant BTW...

Anyway MS havent killed off Flight Sim, its just mothballed, and if im correct in thinking MS make most monies from O/S systems, and those loverly licences compaines have to pay for...

For my system running FSX... Its not great, its locked to 20 FPS, but its now smooth and thats with most sliders to the right, except the autogen and a few others... It ran well on my old single core AMD 64 PC, but i built this new PC with a quad core in mine when the prices are low enough and the speed is 3.16+... Thats after ive splash out on a new TV and theater system and possibly a home server...

[auster]

Hello Chris,

I think you may have misunderstood me a bit. Clearly, there is a vast difference between flight sims and combat sims. I have 2 combat sims and I don’t like either of them. Not my kind of flying.

What I was suggesting was that in the absence of MSFS, Oleg Maddox could decide to step into the flight sim market with an already developed engine. He did take on MS in the combat sims market and made a success of it to the extent that they left the field after CFS3 which was a pretty poor product.

I take my hat off to you for building your own PC. I am aware that it’s a matter of bolting a few mechanical components together. That’s the easy bit. What I couldn’t handle is what comes next, i.e. getting everything to work in harmony. One of my DVD drives has packed up after about 5 hours use and I am wary of fitting a replacement. It’s a positive bird’s nest in there and I am sure that I am going to disturb one or more other connections.

I know that you have mentioned Nick Needham in a couple of posts and he has been a great help to me. Believe it or not, my new system, out of the box, was a bit of a dog to start with. OOM errors, stuttering and blurries were there without all sliders being maxed. I followed his instructions on all his posts and optimised the lot. Result? Perfect! Well I think so, although I am scared of overclocking the CPU in view of its price.

Ralph

[Chris Sykes]

Ah, sorry, i was think that it would be a combat FS... Anyways building a pc is great fun, took me about 30 mins to get it to boot... The worst parts is the partitioning, O/S Install, and drivers... Most of the harmony stuff is BIOS...

Back to the topic, does this shelving of FS mean that you modelers will finally give the "Dark Side" a go at modeling???

[Paul K]

Its made the BBC News website:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7874937.stm


Now all we need is the wretched Daily Mail to get hold of it...Millions set to DIE in Flightsim shutdown ARMAGEDDON !!!!!