Classic British Flight Sim

Its death knell, not nail. The tolling of a bell announcing a death. Sorry to be a pedant. ;-)

Without the internet at home at the moment, I have been a bit behind on this. I see the fact that we will not have a new FS platform for (what I guess will be at least 3-4 years) will give our add-on developers a real boost. Hundreds of small developers (many more joining after redundancies perhaps) will have a stable environment to work in. I am really happy about this, from a selfish point of view, I can now run FSX well and FS9 at full max with ease. I do not have to worry about updating my hardware for the next sim for years! I do not feel too sorry for the MS contracted developers, they can now set up themselves and make FS and TS add-ons from their living rooms!

I am sure some other company will pick up the rights from MS if they are willing to sell it.

or maybe they will release the platform as OS ..... maybe

Gaming nowadays is all about control. For the supplier that is, not the gamer. :-( M$, Nintendo, etc. all use the model adopted by Sony when the first Playtation was released - control the games releases, and take a cut of each game sold. Nice business if you can get it! Unfortunately, folks got their machines chipped to play pirated games. So future consoles have extra measures to prevent this. I believe this is taken a step further with Xbox Live where the console (and not the user) is actually banned if pirated / modified software is found. Of course, the pirates are never too far behind the software companies... Piracy is wrong, but some would argue corporate greed is too.

As far as FSX goes, hopefully we will see more payware and freeware development now that FS11 isn't just around the corner. Unfortunately the design of FSX means that IMO performance isn't likely to increase much over the next few years. FSX thrives on CPU clock speed, which is little improved on the best CPUs of 5 years ago. So whereas FS9 will run very quickly on a modern machine, little increase will be seen with FSX.

James

Sl4yer wrote:. FSX thrives on CPU clock speed, which is little improved on the best CPUs of 5 years ago. So whereas FS9 will run very quickly on a modern machine, little increase will be seen with FSX.
James

Definately Not so. FSX since SP1 is optomised for multi core computing and therefore will run faster on a quad 2.33 that a single 3GHz.... and thats from personal experience as well as all the stats.

FSX thrives on CPU clock speed, which is little improved on the best CPUs of 5 years ago. So whereas FS9 will run very quickly on a modern machine, little increase will be seen with FSX.

Yes, but FSX is multi-core capable whereas FS9 isn't. As we see 8 core machines appear on the market FSX will take advantage, whereas FS9 can't. Current clock speeds are about as fast as can be done before 'bad things'* happen to the CPU hence the move to multi-core CPUs, FS9 won't get any/much faster than it is now whereas FSX can.

*I think 'bad things' include electron migration, overheating and becoming a radar emitter....

I agree James with respect to performance of FSX, even the new Intel processors don't improve the performance of FSX significantly, if at all. It seems that to get around "Moore's Law" the trick is to produce more cores that run more efficiently but not necessarily faster - fine for many games but not quite so good for FSX. Edit (new stuff) - see Nick Needham's posts over at Simforums.com for more on this subject.

Regards,
Chris

Have you ever compaired FSX from a single core to a quad or even dual core? I you don't see a considerable increase in performance I'd suggest you have someone look at your PC. Seriously guys... that is so far of the mark

can anyone confirm that MS has added the bad news (idea really) that
the last of flight sim has been issued with FSX?

Joe

Ben Watson wrote:Have you ever compaired FSX from a single core to a quad or even dual core? I you don't see a considerable increase in performance I'd suggest you have someone look at your PC. Seriously guys... that is so far of the mark

Yes I have Ben. From a 3GHz P4 to a 2.4 GHz Q6600. Bearing in mind that clock for clock, the quad is 30% faster than the P4, the performance increase isn't that great. Granted, the image quality and scenery loading are immensely improved due to the service packs, but the base performance doesn't scale to the number of cores. FSX will always be limited in this way, where newer games that utilise all cores properly aren't. FSX was designed for single CPUs, and the service packs are really Q&D fixes to try to squeeze some more performance out of the multi-core CPUs that shortsighted M$ (or maybe ACES) didn't see coming over the horizon. Don't forget that the RTM version defaulted 30% of the CPU time to scenery loading - with the patches, and a multi core CPU, the load on the primary core is reduced. I'd guess this is where the improved performance comes from.

James