Not defending anything. I am making a statement. Try reading all that I posted on that and the post before. The statement about Chaffin is that the guy's got issues and has an axe to grind with the community, thus take what his review says with a lot of skepticism. Not only that, but show me these "reviews" you speak of. I've seen 4 reviews to date and none of them are anywhere near as poor as his. Nor do any make any mention of his supposed need for WHQL Certificates for everything. Then again, most of his gauges are FS98, so that's where his problem is; he just doesn't want to admit that his supposed FS9 gauges aren't really FS9 gauges but repackaged FS98 ones.
When the software
ACTUALLY comes out and is reviewed by credentialed reviewers and not from forum hacks (where most of the so-called "reviews" that are out now come from), look again.
Also, find me a single version of FS in the past 20 years that you could run with all sliders full right out of the box and get 30+ FPS right when the version was released? I've never been able to, I doubt there are very few that can say they were either. That's the nature of the beast. Unlike most game designers who built for current technology and thus the software is obsolete within a few months of release, Microsoft and ACES build their software with shelf life, that is, the newest version released will be cutting edge for 18-24 months after release. You can talk about other programs having better graphics and performance, but then other programs don't do what FS does. Ghost Recon: Advanced Warrior looks amazing, but it only deals in 3 dimensions and over very small areas (maybe 2 sq. km. per map) and small visual ranges (maybe 0.5km). So I'm getting better visuals because there isn't the need to process and display 1/20th of the items that FS needs to display. FS is dealing in 4 dimensions, PLUS having to calculate much more comlex physics than a FPS could ever think of. I have yet to find an FPS that has anything close to a satisfactory flight engine, so when you find one, I've got some beachside property in Arizona for you.
Let's break down some numbers for a better example of what I'm talking about -
FSX has, at full autogen with factory settings 4000 treees and 3000 buildings per square kilometer. Your nominal visual range is going to be ~12 square kilometers (~2 kilometer draw distance for autogen), so you'll have as many as 84,000 buildings and trees being drawn *in realtime* at any given moment. At minimum, you're looking at an average 5 polys per object (4 per tree, 6 per house), so your Graphics Card and CPU are having to process as many as 420,000 polys per cycle. That's just for autogen. That doesn't include the terrain, airports, or aircraft which can easily add another 400,000 polys with detailed airports in even slightly undulating terrain with AI traffic on, so you're looking at the "all-out" FS trying to process 820,000+ polys.
With GR:AW people and vehicles are approx. 30,000 polys, of which I've never seen more than 10 or 15 on screen at any given time, so that's no more than 450,000 polys being processed. In GRAW buildings, trees, and the "small" objects like trash and casings are very basic shapes using alpha channels to create detail, so here you're looking at another 20 polys per object there, and since you're only drawing 0.5km out at a time, you only have about 200 objects. So in total, you're looking at 454,000 or so polys being processed in total.'
Again, you're looking at things on the face of it and not thinking about what's required to get what you see. Because of that, you continue to say that M$ has "again" produced a "bad" program because it doesn't look as good or perform as well as various first person shooters that have about half the amount of processing to do compared to FS.
Quake 4 is a laugh too.
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