Classic British Flight Sim

stegs wrote:I imagine a Cray or equivalent though if FPS is at all workable

I see no reason why it should. After all, it's only replacing textures which are already implemented in the sim, rather than rendering a whole new set of ultra-realistic clouds/water. Flight Environment X has had little to no performance effects on my sim, with clouds at a higher resolution than they were before. In fact, if anything, it's probably running a little better!

The clouds (cirrus especially) are a huge improvement over the default:

I've been running FSX along side FS9 for couple of weeks, now.
I was quite impressed with the frame rate of FSX with SP1 (30 fps, when set at 30 fps). Without SP1, fps were nothing short of abysmal.
FSX, however, is run 'as it comes', with the exception of the addition of FS global 2008. I run FS9 with FS Global 2008, Traffic 2005, FS ground environment and FS flight environment. Not to mention many FS aircraft add-ons.
If I want to fly a commercial route, with plenty of AI traffic, then FS9 is easily my first choice.
For flying 'Hands On' with light aircraft (even up to DC3 - OK, not a light aircraft), then FSX comes out on top.
With time, FSX will knock spots off FS9. Until about 1 year ago, I was running FS9 on an athlon 1.4, with a 128Mb NVIDIA graphics card. FSX (+SP1) is far better than FS9 with no add-ons.
I understand, that many people have spent a long time and an awful lot of money in setting up FS9. FSX is capable of going far beyond this. However this will require the spending of a lot more money and considerably more time.
For those who have invested heavily in FS9, the upgrade may not look so good.
Those of us who have not spent too much on FS9, then FSX will be the way forward.

Regards

Kevin

I've kept quiet up to now but having read Kevin's 'It runs better with no addon's than FS9 did with no addon's'.. I'm starting to question the ABV of the beer I sell I take it Kevin, you're not running the 1.4gig Athlon now then me hearty as FSX still looks/runs cr@p on my XP3200 with 'few' addons. ;-)

I'll give ya that with the exception of FS2000 which ran like a dog on all pc's.. each new incarnation SHOULD look, and to some degree.. run better than it's predecessor. That's what we've all paid for.. right :think: Turn all the sliders up FULL RIGHT and does it still look and run better (especially on your 1.4gig Athlon)?? Well.. the sea is better (looks better) and the terrain mesh is equal to FS9 with VFRPhotoTerrain but for me.. default ANYTHING looks false and FSX is no exception. I really don't like it.. I don't like it at all.. much more so than FS9 towit I was also a reluctant 'acceptor'.

I'll not say that those 'Enviro Xtreme' shots weren't stunning because I can't and they are. Perhaps I've reached a stage where I just don't want to stay in the loop. I don't want to buy another pc just to make it run to an acceptable level.. I don't want to have to buy all my software again (or download 600+mb of replacement ground textures).. I don't want to spend hours f@rting around with my aircraft so that all the right bits show. Maybe.. I'm at the end of my future FS experience. Who the hell know's as I surely don't. Regardless and inspite of the above.. I seem more happy where I am as FSX just isn't working for me and doesn't interest me. Perhaps.. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing :think:

ATB

DaveB :tab:

Notwithstanding all the (previous?) frame-rate issues, etc., with FSX - I saw it on display at last years Brum Flight Sim Show and frankly, in one word it just looked 'Cartoonish'. I do not have the time or inclination to add-on improved scenery that should be there in the default edition. Therefore, I cannot see any reason to upgrade from FS9 which - with my newish du-core E6600, etc. runs wonderfully at max sliders, etc. And, of course, the British classic aircraft all fly at their best...

Cheers Joe ;-) I came on the forum this morning expecting a barrage of abuse but it's not happened (serves me right for making some controversial comments and expecting a relevant response) I had a look online last night after typing the above and the cheapest quad-core I could find was a gnats tadger under £900.. add an operating system and it's well over £900 :o I really can't afford that. :-( Overclockers are advertising a very nice Sapphire XT1950 in AGP flavour (512mb) and I very nearly cracked and added to basket.. until that is, I read the buyer reports. The majority confirmed what a stonkin' GC it is but added that a 500w PSU would also be required. Add that to the cost of the XT1950 and suddenly, it's not such a bargain :roll: At that point, I went to bed ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

Sorry I didn't abuse you David, just saw your post.... :brick:

There will be other occasions, I'm sure :-)

Anyway I have almost given up on you on the FSX-subject :roll:

Why thank you Dan :goodman:

It's difficult to put my finger on it. I didn't care much for FS9 when I first had it. Gone was the mediocre GPS and in came the new-fangled Garmin lookalike. I'm sure it's more accurate in operation and look than the old black rectangle but at least I could read the old black rectangle. We were still dogged with 'worldwide' American accented ATC so that was never going to be used. The terrain mesh looked better than FS2002 and landclass was better (default). The ground textures were an improvement over 2002 (which wasn't difficult).The weather engine was slightly improved but I was already using 3rdParty software for wx and saw no reason to stop using it as it was (IMHO) better than the default. The one single advantage was that my old XP1400 could run it (FS9) though this got upgraded in time to the XP2400 I'm typing on now.

Take a look at what we have now. The hideous, unreadable GPS remains (no reason for it to go as it's a current model).. we're still dogged with worldwide American accented ATC which'll still send you to a runway for landing against the flow of AI and with a tailwind.. terrain mesh (for the UK at least) is a quantum leap better than 2004 but to counter this, the ground textures are not. The weather engine.. to be honest, I see little difference between FS9 and 'X'. MP has come on some and is most welcome.. particularly as it's 'native'. Autogen.. well, much appears to have been carried over from FS9 (notwithstanding AI road and sea traffic) but I like the default buildings less than I did in FS9. They just don't look like they belong here :roll: FSX just doesn't look right and doesn't display right on my XP3200 even though it will run. The refresh isn't smooth (nowt to do with FPS) and it doesn't like dual monitors unless run in windowed mode.

All in all.. it's similar to the early days of FS9 though overall, doesn't run quite as sweetly. Importantly, there is no FSX FSNavigator so I won't even consider going until THAT's released ;-) Tried FSC and successfully navigated our band of merry men to the Ruhr and back but I don't like the program. All of this is subjective and personal to what I see and expect. It doesn't mean to say that FSX is any worse than FS9 was either. It's just not working for me thats all ;-)

ATB

DaveB :tab:

DaveB wrote:I had a look online last night after typing the above and the cheapest quad-core I could find was a gnats tadger under £900..

But it's not like you NEED a quad-core to run it. ;-)

I'm currently running an Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz, with an Nvidia 7600GT and 1Gb of DDR2 RAM (hopefully 2GB, soon). Not a bad set up, by any stretch of the imagination, but it's certainly not state of the art. Currently I run FSX with frame rates nestling in the low 20s, in countryside areas at least (although TBH, that's where I prefer flying), looking like it does in the screenshot shown earlier in the thread. Certainly not maxed out, but what's lacking in the settings is made up by what isn't (if that makes sense ).

I can understand why some people are reluctant to move on from FS9, at least for the time being, due to all the time and effort they've put into it. I'll admit that I barely spent a penny on FS9, so I might not understand it as well from the same point of view. But nevertheless, by no means is FS9 the superior sim, addons or not. I can tell you, within a year or two, most people will have switched over to FSX, wondering why they never did in the first place. ;-)

Although to really boost my simming experience, I may have to invest in TrackIR!

Well I got FSX the day it was released last year, and loaded it onto my laptop (Pentium M 1.86GHz, 2GB RAM, 256MB Geforce 6800 Ultra, 17" 1440x900 display). The thing ran like a dog. If I applied all the various user tweaks I could just about get *barely* acceptable performance when flying the default Cessna in the middle of nowhere. Five days later it was uninstalled and sat on the shelf for some months.

Now I'm fairly lucky in the sense that I have a fairly substantial disposable income and can afford to upgrade once a year or so, and I am forced to run FS on a laptop because my job takes me a way from home for many months at a time. Last November I upgraded to a new laptop with a Core 2 Duo T7200 (2.0Ghz), 2GB RAM, a 256MB Geforce 7600GT graphics card and a 17" 1920x1200 display. After SP1 came out in April I installed it and found I could now get acceptable performance, but only at the cost of the dreaded blurry textures. One again FSX was uninstalled and banished to the shelf.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded again to a new laptop with a Core 2 Duo T7500 (2.2GHz), 2GB RAM, an ATI HD2600XT graphics card and a bloody brilliant 20" 1680x1050 display. FSX was dusted off and tried again. Yep, you guessed it, framerates were all over the place and the blurries were back with a vengeance.

"Oh well" I thought... "This new laptop has a DX10 graphics card, so I'll wait for the DX10 patch and see what that brings". After reading Phil Taylor's blog about "Acceleration" and how the DX10 "upgrade" was now a DX10 "Preview" I didn't have great expectations, but still... maybe I would be pleasantly surprised. A quick perusal of the FSX forum at Avsim last night shows that an awful lot of our American friends are reporting significant performance *DECREASE* running under DX10. What's new, the only real additions are VC shadows and white tops on the waves in windy conditions. What's more some users are reporting a lot of third party addon aircraft don't work properly in the DX10 mode.

It's really sad to see just how botched FSX is. one YEAR after release it still requires top of the range hardware to get just acceptable framerates. There really is no headroom for advanced third party addons. I remember we were told FSX was designed to appeal to a broader audience and hopefully bring new people into the hobby. Ha! Just imagine Joe Bloggs grabbing a copy of FSX in PC World, taking it home and installing it on his middle of the road home PC, watching the 10fps slideshow and horrible graphics that FSX defaults to outside of the box.

It's a shame really, it seems we are victim of an overzealous MS marketing machine, and our own unrealistic expectations. I really hope they can pull something special out of the bag for FSXI.

Last night I took a 737 from ISD's freeware Venice Tessera to UK2000's Gatwick. I flew over 76m mesh and UT Europe, using real world weather (some beautiful cloudscapes), and came into a busy Gatwick buzzing with scheduled and charter airlines, all at 25+ FPS. Then it really hit me, FS9 will be an excellent sim for a long time to come!

Let's not go there Tweek. I let Rick have my TIR4 on permanent loan

You're right of course. It is not necessary to get a quad-core system to run FSX but knowing how things go out of date (and I should know as my system is WELL out of date).. what do you upgrade to from an XP3200 :think: I know that Rick runs a Core2duo with the pants overclocked out of it thrown together with some 800mb graphics card and posh ram which'd probably cost ME more than the quad-core ready built system (he's in the know.. I'm not) :o Intel have raised the bar twice (at least twice) since I made the XP3200 and AMD.. well, I've completely lost the plot with where they're at. It's this frustration as much as anything else that's putting a cloud over FSX for me and it just won't go away.

FSX will run under WinXP (as it does on my system) but was designed to run under Vista.. an OS that many have already moved backward from (as in reinstalled WinXP) then there's the promise of DX10 (or not as the case may be) or DX11 and the successor to Vista.. an OS I still don't have. It's reached saturation point and I don't know which way to turn :roll: Under the circumstances.. staying put seems (to me) to be the only logical way forward.. a contradiction in terms I know! With Intel already talking about x8 core.. 256core.. it's enough to make any sane man go outside and throw bricks at himself :brick:

ATB

DaveB :tab: