Available hardware almost good enough to run FSX?!

Phil Taylor’s latest blog entry focuses on an article on Tom’s Hardware relating to the testing of an over-clocked CPU/GPU rig that has provided some pretty nice figures on Flight Simulator X:

Toms posted a OC CPU-GPU review on May 15th that included FSX-SP2 and shows a whopping 83.1 FPS at 19×12 with no AA,trilinear and Ultra Quality, and a still excellent 72.7 FPS at 19×12 with AA, Anisotropic and Ultra Quality.

Of course, this has triggered the usual debate, bouncing between “FSX should be fixed…” and “Oh well, at least the hardware is finally catching up…”.

I really am still in the “undecided” camp regarding this at the moment. One part of me says “well, it’s always been like that. A new release of Microsoft Flight Simulator always needs about 2 years for the hardware to catch up”.

However, imagine this scenario: Microsoft releases the next version of Flight Simulator and it runs smoothly and fluidly on CURRENT hardware right out of the box. Imagine that? No expensive hardware upgrades, no tweaking required. It just works and works well from day 1. Imagine the sales MS would get? It seems odd to me that MS develop a product that they KNOW won’t run well on current hardware. By the time the hardware catches up, the next release of MSFS is available and people can buy the previous version for almost pennies. Purely from a commercial point of view, I don’t know why MS continues in this way.

Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to keep my fingers cross for FSXI.

• Imagine Simulation releases San Juan for Flight Simulator X
• Aero Files - Sky Environment Ultra FSX released
• Imagine Simulation releases KCLT
• Imagine Simulation updates KMCI for FSX
• FS Dreamscapes Utah 10m Mesh+ Terrain