Flight Simulator X is available in Oslo
Sunday, 8. October 2006, 00:25:45
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:
These are just a few highlights I have spotted during my 2 hours "test".
Same stuff:
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".
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".
WIDGETIZE
other # 14. October 2006, 23:09
System specs:
OS : Win XP64
CPU: AMD X2 4200+
RAM: 4GB
GFX; GeForce 7800GTX
Resolution: 1920x1200x32
--
andre
ismailp # 16. October 2006, 02:00
- Uninstall unused device drivers
- Overclock 10% (which makes 3.1GHz)
- Overclock nVidia GeForce 7950 GT to 800MHz and 600MHz for 3-D
- Disable all unused Windows services (like ALG, Deffender, WIA, etc)
- To consume less space in video RAM, decreased resolution to 1024x768x32 (both in desktop and FSX)
- Decreased texture resolution to 1m
- Decreased mesh complexity to 50
- Decreased water effects to High 2x.
- Decreased Terrain Detail Distance to medium
- Decreased autogen to Medium
- Installed optimized autogen textures
- Did some other stuff mentioned in Turkish Virtual Aviation forum, but don't know whether they are "authentic" (i.e. there is no documentation, AFAIK, describes meanings of those lines)
Inspite of those "decrements", got one "increment"; AI. Without AI, I just can't fly! I have increased AI rate from 10% to 65%.
Before those changes, starting from a gate at LTBA (Istanbul Ataturk Airport) was around 3-5fps. After changes, I've got 9fps
Performance problem arises on the ground or at low altitude, when machine wants to do some "cool" things. It's just perfect if I am flying above 10000ft. Not even clouds introduce any performance degredation.
Without those water (or special) effects, FSX seems like just waste of money, in my humble opinion. Because my Flight Simulator 2004 with all those cool add-ons, full autogen, clouds, and ground textures, can generate far better graphics than Flight Simulator X - not to mention it can perform this task around 51fps.
I am expecting Microsoft Flight Simulator X team to find and fix this autogen problem. I think it all boils down to a software problem in autogen implementation. It's not as simple as "well, your PC is too slow to process it" or "you are running out of memory, that's why it's slow..."; bollocks! 2GB physical memory + 512MB video memory, please...
Conclusion: For some reason, software engineers graduated after 1998 (wow! exact date!) have tendency to write low-performance software, sometimes in favor of high-abstraction. We need efficient software! Yes, I think I should write a blog entry about "HOWTO: Using CPU cycles efficiently"!