DVA3901
Captain, MD-88
Joined on January 10 2007
Northeastern United States
15 legs, 24.9 hours
3 legs,
3.0 hours ACARS
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Posted onPost created on
January 18 2007 17:09 ET by Garry Shtofmakher
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OK, I have been playing with FSX for some time now, here's my take on FSX.
The initial impression was as always somewhat disappointing, I guess I just expect too much, it will grow on you though. My evaluation is far from over but I think I have enough for a preliminary statement. The scenery is spectacular. Those that know me know my favorite form of flight is low & slow bush flying, FSX is making it tough to find some flat treeless spots in the forests to land on thanks to better Terrain Mesh and Autogen trees. I especially like the addition of the Maul M7 a tried and true bush plane.
One problem seems to be solved...airports sitting on plateaus...most bush strips were plagued by this anomaly usually due to wrong airport elevation data. The strips are still perfectly level though, not realistic. Most of my flying was around mountainous terrain and airports were small with little or no buildings/ houses around. This is another disappointment, small cites and towns are still non existent in FSX. I had high hopes that MS would improve their land class maps, they did not. Addons like Ultimate Terrain will still be necessary to get the towns, roads, rivers and lakes right in FSX. FSX landclass is really lacking in some areas like mountainous terrain. The rock and scrub classes appear to be pasted on to the texture and the outline is too sharp. In general the outline of all landclass boundaries are too well defined and need to be blended more. There is great need for a better landclass addon, I have not tried to use FS Genesis Landclass in FSX but even it had some problems.
Now on to the settings. I started with the default settings and flew around a bit, my FPS where rock solid and locked at 20. I then started increasing the sliders that would improve the scenery more until I started getting occasional drops below 20. That is what is really great about FSX the level of control you have on the settings is much improved. You can fine tune them to your particular type of flight and also save them as a configure file for easy readjustment when you change your type of flight. When Vista and DX10 cards are available I am sure I will be able to crank it up another couple of notches.
These are the settings that my system could handle before I started to see drops below 20 FPS.
GRAPHICS
Global Settings: Custom
Full Screen resolution: 1024x768x32
I have not tried anything else as yet.
Filtering: Trilinear,
Anti-Aliasing: off
Global Texture Resolution: Very High
Lens Flair, Light Bloom: Off
Advanced Animations: On
AIRCRAFT
Global Settings: Medium High
Default Cockpit View: 3-D Virtual Cockpit
I began flying in this view a while back with FS9 and have become really comfortable with it.
Tool Tips & High Resolution Virtual Cockpit: On
2-D Panel Transparency: 0 %
Aircraft casts shadows on the ground & aircraft landing lights illuminate ground: On
Aircraft casts shadows on self: Off
SCENERY
Global Settings: Custom
Level of Detail Radius: Large
Gone is the shimmering effect in FS9 with this slider set to high values. Even at lesser settings transition to higher detailed texture is very smooth.
Mesh Complexity: 100
Apparently this slider works in conjunction with the mesh resolution slider. You can adjust this slider to fine tune the number of points FSX will use to define elevation detail. If you set the texture resolution to 38 Meters and the Mesh Complexity to 100 then FSX will use all elevation data available for 38 Meters. Reducing this slider will use less points and reduce elevation detail but also reduce the work load on processing terrain elevation.
Mesh Resolution: 38 meters
The effect is unclear if you use this slider at values of higher resolution than what is available. Default for most of the western US is 38 meters I believe, logic would say setting this slider at anything higher (lower number) would not have any effect. I believe the higher settings are for addon terrain mesh that is more detailed than default terrain mesh.
Texture Resolution: 7 CM
This slider can really bring ground detail into sharp focus, I like the most detail I can get here though it is less important the higher your altitude is.
Water Effects: High 2.x
This setting is fine for my liking and video card. I can crank it up some more but FSX water is so real looking at higher settings it tends to make ground scenery look worse or less real. I think this is where some got the "cartoonish" effect in the demo, there was so much real looking water around that when you saw land it looked "fake" compared to the water.
WEATHER
Global Settings: Medium High
Cloud Draw Distance: 60 miles
Thermal Visualization: None
Cloud Detail: Detailed Clouds
Cloud Coverage Density: Medium
Download Winds Aloft: On
Disable Turbulence & Thermal Effects: Off
Weather Change Rate: Medium
TRAFFIC
Global Settings: Medium High
Airline & General Aviation Density: 10%
Airport Vehicle Density: Low
Road Vehicles: 10%
Ships, Ferries and Leisure Boats: 30%
Since I am mainly flying bush I keep these settings low. If I were to fly the jets or props into major airports, populated areas or near the oceans I would set all these settings as high as possible.
MY Specs:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 640 HT/ EM64T, 3.2 G Hz over clocked to 3.633 G Hz
Motherboard: ECS PF21 Extreme (3 PCI, 2 PCI-E x1, 1 PCI-E x16, 4 DDR2 DIMM, Audio, Dual LAN, IEEE-1394)
Motherboard Chip set: North Bridge - Intel Alderwood i925XE, South Bridge - Intel 82801FR ICH6R
Memory: 4 Corsair VS512MB533D2 512 MB DDR2-533 PC 4200 DDR2 SDRAM
Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP2
Display: RADEON X800GT PCI-Ex16 (128 MB)
Disk Drive: Western Digital WD2000JD-22HBB0 (200 GB, SATA)
Optical Drive: NEC DVD/CD RW ND-3520A
Garry ShtofmakherCaptain, MD-88
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