Active 10 GPS

"Paul Saunders" <[email hidden]> wrote:

<snip>

Quoted message said:

Both offer demos so you can try them out first, although you'll need a full
version of FSX to install them, they won't install into the FSX demo. Again
you can pick these up much cheaper than RRP from Amazon.

Alternatively there are demo videos. I just played a couple from VFR
which impressed me. Looking at the Horizon site right now but so far
not found any.

BTW, I'm interested in viewing, not aircraft flying. Presumably you
can switch off all evidence of the cockpit etc?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

"Paul Saunders" <[email hidden]> wrote:

<snip>

Quoted message said:

Both offer demos so you can try them out first, although you'll need a full
version of FSX to install them, they won't install into the FSX demo. Again
you can pick these up much cheaper than RRP from Amazon.

Alternatively there are demo videos. I just played a couple from VFR
which impressed me. Looking at the Horizon site right now but so far
not found any.

BTW, I'm interested in viewing, not aircraft flying. Presumably you
can switch off all evidence of the cockpit etc?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

"Paul Saunders" <[email hidden]> wrote:

<snip>

Quoted message said:

Both offer demos so you can try them out first, although you'll need a full
version of FSX to install them, they won't install into the FSX demo. Again
you can pick these up much cheaper than RRP from Amazon.

Alternatively there are demo videos. I just played a couple from VFR
which impressed me. Looking at the Horizon site right now but so far
not found any.

BTW, I'm interested in viewing, not aircraft flying. Presumably you
can switch off all evidence of the cockpit etc?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, one more thing, you need quite a powerful computer to run it.

Thanks, sounds great. I haven't yet got around to upgrading my 5 year
old MESH Athlon 1800 1GB, so in view of your concluding comment I
wonder if I would need to do so before I could satisfactorily use FSX?

To be honest, I'd say yes, although it depends on your definition of "use".
If by "use" you mean "run it in it's full glory (as a flight sim)", then
definitely yes, however, if you just want to use it as a 3D scenery viewer
you might get away with it. You'd have to turn most options off or down to
their lowest settings, but for pure scenery viewing, you might get away with
it.

For example, weather is a big frame rate hog, so turn it off. Other
aircraft, moving vehicles etc, all eat up frame rate. Turn them off. There
are lots of fancy graphics effects like shadows on aircraft, water
reflections, metallic surface reflections which have no effect on the photo
scenery. Also there's the texture resolutions (for aircraft and the default
scenery) which you can turn right down, but which again doesn't affect the
photo scenery. Who cares what the aircraft looks like if you're just looking
at the scenery?

In fact, the default scenery consists of large amounts of 3D objects (trees,
buildings, etc) but the photo scenery doesn't, since it's just a photograph
overlaid onto the terrain mesh. So the photo scenery actually has much
better framerates than the default scenery.

The only things you really need to have set high are the photo scenery (1m)
and terrain mesh (5m), everything else can be turned off or down.
Anti-aliasing should be turned on, but I guess you could live without that
if you had too.

The minimum specs are a 1.0GHz processor, XP SP2 or Vista and a DirectX 9.0c
compliant video card with 32MB of RAM.

Quoted message said:

Your observation seems reinforced at this page
http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt24372.html where I read:
"However, there is one FUNDAMENTAL problem: how come no-one can run
FSX properly? By that, I mean without compromise in graphic visuals,
whilst retaining playable framerates. To give you an idea, even the
high-end computers at the Microsoft E3 show were struggling to show
off FSX in all its beauty."

And also

"FSX is very much graphics resourceful (i.e. the importance of having
a powerful graphics card surpasses that of having a fast CPU)."

Yes, but they are talking about "in all its beauty". I've recently bought a
new computer (X2-5600 dual core with a 256MB 8600GTS graphics card and 2GB
of RAM), and even I can't turn everything up to full. But I can easily
compromise. To get better performance from one aspect of the sim I can turn
something else off or down. For example if I'm just looking at scenery I may
turn all the other aircraft off. Even with most things on full or high I get
pretty good frame rates (20-30) with the photo scenery. I get more problems
when flying in non-photo scenery areas and at big airports with lots of
planes, but I guess you won't be spending a lot of time at Heathrow, will
you?

Weather is one of the biggest problems, particularly bad weather with lots
of clouds, that really affects performance, but when it's really bad you
can't see the scenery anyway! So you can forget my recommendation to get
Active Sky X until you get a better computer.

Quoted message said:

My graphics is a modest 64MB NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400, although it
does give me pretty good touring (and tour capture for video clips) in
Google Earth.

Sounds like you could just about run it, but you'd be scraping the bottom of
the barrel and it wouldn't look as good as it could with realistic weather
and lighting effects, but the photo scenery itself wouldn't be much
affected.

In fact, if you're not really interested in flying (as you said in your
other post), and prefer to just slew around, then even the frame rates
wouldn't matter much.

I recommend that you download the FSX demo and play around with all the
different graphics settings, to see if you can actually run it. In
particular, turn all the autogen and custom scenery off, turn all the moving
vehicles off and reduce the texture quality.

But it sounds like it might be time to upgrade your computer anyway... :-)

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, one more thing, you need quite a powerful computer to run it.

Thanks, sounds great. I haven't yet got around to upgrading my 5 year
old MESH Athlon 1800 1GB, so in view of your concluding comment I
wonder if I would need to do so before I could satisfactorily use FSX?

To be honest, I'd say yes, although it depends on your definition of "use".
If by "use" you mean "run it in it's full glory (as a flight sim)", then
definitely yes, however, if you just want to use it as a 3D scenery viewer
you might get away with it. You'd have to turn most options off or down to
their lowest settings, but for pure scenery viewing, you might get away with
it.

For example, weather is a big frame rate hog, so turn it off. Other
aircraft, moving vehicles etc, all eat up frame rate. Turn them off. There
are lots of fancy graphics effects like shadows on aircraft, water
reflections, metallic surface reflections which have no effect on the photo
scenery. Also there's the texture resolutions (for aircraft and the default
scenery) which you can turn right down, but which again doesn't affect the
photo scenery. Who cares what the aircraft looks like if you're just looking
at the scenery?

In fact, the default scenery consists of large amounts of 3D objects (trees,
buildings, etc) but the photo scenery doesn't, since it's just a photograph
overlaid onto the terrain mesh. So the photo scenery actually has much
better framerates than the default scenery.

The only things you really need to have set high are the photo scenery (1m)
and terrain mesh (5m), everything else can be turned off or down.
Anti-aliasing should be turned on, but I guess you could live without that
if you had too.

The minimum specs are a 1.0GHz processor, XP SP2 or Vista and a DirectX 9.0c
compliant video card with 32MB of RAM.

Quoted message said:

Your observation seems reinforced at this page
http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt24372.html where I read:
"However, there is one FUNDAMENTAL problem: how come no-one can run
FSX properly? By that, I mean without compromise in graphic visuals,
whilst retaining playable framerates. To give you an idea, even the
high-end computers at the Microsoft E3 show were struggling to show
off FSX in all its beauty."

And also

"FSX is very much graphics resourceful (i.e. the importance of having
a powerful graphics card surpasses that of having a fast CPU)."

Yes, but they are talking about "in all its beauty". I've recently bought a
new computer (X2-5600 dual core with a 256MB 8600GTS graphics card and 2GB
of RAM), and even I can't turn everything up to full. But I can easily
compromise. To get better performance from one aspect of the sim I can turn
something else off or down. For example if I'm just looking at scenery I may
turn all the other aircraft off. Even with most things on full or high I get
pretty good frame rates (20-30) with the photo scenery. I get more problems
when flying in non-photo scenery areas and at big airports with lots of
planes, but I guess you won't be spending a lot of time at Heathrow, will
you?

Weather is one of the biggest problems, particularly bad weather with lots
of clouds, that really affects performance, but when it's really bad you
can't see the scenery anyway! So you can forget my recommendation to get
Active Sky X until you get a better computer.

Quoted message said:

My graphics is a modest 64MB NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400, although it
does give me pretty good touring (and tour capture for video clips) in
Google Earth.

Sounds like you could just about run it, but you'd be scraping the bottom of
the barrel and it wouldn't look as good as it could with realistic weather
and lighting effects, but the photo scenery itself wouldn't be much
affected.

In fact, if you're not really interested in flying (as you said in your
other post), and prefer to just slew around, then even the frame rates
wouldn't matter much.

I recommend that you download the FSX demo and play around with all the
different graphics settings, to see if you can actually run it. In
particular, turn all the autogen and custom scenery off, turn all the moving
vehicles off and reduce the texture quality.

But it sounds like it might be time to upgrade your computer anyway... :-)

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, one more thing, you need quite a powerful computer to run it.

Thanks, sounds great. I haven't yet got around to upgrading my 5 year
old MESH Athlon 1800 1GB, so in view of your concluding comment I
wonder if I would need to do so before I could satisfactorily use FSX?

To be honest, I'd say yes, although it depends on your definition of "use".
If by "use" you mean "run it in it's full glory (as a flight sim)", then
definitely yes, however, if you just want to use it as a 3D scenery viewer
you might get away with it. You'd have to turn most options off or down to
their lowest settings, but for pure scenery viewing, you might get away with
it.

For example, weather is a big frame rate hog, so turn it off. Other
aircraft, moving vehicles etc, all eat up frame rate. Turn them off. There
are lots of fancy graphics effects like shadows on aircraft, water
reflections, metallic surface reflections which have no effect on the photo
scenery. Also there's the texture resolutions (for aircraft and the default
scenery) which you can turn right down, but which again doesn't affect the
photo scenery. Who cares what the aircraft looks like if you're just looking
at the scenery?

In fact, the default scenery consists of large amounts of 3D objects (trees,
buildings, etc) but the photo scenery doesn't, since it's just a photograph
overlaid onto the terrain mesh. So the photo scenery actually has much
better framerates than the default scenery.

The only things you really need to have set high are the photo scenery (1m)
and terrain mesh (5m), everything else can be turned off or down.
Anti-aliasing should be turned on, but I guess you could live without that
if you had too.

The minimum specs are a 1.0GHz processor, XP SP2 or Vista and a DirectX 9.0c
compliant video card with 32MB of RAM.

Quoted message said:

Your observation seems reinforced at this page
http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt24372.html where I read:
"However, there is one FUNDAMENTAL problem: how come no-one can run
FSX properly? By that, I mean without compromise in graphic visuals,
whilst retaining playable framerates. To give you an idea, even the
high-end computers at the Microsoft E3 show were struggling to show
off FSX in all its beauty."

And also

"FSX is very much graphics resourceful (i.e. the importance of having
a powerful graphics card surpasses that of having a fast CPU)."

Yes, but they are talking about "in all its beauty". I've recently bought a
new computer (X2-5600 dual core with a 256MB 8600GTS graphics card and 2GB
of RAM), and even I can't turn everything up to full. But I can easily
compromise. To get better performance from one aspect of the sim I can turn
something else off or down. For example if I'm just looking at scenery I may
turn all the other aircraft off. Even with most things on full or high I get
pretty good frame rates (20-30) with the photo scenery. I get more problems
when flying in non-photo scenery areas and at big airports with lots of
planes, but I guess you won't be spending a lot of time at Heathrow, will
you?

Weather is one of the biggest problems, particularly bad weather with lots
of clouds, that really affects performance, but when it's really bad you
can't see the scenery anyway! So you can forget my recommendation to get
Active Sky X until you get a better computer.

Quoted message said:

My graphics is a modest 64MB NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400, although it
does give me pretty good touring (and tour capture for video clips) in
Google Earth.

Sounds like you could just about run it, but you'd be scraping the bottom of
the barrel and it wouldn't look as good as it could with realistic weather
and lighting effects, but the photo scenery itself wouldn't be much
affected.

In fact, if you're not really interested in flying (as you said in your
other post), and prefer to just slew around, then even the frame rates
wouldn't matter much.

I recommend that you download the FSX demo and play around with all the
different graphics settings, to see if you can actually run it. In
particular, turn all the autogen and custom scenery off, turn all the moving
vehicles off and reduce the texture quality.

But it sounds like it might be time to upgrade your computer anyway... :-)

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, one more thing, you need quite a powerful computer to run it.

Thanks, sounds great. I haven't yet got around to upgrading my 5 year
old MESH Athlon 1800 1GB, so in view of your concluding comment I
wonder if I would need to do so before I could satisfactorily use FSX?

To be honest, I'd say yes, although it depends on your definition of "use".
If by "use" you mean "run it in it's full glory (as a flight sim)", then
definitely yes, however, if you just want to use it as a 3D scenery viewer
you might get away with it. You'd have to turn most options off or down to
their lowest settings, but for pure scenery viewing, you might get away with
it.

For example, weather is a big frame rate hog, so turn it off. Other
aircraft, moving vehicles etc, all eat up frame rate. Turn them off. There
are lots of fancy graphics effects like shadows on aircraft, water
reflections, metallic surface reflections which have no effect on the photo
scenery. Also there's the texture resolutions (for aircraft and the default
scenery) which you can turn right down, but which again doesn't affect the
photo scenery. Who cares what the aircraft looks like if you're just looking
at the scenery?

In fact, the default scenery consists of large amounts of 3D objects (trees,
buildings, etc) but the photo scenery doesn't, since it's just a photograph
overlaid onto the terrain mesh. So the photo scenery actually has much
better framerates than the default scenery.

The only things you really need to have set high are the photo scenery (1m)
and terrain mesh (5m), everything else can be turned off or down.
Anti-aliasing should be turned on, but I guess you could live without that
if you had too.

The minimum specs are a 1.0GHz processor, XP SP2 or Vista and a DirectX 9.0c
compliant video card with 32MB of RAM.

Quoted message said:

Your observation seems reinforced at this page
http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt24372.html where I read:
"However, there is one FUNDAMENTAL problem: how come no-one can run
FSX properly? By that, I mean without compromise in graphic visuals,
whilst retaining playable framerates. To give you an idea, even the
high-end computers at the Microsoft E3 show were struggling to show
off FSX in all its beauty."

And also

"FSX is very much graphics resourceful (i.e. the importance of having
a powerful graphics card surpasses that of having a fast CPU)."

Yes, but they are talking about "in all its beauty". I've recently bought a
new computer (X2-5600 dual core with a 256MB 8600GTS graphics card and 2GB
of RAM), and even I can't turn everything up to full. But I can easily
compromise. To get better performance from one aspect of the sim I can turn
something else off or down. For example if I'm just looking at scenery I may
turn all the other aircraft off. Even with most things on full or high I get
pretty good frame rates (20-30) with the photo scenery. I get more problems
when flying in non-photo scenery areas and at big airports with lots of
planes, but I guess you won't be spending a lot of time at Heathrow, will
you?

Weather is one of the biggest problems, particularly bad weather with lots
of clouds, that really affects performance, but when it's really bad you
can't see the scenery anyway! So you can forget my recommendation to get
Active Sky X until you get a better computer.

Quoted message said:

My graphics is a modest 64MB NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400, although it
does give me pretty good touring (and tour capture for video clips) in
Google Earth.

Sounds like you could just about run it, but you'd be scraping the bottom of
the barrel and it wouldn't look as good as it could with realistic weather
and lighting effects, but the photo scenery itself wouldn't be much
affected.

In fact, if you're not really interested in flying (as you said in your
other post), and prefer to just slew around, then even the frame rates
wouldn't matter much.

I recommend that you download the FSX demo and play around with all the
different graphics settings, to see if you can actually run it. In
particular, turn all the autogen and custom scenery off, turn all the moving
vehicles off and reduce the texture quality.

But it sounds like it might be time to upgrade your computer anyway... :-)

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Paul Saunders said:

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, one more thing, you need quite a powerful computer to run it.

Thanks, sounds great. I haven't yet got around to upgrading my 5 year
old MESH Athlon 1800 1GB, so in view of your concluding comment I
wonder if I would need to do so before I could satisfactorily use FSX?

To be honest, I'd say yes, although it depends on your definition of "use".
If by "use" you mean "run it in it's full glory (as a flight sim)", then
definitely yes, however, if you just want to use it as a 3D scenery viewer
you might get away with it. You'd have to turn most options off or down to
their lowest settings, but for pure scenery viewing, you might get away with
it.

For example, weather is a big frame rate hog, so turn it off. Other
aircraft, moving vehicles etc, all eat up frame rate. Turn them off. There
are lots of fancy graphics effects like shadows on aircraft, water
reflections, metallic surface reflections which have no effect on the photo
scenery. Also there's the texture resolutions (for aircraft and the default
scenery) which you can turn right down, but which again doesn't affect the
photo scenery. Who cares what the aircraft looks like if you're just looking
at the scenery?

In fact, the default scenery consists of large amounts of 3D objects (trees,
buildings, etc) but the photo scenery doesn't, since it's just a photograph
overlaid onto the terrain mesh. So the photo scenery actually has much
better framerates than the default scenery.

The only things you really need to have set high are the photo scenery (1m)
and terrain mesh (5m), everything else can be turned off or down.
Anti-aliasing should be turned on, but I guess you could live without that
if you had too.

The minimum specs are a 1.0GHz processor, XP SP2 or Vista and a DirectX 9.0c
compliant video card with 32MB of RAM.

Quoted message said:

Your observation seems reinforced at this page
http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt24372.html where I read:
"However, there is one FUNDAMENTAL problem: how come no-one can run
FSX properly? By that, I mean without compromise in graphic visuals,
whilst retaining playable framerates. To give you an idea, even the
high-end computers at the Microsoft E3 show were struggling to show
off FSX in all its beauty."

And also

"FSX is very much graphics resourceful (i.e. the importance of having
a powerful graphics card surpasses that of having a fast CPU)."

Yes, but they are talking about "in all its beauty". I've recently bought a
new computer (X2-5600 dual core with a 256MB 8600GTS graphics card and 2GB
of RAM), and even I can't turn everything up to full. But I can easily
compromise. To get better performance from one aspect of the sim I can turn
something else off or down. For example if I'm just looking at scenery I may
turn all the other aircraft off. Even with most things on full or high I get
pretty good frame rates (20-30) with the photo scenery. I get more problems
when flying in non-photo scenery areas and at big airports with lots of
planes, but I guess you won't be spending a lot of time at Heathrow, will
you?

Weather is one of the biggest problems, particularly bad weather with lots
of clouds, that really affects performance, but when it's really bad you
can't see the scenery anyway! So you can forget my recommendation to get
Active Sky X until you get a better computer.

Quoted message said:

My graphics is a modest 64MB NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400, although it
does give me pretty good touring (and tour capture for video clips) in
Google Earth.

Sounds like you could just about run it, but you'd be scraping the bottom of
the barrel and it wouldn't look as good as it could with realistic weather
and lighting effects, but the photo scenery itself wouldn't be much
affected.

In fact, if you're not really interested in flying (as you said in your
other post), and prefer to just slew around, then even the frame rates
wouldn't matter much.

I recommend that you download the FSX demo and play around with all the
different graphics settings, to see if you can actually run it. In
particular, turn all the autogen and custom scenery off, turn all the moving
vehicles off and reduce the texture quality.

But it sounds like it might be time to upgrade your computer anyway... :-)

Thanks Paul, very helpful. It's now really only a question of *when* I
start. I'm already a keen 'GE tourer', so the potential for much
higher resolution is exciting.

Re the PC upgrade, yes, I've been putting it off for ages. It always
comes back mainly to my dread of re-installing/re-tweaking/re-fixing
scores of major programs and maybe a few hundreds of minor ones.
However, FSX is yet another motivator!

Given the FSX spec, one immediate show-stopper is that I'm still using
SP1. I had serious problems when I tried to upgrade to SP2 a year or
so ago, immediately reverting, and I've never found much motivation to
try again. But again, the reasons are beginning to accumulate. FSX
apart, Microsoft Virtual World (which seems to offer better resolution
than GE for many areas) also needs SP2.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Paul Saunders said:

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, one more thing, you need quite a powerful computer to run it.

Thanks, sounds great. I haven't yet got around to upgrading my 5 year
old MESH Athlon 1800 1GB, so in view of your concluding comment I
wonder if I would need to do so before I could satisfactorily use FSX?

To be honest, I'd say yes, although it depends on your definition of "use".
If by "use" you mean "run it in it's full glory (as a flight sim)", then
definitely yes, however, if you just want to use it as a 3D scenery viewer
you might get away with it. You'd have to turn most options off or down to
their lowest settings, but for pure scenery viewing, you might get away with
it.

For example, weather is a big frame rate hog, so turn it off. Other
aircraft, moving vehicles etc, all eat up frame rate. Turn them off. There
are lots of fancy graphics effects like shadows on aircraft, water
reflections, metallic surface reflections which have no effect on the photo
scenery. Also there's the texture resolutions (for aircraft and the default
scenery) which you can turn right down, but which again doesn't affect the
photo scenery. Who cares what the aircraft looks like if you're just looking
at the scenery?

In fact, the default scenery consists of large amounts of 3D objects (trees,
buildings, etc) but the photo scenery doesn't, since it's just a photograph
overlaid onto the terrain mesh. So the photo scenery actually has much
better framerates than the default scenery.

The only things you really need to have set high are the photo scenery (1m)
and terrain mesh (5m), everything else can be turned off or down.
Anti-aliasing should be turned on, but I guess you could live without that
if you had too.

The minimum specs are a 1.0GHz processor, XP SP2 or Vista and a DirectX 9.0c
compliant video card with 32MB of RAM.

Quoted message said:

Your observation seems reinforced at this page
http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt24372.html where I read:
"However, there is one FUNDAMENTAL problem: how come no-one can run
FSX properly? By that, I mean without compromise in graphic visuals,
whilst retaining playable framerates. To give you an idea, even the
high-end computers at the Microsoft E3 show were struggling to show
off FSX in all its beauty."

And also

"FSX is very much graphics resourceful (i.e. the importance of having
a powerful graphics card surpasses that of having a fast CPU)."

Yes, but they are talking about "in all its beauty". I've recently bought a
new computer (X2-5600 dual core with a 256MB 8600GTS graphics card and 2GB
of RAM), and even I can't turn everything up to full. But I can easily
compromise. To get better performance from one aspect of the sim I can turn
something else off or down. For example if I'm just looking at scenery I may
turn all the other aircraft off. Even with most things on full or high I get
pretty good frame rates (20-30) with the photo scenery. I get more problems
when flying in non-photo scenery areas and at big airports with lots of
planes, but I guess you won't be spending a lot of time at Heathrow, will
you?

Weather is one of the biggest problems, particularly bad weather with lots
of clouds, that really affects performance, but when it's really bad you
can't see the scenery anyway! So you can forget my recommendation to get
Active Sky X until you get a better computer.

Quoted message said:

My graphics is a modest 64MB NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400, although it
does give me pretty good touring (and tour capture for video clips) in
Google Earth.

Sounds like you could just about run it, but you'd be scraping the bottom of
the barrel and it wouldn't look as good as it could with realistic weather
and lighting effects, but the photo scenery itself wouldn't be much
affected.

In fact, if you're not really interested in flying (as you said in your
other post), and prefer to just slew around, then even the frame rates
wouldn't matter much.

I recommend that you download the FSX demo and play around with all the
different graphics settings, to see if you can actually run it. In
particular, turn all the autogen and custom scenery off, turn all the moving
vehicles off and reduce the texture quality.

But it sounds like it might be time to upgrade your computer anyway... :-)

Thanks Paul, very helpful. It's now really only a question of *when* I
start. I'm already a keen 'GE tourer', so the potential for much
higher resolution is exciting.

Re the PC upgrade, yes, I've been putting it off for ages. It always
comes back mainly to my dread of re-installing/re-tweaking/re-fixing
scores of major programs and maybe a few hundreds of minor ones.
However, FSX is yet another motivator!

Given the FSX spec, one immediate show-stopper is that I'm still using
SP1. I had serious problems when I tried to upgrade to SP2 a year or
so ago, immediately reverting, and I've never found much motivation to
try again. But again, the reasons are beginning to accumulate. FSX
apart, Microsoft Virtual World (which seems to offer better resolution
than GE for many areas) also needs SP2.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Paul Saunders said:

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, one more thing, you need quite a powerful computer to run it.

Thanks, sounds great. I haven't yet got around to upgrading my 5 year
old MESH Athlon 1800 1GB, so in view of your concluding comment I
wonder if I would need to do so before I could satisfactorily use FSX?

To be honest, I'd say yes, although it depends on your definition of "use".
If by "use" you mean "run it in it's full glory (as a flight sim)", then
definitely yes, however, if you just want to use it as a 3D scenery viewer
you might get away with it. You'd have to turn most options off or down to
their lowest settings, but for pure scenery viewing, you might get away with
it.

For example, weather is a big frame rate hog, so turn it off. Other
aircraft, moving vehicles etc, all eat up frame rate. Turn them off. There
are lots of fancy graphics effects like shadows on aircraft, water
reflections, metallic surface reflections which have no effect on the photo
scenery. Also there's the texture resolutions (for aircraft and the default
scenery) which you can turn right down, but which again doesn't affect the
photo scenery. Who cares what the aircraft looks like if you're just looking
at the scenery?

In fact, the default scenery consists of large amounts of 3D objects (trees,
buildings, etc) but the photo scenery doesn't, since it's just a photograph
overlaid onto the terrain mesh. So the photo scenery actually has much
better framerates than the default scenery.

The only things you really need to have set high are the photo scenery (1m)
and terrain mesh (5m), everything else can be turned off or down.
Anti-aliasing should be turned on, but I guess you could live without that
if you had too.

The minimum specs are a 1.0GHz processor, XP SP2 or Vista and a DirectX 9.0c
compliant video card with 32MB of RAM.

Quoted message said:

Your observation seems reinforced at this page
http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt24372.html where I read:
"However, there is one FUNDAMENTAL problem: how come no-one can run
FSX properly? By that, I mean without compromise in graphic visuals,
whilst retaining playable framerates. To give you an idea, even the
high-end computers at the Microsoft E3 show were struggling to show
off FSX in all its beauty."

And also

"FSX is very much graphics resourceful (i.e. the importance of having
a powerful graphics card surpasses that of having a fast CPU)."

Yes, but they are talking about "in all its beauty". I've recently bought a
new computer (X2-5600 dual core with a 256MB 8600GTS graphics card and 2GB
of RAM), and even I can't turn everything up to full. But I can easily
compromise. To get better performance from one aspect of the sim I can turn
something else off or down. For example if I'm just looking at scenery I may
turn all the other aircraft off. Even with most things on full or high I get
pretty good frame rates (20-30) with the photo scenery. I get more problems
when flying in non-photo scenery areas and at big airports with lots of
planes, but I guess you won't be spending a lot of time at Heathrow, will
you?

Weather is one of the biggest problems, particularly bad weather with lots
of clouds, that really affects performance, but when it's really bad you
can't see the scenery anyway! So you can forget my recommendation to get
Active Sky X until you get a better computer.

Quoted message said:

My graphics is a modest 64MB NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400, although it
does give me pretty good touring (and tour capture for video clips) in
Google Earth.

Sounds like you could just about run it, but you'd be scraping the bottom of
the barrel and it wouldn't look as good as it could with realistic weather
and lighting effects, but the photo scenery itself wouldn't be much
affected.

In fact, if you're not really interested in flying (as you said in your
other post), and prefer to just slew around, then even the frame rates
wouldn't matter much.

I recommend that you download the FSX demo and play around with all the
different graphics settings, to see if you can actually run it. In
particular, turn all the autogen and custom scenery off, turn all the moving
vehicles off and reduce the texture quality.

But it sounds like it might be time to upgrade your computer anyway... :-)

Thanks Paul, very helpful. It's now really only a question of *when* I
start. I'm already a keen 'GE tourer', so the potential for much
higher resolution is exciting.

Re the PC upgrade, yes, I've been putting it off for ages. It always
comes back mainly to my dread of re-installing/re-tweaking/re-fixing
scores of major programs and maybe a few hundreds of minor ones.
However, FSX is yet another motivator!

Given the FSX spec, one immediate show-stopper is that I'm still using
SP1. I had serious problems when I tried to upgrade to SP2 a year or
so ago, immediately reverting, and I've never found much motivation to
try again. But again, the reasons are beginning to accumulate. FSX
apart, Microsoft Virtual World (which seems to offer better resolution
than GE for many areas) also needs SP2.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Paul Saunders said:

Terry Pinnell said:

Quoted message said:

Oh, one more thing, you need quite a powerful computer to run it.

Thanks, sounds great. I haven't yet got around to upgrading my 5 year
old MESH Athlon 1800 1GB, so in view of your concluding comment I
wonder if I would need to do so before I could satisfactorily use FSX?

To be honest, I'd say yes, although it depends on your definition of "use".
If by "use" you mean "run it in it's full glory (as a flight sim)", then
definitely yes, however, if you just want to use it as a 3D scenery viewer
you might get away with it. You'd have to turn most options off or down to
their lowest settings, but for pure scenery viewing, you might get away with
it.

For example, weather is a big frame rate hog, so turn it off. Other
aircraft, moving vehicles etc, all eat up frame rate. Turn them off. There
are lots of fancy graphics effects like shadows on aircraft, water
reflections, metallic surface reflections which have no effect on the photo
scenery. Also there's the texture resolutions (for aircraft and the default
scenery) which you can turn right down, but which again doesn't affect the
photo scenery. Who cares what the aircraft looks like if you're just looking
at the scenery?

In fact, the default scenery consists of large amounts of 3D objects (trees,
buildings, etc) but the photo scenery doesn't, since it's just a photograph
overlaid onto the terrain mesh. So the photo scenery actually has much
better framerates than the default scenery.

The only things you really need to have set high are the photo scenery (1m)
and terrain mesh (5m), everything else can be turned off or down.
Anti-aliasing should be turned on, but I guess you could live without that
if you had too.

The minimum specs are a 1.0GHz processor, XP SP2 or Vista and a DirectX 9.0c
compliant video card with 32MB of RAM.

Quoted message said:

Your observation seems reinforced at this page
http://flyawaysimulation.com/postt24372.html where I read:
"However, there is one FUNDAMENTAL problem: how come no-one can run
FSX properly? By that, I mean without compromise in graphic visuals,
whilst retaining playable framerates. To give you an idea, even the
high-end computers at the Microsoft E3 show were struggling to show
off FSX in all its beauty."

And also

"FSX is very much graphics resourceful (i.e. the importance of having
a powerful graphics card surpasses that of having a fast CPU)."

Yes, but they are talking about "in all its beauty". I've recently bought a
new computer (X2-5600 dual core with a 256MB 8600GTS graphics card and 2GB
of RAM), and even I can't turn everything up to full. But I can easily
compromise. To get better performance from one aspect of the sim I can turn
something else off or down. For example if I'm just looking at scenery I may
turn all the other aircraft off. Even with most things on full or high I get
pretty good frame rates (20-30) with the photo scenery. I get more problems
when flying in non-photo scenery areas and at big airports with lots of
planes, but I guess you won't be spending a lot of time at Heathrow, will
you?

Weather is one of the biggest problems, particularly bad weather with lots
of clouds, that really affects performance, but when it's really bad you
can't see the scenery anyway! So you can forget my recommendation to get
Active Sky X until you get a better computer.

Quoted message said:

My graphics is a modest 64MB NVidia Geforce2 MX/MX 400, although it
does give me pretty good touring (and tour capture for video clips) in
Google Earth.

Sounds like you could just about run it, but you'd be scraping the bottom of
the barrel and it wouldn't look as good as it could with realistic weather
and lighting effects, but the photo scenery itself wouldn't be much
affected.

In fact, if you're not really interested in flying (as you said in your
other post), and prefer to just slew around, then even the frame rates
wouldn't matter much.

I recommend that you download the FSX demo and play around with all the
different graphics settings, to see if you can actually run it. In
particular, turn all the autogen and custom scenery off, turn all the moving
vehicles off and reduce the texture quality.

But it sounds like it might be time to upgrade your computer anyway... :-)

Thanks Paul, very helpful. It's now really only a question of *when* I
start. I'm already a keen 'GE tourer', so the potential for much
higher resolution is exciting.

Re the PC upgrade, yes, I've been putting it off for ages. It always
comes back mainly to my dread of re-installing/re-tweaking/re-fixing
scores of major programs and maybe a few hundreds of minor ones.
However, FSX is yet another motivator!

Given the FSX spec, one immediate show-stopper is that I'm still using
SP1. I had serious problems when I tried to upgrade to SP2 a year or
so ago, immediately reverting, and I've never found much motivation to
try again. But again, the reasons are beginning to accumulate. FSX
apart, Microsoft Virtual World (which seems to offer better resolution
than GE for many areas) also needs SP2.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Paul Saunders said:

Horizon VFR video:
http://www.horizonsimulation.info/video/VFRGenX-DemoVideo.wmv

By the way, you may notice that this video is more blurry than the Just
Flight videos, but that's because it's more highly compressed. Rest assured
that the scenery is just as sharp as the Just Flight scenery.

You might be interested in this thread that compares the two sceneries:
http://forum.justflight.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=22889

Many have been disappointed with the Just Flight scenery because of obvious
joins (of different colours) between different scenery areas. I've also
noticed some areas of odd colour within the Horizon scenery, so that's not
perfect either.

Just Flight's scenery is noticeably less colourful than the Horizon scenery
and has a greenish hue. On the other hand, some complain that the Horizon
scenery is too garish. However, not one person has mentioned monitor
calibration, so any argument about colours are invalid unless you have a
properly calibrated monitor. I have, and the Horizon colours are fine.

It's also been suggested in the thread that the desaturated colours of the
Just Flight scenery are more realistic because that's what it actually looks
like.

However, what no-one's bothered to mention is that the weather and lighting
effects in the sim itself have a big effect on the colours. If you fly on a
hazy day the colours are desaturated by the haze, but on a clear day they
are bright and colourful. This is realistic (compare photos taken in hazy
weather to clear sunshine). But if you start with desaturated colours in
clear sunshine, they look even worse in hazy weather. This is not good. For
this reason (amongst many others) I recommend the Horizon scenery.

On the plus side, the Just Flight scenery includes real water lakes and
night lighting, which the base Horizon scenery doesn't. However, Horizon
will be adding these features and making them available as free downloads,
as well as ultra-high detail cities.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Paul Saunders said:

Horizon VFR video:
http://www.horizonsimulation.info/video/VFRGenX-DemoVideo.wmv

By the way, you may notice that this video is more blurry than the Just
Flight videos, but that's because it's more highly compressed. Rest assured
that the scenery is just as sharp as the Just Flight scenery.

You might be interested in this thread that compares the two sceneries:
http://forum.justflight.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=22889

Many have been disappointed with the Just Flight scenery because of obvious
joins (of different colours) between different scenery areas. I've also
noticed some areas of odd colour within the Horizon scenery, so that's not
perfect either.

Just Flight's scenery is noticeably less colourful than the Horizon scenery
and has a greenish hue. On the other hand, some complain that the Horizon
scenery is too garish. However, not one person has mentioned monitor
calibration, so any argument about colours are invalid unless you have a
properly calibrated monitor. I have, and the Horizon colours are fine.

It's also been suggested in the thread that the desaturated colours of the
Just Flight scenery are more realistic because that's what it actually looks
like.

However, what no-one's bothered to mention is that the weather and lighting
effects in the sim itself have a big effect on the colours. If you fly on a
hazy day the colours are desaturated by the haze, but on a clear day they
are bright and colourful. This is realistic (compare photos taken in hazy
weather to clear sunshine). But if you start with desaturated colours in
clear sunshine, they look even worse in hazy weather. This is not good. For
this reason (amongst many others) I recommend the Horizon scenery.

On the plus side, the Just Flight scenery includes real water lakes and
night lighting, which the base Horizon scenery doesn't. However, Horizon
will be adding these features and making them available as free downloads,
as well as ultra-high detail cities.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Paul Saunders said:

Horizon VFR video:
http://www.horizonsimulation.info/video/VFRGenX-DemoVideo.wmv

By the way, you may notice that this video is more blurry than the Just
Flight videos, but that's because it's more highly compressed. Rest assured
that the scenery is just as sharp as the Just Flight scenery.

You might be interested in this thread that compares the two sceneries:
http://forum.justflight.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=22889

Many have been disappointed with the Just Flight scenery because of obvious
joins (of different colours) between different scenery areas. I've also
noticed some areas of odd colour within the Horizon scenery, so that's not
perfect either.

Just Flight's scenery is noticeably less colourful than the Horizon scenery
and has a greenish hue. On the other hand, some complain that the Horizon
scenery is too garish. However, not one person has mentioned monitor
calibration, so any argument about colours are invalid unless you have a
properly calibrated monitor. I have, and the Horizon colours are fine.

It's also been suggested in the thread that the desaturated colours of the
Just Flight scenery are more realistic because that's what it actually looks
like.

However, what no-one's bothered to mention is that the weather and lighting
effects in the sim itself have a big effect on the colours. If you fly on a
hazy day the colours are desaturated by the haze, but on a clear day they
are bright and colourful. This is realistic (compare photos taken in hazy
weather to clear sunshine). But if you start with desaturated colours in
clear sunshine, they look even worse in hazy weather. This is not good. For
this reason (amongst many others) I recommend the Horizon scenery.

On the plus side, the Just Flight scenery includes real water lakes and
night lighting, which the base Horizon scenery doesn't. However, Horizon
will be adding these features and making them available as free downloads,
as well as ultra-high detail cities.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Paul Saunders said:

Horizon VFR video:
http://www.horizonsimulation.info/video/VFRGenX-DemoVideo.wmv

By the way, you may notice that this video is more blurry than the Just
Flight videos, but that's because it's more highly compressed. Rest assured
that the scenery is just as sharp as the Just Flight scenery.

You might be interested in this thread that compares the two sceneries:
http://forum.justflight.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=22889

Many have been disappointed with the Just Flight scenery because of obvious
joins (of different colours) between different scenery areas. I've also
noticed some areas of odd colour within the Horizon scenery, so that's not
perfect either.

Just Flight's scenery is noticeably less colourful than the Horizon scenery
and has a greenish hue. On the other hand, some complain that the Horizon
scenery is too garish. However, not one person has mentioned monitor
calibration, so any argument about colours are invalid unless you have a
properly calibrated monitor. I have, and the Horizon colours are fine.

It's also been suggested in the thread that the desaturated colours of the
Just Flight scenery are more realistic because that's what it actually looks
like.

However, what no-one's bothered to mention is that the weather and lighting
effects in the sim itself have a big effect on the colours. If you fly on a
hazy day the colours are desaturated by the haze, but on a clear day they
are bright and colourful. This is realistic (compare photos taken in hazy
weather to clear sunshine). But if you start with desaturated colours in
clear sunshine, they look even worse in hazy weather. This is not good. For
this reason (amongst many others) I recommend the Horizon scenery.

On the plus side, the Just Flight scenery includes real water lakes and
night lighting, which the base Horizon scenery doesn't. However, Horizon
will be adding these features and making them available as free downloads,
as well as ultra-high detail cities.

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Terry Pinnell said:

Thanks Paul, very helpful. It's now really only a question of *when* I
start. I'm already a keen 'GE tourer', so the potential for much
higher resolution is exciting.

Re the PC upgrade, yes, I've been putting it off for ages. It always
comes back mainly to my dread of re-installing/re-tweaking/re-fixing
scores of major programs and maybe a few hundreds of minor ones.

Yeah, always a pain.

Quoted message said:

However, FSX is yet another motivator!

Given the FSX spec, one immediate show-stopper is that I'm still using
SP1. I had serious problems when I tried to upgrade to SP2 a year or
so ago, immediately reverting, and I've never found much motivation to
try again. But again, the reasons are beginning to accumulate. FSX
apart, Microsoft Virtual World (which seems to offer better resolution
than GE for many areas) also needs SP2.

Haven't heard of that before.

One more minor point...

FSX Deluxe takes up 15GB of HD space. Each of the three Horizon scenery
packages comes on four dual-layer DVDs and requires 35GB of HD space. That's
105GB for the scenery, 120GB in total!

Might be worth buying a new hard drive just for the flight sim!

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Terry Pinnell said:

Thanks Paul, very helpful. It's now really only a question of *when* I
start. I'm already a keen 'GE tourer', so the potential for much
higher resolution is exciting.

Re the PC upgrade, yes, I've been putting it off for ages. It always
comes back mainly to my dread of re-installing/re-tweaking/re-fixing
scores of major programs and maybe a few hundreds of minor ones.

Yeah, always a pain.

Quoted message said:

However, FSX is yet another motivator!

Given the FSX spec, one immediate show-stopper is that I'm still using
SP1. I had serious problems when I tried to upgrade to SP2 a year or
so ago, immediately reverting, and I've never found much motivation to
try again. But again, the reasons are beginning to accumulate. FSX
apart, Microsoft Virtual World (which seems to offer better resolution
than GE for many areas) also needs SP2.

Haven't heard of that before.

One more minor point...

FSX Deluxe takes up 15GB of HD space. Each of the three Horizon scenery
packages comes on four dual-layer DVDs and requires 35GB of HD space. That's
105GB for the scenery, 120GB in total!

Might be worth buying a new hard drive just for the flight sim!

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Terry Pinnell said:

Thanks Paul, very helpful. It's now really only a question of *when* I
start. I'm already a keen 'GE tourer', so the potential for much
higher resolution is exciting.

Re the PC upgrade, yes, I've been putting it off for ages. It always
comes back mainly to my dread of re-installing/re-tweaking/re-fixing
scores of major programs and maybe a few hundreds of minor ones.

Yeah, always a pain.

Quoted message said:

However, FSX is yet another motivator!

Given the FSX spec, one immediate show-stopper is that I'm still using
SP1. I had serious problems when I tried to upgrade to SP2 a year or
so ago, immediately reverting, and I've never found much motivation to
try again. But again, the reasons are beginning to accumulate. FSX
apart, Microsoft Virtual World (which seems to offer better resolution
than GE for many areas) also needs SP2.

Haven't heard of that before.

One more minor point...

FSX Deluxe takes up 15GB of HD space. Each of the three Horizon scenery
packages comes on four dual-layer DVDs and requires 35GB of HD space. That's
105GB for the scenery, 120GB in total!

Might be worth buying a new hard drive just for the flight sim!

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

Terry Pinnell said:

Thanks Paul, very helpful. It's now really only a question of *when* I
start. I'm already a keen 'GE tourer', so the potential for much
higher resolution is exciting.

Re the PC upgrade, yes, I've been putting it off for ages. It always
comes back mainly to my dread of re-installing/re-tweaking/re-fixing
scores of major programs and maybe a few hundreds of minor ones.

Yeah, always a pain.

Quoted message said:

However, FSX is yet another motivator!

Given the FSX spec, one immediate show-stopper is that I'm still using
SP1. I had serious problems when I tried to upgrade to SP2 a year or
so ago, immediately reverting, and I've never found much motivation to
try again. But again, the reasons are beginning to accumulate. FSX
apart, Microsoft Virtual World (which seems to offer better resolution
than GE for many areas) also needs SP2.

Haven't heard of that before.

One more minor point...

FSX Deluxe takes up 15GB of HD space. Each of the three Horizon scenery
packages comes on four dual-layer DVDs and requires 35GB of HD space. That's
105GB for the scenery, 120GB in total!

Might be worth buying a new hard drive just for the flight sim!

Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk/weblog/

"Paul Saunders" <[email hidden]> wrote:

<snip>

Quoted message said:

FSX Deluxe takes up 15GB of HD space. Each of the three Horizon scenery
packages comes on four dual-layer DVDs and requires 35GB of HD space. That's
105GB for the scenery, 120GB in total!

Astonishing to recall that not so long ago an application that needed
120 *MB* of your precious HD capacity was considered exceptional. The
likes of MS Office, etc come to mind. Yet here we have one requiring a
thousand times as much!

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK