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What's your review on fsX


seahawk09

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Hey all,

For those of you who have your copy of fsX now and have been flying it for awhile I would like to hear your review's on this product is it everything that Microsoft said it was or is it just another door stop in the software world. The reason i am asking for input is because i wouldnt want to waste my money on software. I really like fs2004 and I would like the transistion to go smoothly from one to the other.

Thank's for your input

Richard :)

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I bought the Deluxe version. My PC is configured like this:

AMD Athlon XP3000

1 gig Corsair XMS memory

BFG 6800 GT OC AGP

2 x 15,000 rpm Cheetah 76 gig hard drives in Raid ) array

Soundblaster Gamer

Win XP

I run my system very lean, i.e. I manage what processes run, my registry is clean and my drives are defragged. I found the sim to run decently at all of the settings mostly on high, with the exception of the traffic slider. If I'm over scenery where there is alot of AI traffic and moving cars, the sim chugs a bit. I associate this with the CPU, but I am planning to upgrade my system in 2 months anyways.

I think with most people's current PCs, the sim will not represent a HUGE improvement over the current version of FS2004 (assuming you have commercial add ons to dress up the weather, ground environment, and scenery/planes). Having said this however, I believe FSX offers the potential of what is to come visually, expecially with DX10 in a few months. Also, FSX offers a little more interactivity, especially with missions, etc so there is an expanded playability present as well.

The advice I give is: Unless you have a new, cutting edge PC or plan to buy one very soon, wait on FSX. Enjoy FS2004 for another 6 months, and after DX10 arrives along with a host of other commercial add-ons, then you should look at upgrading your PC and buying FSX. By that time peopel will begin to fully realize the potential of the new sim.

Make sense? I hope I helped you.

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Well, personally overall I have to say that I like the new sim's look. But the performance is making it really hard to recommend. I recently upgraded my system and I get marginal performance as it is. Some people would call it good.

Features that I like:

Shared cockpit: This is a very cool addition, maybe my favorite. If your flying a long trip or want to train someone you can both be flying as pilot and copilot. You can fly as they take care of copilot duties. Then if you get hungry you can hand over control of the aircarft and grab a snack while the copilot flies. When you get back you can get control back. There's a bad side though. If you leave the seat open without a password then anyone can get in and do some pretty ignorant stuff like shutting down an engine on climbout. You can talk to that person on your mic without hitting any buttons. If you then want to talk to the tower you just program a button on your joystick as your mic key switch and talk away. I love this!!

Tower Controller: I love that there is not longer additional software needed for this. Changing radio freq's in the sim seems to actually work as well. They also implemented my suggestion about bring back ATIS capability during Multiplayer...YES!!!

Autogen: It looks better since they are using 1024 sized textures but this is one of the reasons for the performance hit. There are already people converting these to 512 and getting very good results performance wise.

AI Planes: These things are once again fps killers. I have mine set to 50% as a decent balance of pretty vs. performance. Hopefully Ultimate Traffic and the others come up with a solution for this. In the end I'll just replace them with tweaked AIA and Evolve planes anyway.

High Resolution Ground Textures: The sim has the potential to display up to 7cm ground textures. I have mine set at 1 meter. With FS9 the most you could get was 4.8 meter. This has huge potential for some really nice Megascenery type scenery.

These are just the first things that come to mind for me. The sim has huge potential to be great but we're definately going to have to wait for it to mature a bit. I don't really see much change for performance even after the release of Vista with it's much DX10. I think it's just going to take more powerful hardware just as it always has in the past.

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There's a bad side though. If you leave the seat open without a password then anyone can get in and do some pretty ignorant stuff like shutting down an engine on climbout.

:P :twisted: :P

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  • Aerosoft
High Resolution Ground Textures: The sim has the potential to display up to 7cm ground textures. I have mine set at 1 meter. With FS9 the most you could get was 4.8 meter. This has huge potential for some really nice Megascenery type scenery.

Well going from 4.8 meters to 7 cm means an increase in texture size of about 500.000 times, lol... Better get ready for that graphics card with a few terrabytes of memory.

(4800/7)=685*685...

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Better get ready for that graphics card with a few terrabytes of memory.

Well, Nvidia already has a card out with 1 gig of ram, - the multi-terabyte card is probably not so far away!

I am excited at the recent news announcement between AMD and ATI; this means that the potential exists for the GPU to become imbedded in the CPU which will result in much faster graphic execution times...

Speaking of announcements, did you see that IBM has found a way to utilize fiber optics directly within the CPU? As you know, the bottleneck and source of heat for a system is the copper wiring used (the more you push through this conduit, the greater the resistence, - the greater the resistence the greater the heat generated). They have announced this CPU could be ready in another 2 years, representing a 700x performance improvement over any CPU available today! (So much for Moore's famous law)...if the mobo and peripherals follow suit you can imagine what is possible! :o

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Check out my FSX Reviews in my blogs,

In Auto.Rotation (helifreak.blogspot.com) some helicopter testing in FSX.

In Factor T (testercorner.blogspot.com) general software and hardware analysis (Portuguese, to be translated).

Please comment and share your thoughts too!

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After 2 days with FSX i was ready to uninstall it due to bad FPS. Then i came across this site

http://www.fox-fam.com/wordpress/?page_id=41

Some great mods and i now get 18-20 fps from the default of 8 to as low as 0.1!! there is light at the end of the black hole

WARNING these mods are unofficial. Be sure to backup your files before using any of these modifications!!!!

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