FSX Graphics
Big, big change here. In the past, Flight Simulator would run on more or less any graphics card you cared to put in its way, so long as it had at least 64 Mb of RAM. The game was more limited by CPU than graphics power and when economies had to be made in budgeting for a new system, it made sense to specify a more powerful CPU, rather than spend cash on graphics. With FSX all of that has been stood on its head and if you don't have a cutting edge card, you will miss out on some fantastic effects. Where a 256 Mb Radeon X800XL/GeForce 7600GT did very nicely for FS2004, FSX users are looking nearer to the Radeon X1900/GeForce 7900 series of cards and upwards and having seen it in action, 512 Mb of video RAM doesn't sound like so much of a luxury any more. Why is all this extra power needed? Well, as I mentioned above, the interface has had a complete overhaul, although this is mainly cosmetic and experienced FS2004 users will still be able to find their way around; on the other hand, the support for new users has been substantially increased and the Learning Center should be a compulsory stop for anyone with no previous experience of Flight Simulator. Although the highest video resolution remains 1600 x 1200 x 32, support for 3D effects is hugely extended and absolutely transforms the whole look of the game, particularly where lighting is concerned - just take a look at the shots taken over water. Given that the pendulum has swung very much towards the virtual cockpit, texture and special effects management is at the top of the agenda now, which means that the days of being able to economize on cards for FS graphics are officially over - FSX is as demanding as some of the top end first person shooters on 3D code management.
Despite the fact that the main changes to the interface are restricted to the eye candy, some big surprises lie in wait among the graphics settings; for example, terrain mesh complexity can be set to an impressive 1 meter and terrain texture resolution down to an astonishing 7 cm, which is good to see, although I doubt either will be useful until we are all running quad processor systems packing several terabytes of RAM. The terrain texture resolution increase is welcome, but will pose some interesting problems, given that at present, phototexture packages conform to a nominal 5 m per pixel standard: increase this to 1 m per pixel, which is the natural resolution of most aerial photographs and the size of texture tiles on disk goes up by a factor of 25, which would boost the size of many photoscenery packages up to the 200 Gb mark. Even if they start giving away hard disks for free, I can't imagine many users being keen to install a package which is supplied on 44 DVDs, nor many publishers being keen to develop such things, so much of the new texture display capacity is likely to remain unused except for small scale projects. Power users will be delighted to hear that scenery library management remains as horrible as it ever was with no obvious changes to the interface.
Installing FSX for the first time will bring a smile to your face, followed by a frown which will remain until you get the video settings right. I installed my copy on a 3.2 Ghz Pentium D with 4 Gb of RAM and a Radeon X1950 series card with 512 Mb of RAM and was surprised to see that FSX had configured itself to run a target frame rate of 20 fps. Ten minutes after takeoff from Friday Harbor - the new default start location - I had yet to see 20 fps, having watched rates hover around 10-15 fps, with significant stuttering and some drops into single figures. A quick look around revealed that part of the problem lay in the amount of Autogen underneath me and some hurried tweaking of sliders followed; turning off lens flare and light bloom clawed back a few frames, as did turning off shadows, reducing texture resolution back to 5 m, cutting Autogen density to normal and setting mesh resolution to 76 m. I also zapped all the AI traffic, which accounts for why there isn't much activity in the airports featured in the screenshots, but I suspect it will be possible to add it back in without serious adverse effects.
