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Microsoft Flight Simulator X is supposed to be available at 13th of October. A coworker told me he's read on a forum people bought Flight Simulator X on Friday. I have called Expert Shop in Oslo, and I have heard that "yes, we've got and it's available". Flight Simulator X Deluxe Edition costs 700 Norwegian Kroner, two DVDs.

How is it so far?
Frankly speaking, I didn't find enough time to play yet I am planning to fly between EDDF-RKSI (might be RKSI-EDDF, too) tomorrow (Sunday). I have, however, spotted really cool improvements. Before starting "really cool improvements", let's talk about "requirements" As most expected, this game is thirsty for powerful hardware. See mine below, and decide yours;
ASUS P5LD2 motherboard (we know, it's slow)
2GB RAM (PC2-5300)
Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz Double Core
nVidia GeForce 7950GT 512MB RAM
400GB Seagate Hard Disk (8MB cache)

This configuration can generate 3-20fps when flying at low altitude with default aircrafts and scenery, with slightly improved scenery quality. I will try to find out optimal settings for Flight Simulator, and may disable driver's overrides.

Cool improvements I saw:

• Flexing aircraft wings, but they are flexing nicely.
  
• Realistic lightning (both in aircraft lights and runway lights, which are my favorites)
  
• Realistic water
  
• Realistic weather and thermal effects (however, it still requires, I think, something like ActiveSky)
  
• Realistic ground environment (like smarter autogen, moving cars on road, boats and ships on sea, etc)
  
• Default aircrafts have cool virtual cockpits (with reflection, etc - and it doesn't look like Quake-like 3D stuff we were seeing in FS2004)
  
• A321 switches TOGA if aircraft begins stalling when pilot, who was not using ATHR, is busy with looking around to find out "cool improvements" in new version of the game.
  

These are just a few highlights I have spotted during my 2 hours "test".

Same stuff:

• Same AI (probably, slightly improved same good ol' stupid AI, I mean)
  
• Same voices
  
• Same ATC (I think it's much like what I said for AI)
  

Backwards compatibility:
Istanbul Ataturk scenery (Biber's LTBA) works fine, except some land mesh problems (I think). Aircraft jumps despite the fact that it's parked still on the gate.
PSS A343 works fine. It doesn't display overhead panel, some textures on aircraft are not painted, looks a bit ugly. MCDU couldn't find my flights, couldn't import from FSX either. So I couldn't complete test But when I flying previously, I also couldn't get AP to hold altitude or VS.

I have bought this new GeForce 7950 GT one week ago, FS2004 has never been smoother before. But now, I can't believe why my machine is so slow. I really wonder what sort of hardware I need to run simulator "smoother".