- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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No one in this business can guarantee anything for certain - Ian McNair, VP at HPQ
Microsoft, Flight Simulator developers use images to paint misleading picture
DURING THIS WEEKEND, Yougamers wrote a preview of Flight Simulator X: Acceleration. This add-on was originally planned to come after the Service Pack 1 that would enable DirectX 10 graphics for the game.
It came with appropriate screenshots addressing the visual gorgeousness of the all-mighty all-conquering API.
Published by Microsoft, Flight Simulator series is being developed by a team called ACES. After the announcement that DirectX 10 will not make it into Service Pack 1 (released earlier this summer), ACES decided to adopt the DirectX 10 API as a part of its upcoming add-on, called Acceleration.
Yesterday, when the first review of FSX: Acceleration hit the Interweb, Yougamers discovered that all the marketing materials and carefully distributed shots were nothing but a fantasist's smoke'n'mirrors. The game does not look radically or even satisfactory better than the original Flight Simulator X, released around a year ago.
Last winter, ACES released DX9 vs. DX10 screenshots. Those two screenshots are here:
FSX in DirectX 9 mode looks relatively good.
...but if you buy Vista, this is how FSX will look, in all the
beauty of photorealistic effects courtesy of DirectX 10
We received this set of screenshots ages ago from Microsoft itself, which used this game heavily to promote the beauty of DX10 and how necessary is to switch from Windows XP to Vista. These two screenshots ended in quite a lot of mainstream magazines, and were all over the place in specialist IT media.
However, if you're wondering what FSX: Acceleration really looks like, take a look at the following screenshot.
FSX: How acceleration in DX10 mode really looks
As you can see, something went seriously wrong, so we went to search for Flight Simulator X and DirectX 10 on Microsoft's own web-site, www.microsoft.com and this was the result.
Microsoft.com still claims this "artistic impression" is a shipping product.
A comment about something that is now considered "artistic rendering" was following: Eye-popping graphics in Microsoft Flight Simulator X.
Eye popping indeed.
Hood winking, we might add.
Nobody buys explanations about why Flight Simulator runs so slowly on quad-core processors and most powerful graphics cards, as we concluded in our review.
FSX is rendering practically everything, forget about any modern 3D feature such as Occlussion Culling, Occlusion Querry and Z-buffer compression and putting a bitmap cockpit on blanked alpha texture, while everything else is being rendered.
This procedure just kills performance and we could not imagine any game past DX7 utilizing such a concept.
We cannot avoid the thought that this plot might have been done deliberately, in order to spark interest about the game itself and boost sales of a product that usually has a limited customer base. ยต
L'INQ
Microsoft
DirectX 10 web-page
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FSX: Acceleration review
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this is really no suprise. I bought both fsx boxes when they came out. It took the vole a half year just to make the game semi playable with sp1. But in acceleration the dx10 is only a box that says preview. I love flight sims but ms is just getting shadier and shadier. I won't buy another os in the forseeable future or any other product. I used to condone people using illegal copies of winows. But after $700 plus in vista plus new things like printers. Its really just smoke and mirrors and I would like my xp back. Even with owning crysis. Dx10 is just overhyped underperforming code.
Have you ever seen the box-art for videogames before? Theyre all art and not in-game renders.

But oh god the game is made by M$$$ lets bash it!

Check out Crysis in DX10 if you want to see what the API is capable of.

Gimme X-plane any day :-)
http://www.x-plane.com
Anyone who has been playing/following FSX for any period of time knows about whats colloquially known as the "magic screenies." Aces has said over and over again NOT to expect those artist renditions in a DX10 patched FSX. It was a pretty hot topic on many flight sim boards for a long while. Just like any other advertising, you have to take "screenshots" which are released YEARS in advance of an API with a grain of salt. The best new feature you get with DX10 in FSX is dynamic cockpit shadows! Woohoo! Now that was worth the wait...
DX 11 is not just guessing game, its mentioned in article on fridays internet. maybe 2 years, if drag queen jeerers suggestions are true, its gonna be awhile.
tomas vondrashek maybe neoptics thang.
I cannot believe how bad FSX runs on my system. It was a waste of money honestly.

Q6600 quad-core @ 3Ghz
4GB ram
8800 GT 512
XP sp2
1680x1050 resolution monitor

FS9 Ran solid smooth on MAX graphics, everything set to max, and global textures set to massive even AA enabled on 1680x1050 resolution it ran solid smooth around 50-60fps, Even in places like new york city.

FSX on max? yea right, 15fps? forget that, can barely run on medium settings with 25fps.

I even managed to get crysis to run smoothly maxed out, with dx10 features enabled (yes there is a config modification to enable DX10 features on XP)
and it runs at 30-40 FPS.

FSX is nothing but a cheat, and that image proves it, good luck getting a smooth frame rate which is an absolute necessity for a flight sim.

Chemtype, you should read up on Crysis, turns out, you can make the DX9 version look just as good while performing slightly better.

http://www.crysis-online.com/forum/index.php?topic=11837.0

DX10 is a scam.
to the guys mentioning Crysis as their DX10 savior... see http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=513 to enable said features in XP. 

Also I think Call of Duty 4 is DX9 and looks very nice
First of all, ACES decided to fit Direct X 10 into Service pack two, which is included with Acceleration and will be availible as a seperate install a short time from now. Why? Because SP2 is in a separate source tree. Trying to build 2 products out of 1 tree is inviting disaster.

Second, yougamers never discovered anything. It has always, for years been known that those pictures were ARTISTS impressions, you may want to read up on Mike Gilbert and Phil Taylor. They have specifically stated, many times, that they were artists impressions. 

The Developers never released those pictures, usually developers do not make artists impressions. Marketting did that, to represent what they expected from DX10. It was obviously a pipe dream, that was only touted as real by idiodic people who ran moronic websites (Gamespot). And that Microsoft page? Damn, a single picture about something almost completely unrelated to Flight Simulator X implies the picture is real?

Big freaken deal. 

ANYONE who is serious about buying Microsoft Flight Simulator X will not be wasting there freaken time reading up on unrelated information to Flight Simulator X. Instead they will go a dedicated website such as gamespot or IGN, and look at there screenshots. E.G. http://au.gamespot.com/pc/sim/flightsimulatorxadrenaline/images.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=tabs&tag=tabs;images 

The official MSFS website is www.fsinsider.com and google should tell this to you. Straight from the horses mouth: "What does DX10 bring you? Much better performance, and the ability to crank up the graphics settings (improve visual quality) without sacrificing frame rate (performance)". http://www.fsinsider.com/product/hardware/Pages/default.aspx
That is, for the most part, true. Most drivers have DX10 problems with fsX, however if you do not suffer from bugger drivers, you can see improvements in the region of 50% or more.

On fsinsider, them artists impressions are NOT there.

A single page from 2005? Again, Big freaken deal.

Your ripping on ACES has is completely uncalled for and untrue. The pictures ARE and ALWAYS HAVE BEEN labelled as artists impressions, and the OFFICIAL MSFS website never shows them pictures. Only a unrelated topic implies it, which in itself, is from 2005. This seems like a piss poor attempt to rip on ACES, because real DX10 pictures have been in the wild for many, many months now, while the pipe dream artists impression has been there since, atleast 2006.

Why now? 

Are you disgruntled that you can't set up fsX correctly so you can get acceptable framerates?

LOL

My two year old machine can, and yep, it looks nice.

http://www.simviation.com/yabbuploads/2007-11-18_1-17-33-656.jpg
The real problem here is that MS portrayed the "magic screenie" as an example of what the game could look like in DX10, based on Ace's promised feature list.
Global Illumination
Real-time dynamic shadows
God Rays

None of the above items were delivered with SP2, and Ace's has no plans to deliver them via any future updates. What you see with SP2 (still yet to be released) is what you get for FSX. 

Worse than that, SP2 breaks backwards-compatibility with many 3rd-party add-ons. 

All that for virtual cockpit shadows and the performance that should've been there from day one. WHOOPIE!

What are you fools whining about?

You see the eye-candy shot of the water in DX10 for FS:X?

Well I own FS X and the water DOES look like this. My hardware isn't even that high-end, and I can get around 35FPS.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 OCed to 3.8GHz
Asus P5K-E WiFi P35 Mobo
2x1GB Crucial Ballistix Tracers DDR2-1066 RAM
74GB Western Digital 10000rpm Raptor HD
3 x 500GB Western Digital 7200rpm HDs
320MB GeForce 8800GTS OCed to 675/2050
256MB GeForce 8400GS 460/800

Using Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme on CPU and Thermalright HR-03 Plus on video card.

I'm running three monitors. The left is a 19" Dell 1907FP LCDs. The middle is a 22" LG Widescreen LCD. The right is another 1907FP.

I play FS:X on the center one at native 1680x1050 resolution. Settings are on high but not max. I get 35FPS and more no problem.
Download the lastest beta demo of x-plane 9 and compare it to FSX.
x-plane 9 will run almost smooth.
FSX will be a slideshow at identical settings.
x-plane looks better at med to high altitudes and almost identical on ground.
When x-plane 9 is out of beta my copy of FSX will be available on ebay! :D
The FSX programmers really needs some more training on programming multi core CPUs.
Seriously, I believe it is. Unfortunately, in itself it is not an incentive to go to Vista, which has way more negative points than the feeble benefits of DX10 can possibly offset.
I'll wait for DX10 to appear on XP before I use it. No way I'm going to Vista whatever happens.
As for Flight Simulator, I abandoned any and all interest in that clunker years ago. There's loads of flight sims that perform way better than that pile of crap.
DX 10 and FLight Sim X both are not what they are led to be. I have had the flight sims from the first one out by M$ and this one will not run on my computer with duel video cards or on two types of chip. 
I wonder why they made the flight sim like they did? It just does not make sense. The only thing I can see is they are giving the project to anyone with the lowest bid, and we see what we got from that. I hope they do not do this again as i will not buy any more if they do, that is for sure. 
I have gone back to Flight Sim 9 so I can have a good time flying and not watching my screen flip at 14 frames fps .
You are a liar, or just blind as a bat. 

You are quite literally the only person on the internet that thinks FSX Acceleration/SP2 looks even remotely like the infamous magic screenie, ESPECIALLY THE WATER. To pick out the most astounding part of the magic screenie and claim that Acceleration/SP2 duplicates this level of visual fluidity, you have got to be a viral marketeer or just a troll.
Oh please........ any idiot will know that that picture has been heavily photoshopped. It's probably the Graphics in 2015. not now obviously only noobs and idoits will believe m$ or that pic