This game is very hard on current hardware, even with our Core 2 Extreme Duo processor and GeForce 8800 GTX it felt like we were running on a Pentium III with a GeForce 2. There was just simply no way that “ultra high” scenery was going to work. When we set the scenery up that high the framerates went to the lower single digits, it was bad. The scenery option seems to make a large impact on performance in this game. We also found that “light bloom” also is a huge performance eater. We honestly did not notice anything that different by enabling “light bloom,” maybe the plane got a little brighter, that was all. We recommend disabling “light bloom” to gain about 10-30 FPS in performance. It is crazy because even at ‘ultra high” settings the sliders in the game are no where maxed out with the level of quality this game can provide. Keep in mind that this game will be a lead DX10 title so we are likely to see it become much more efficient when DX10 arrives. It still is likely going to be a few years before we can maximize this game’s graphics quality fully.
 
Even with the slow performance we did see some differences between the video cards. It is no surprise by now that the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX provided the best game experience. We were able to set aircraft, weather, and traffic to “ultra high” and scenery to “medium high” at 1600x1200. We also found that cranking up the CSAA took little to no performance hit, 16X TR SSAA was very doable. In this game we were able to choose the “override application setting” antialiasing mode and brute force any AA mode we wanted. The game also has an in-game AF switch which when turned on provides the maximum possible AF level. At16X AF it was very playable.
 
With the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS we did have to lower some settings to get playable performance. We found that lowering the aircraft to “medium high” disables the feature where aircraft cast shadows on themselves. This provided a nice sized performance improvement when around a lot of aircraft. We also dropped the antialiasing level to 8X TR SSAA which performed great.
 
We encountered some horrible image quality problems with the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX in Flight Simulator X. With both GeForce 8800 video cards we were able to turn on AF from in-game and it worked fine and looked great. However, when we turned on AF from in-game with the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX we saw horrible texture filtering quality, I mean completely horrible. It was as if there was a band of point sampled textures (not even bilinear filtered) that danced in front of you on every object as you moved through the game. It was completely messed up. We found a fix though, disable the in-game AF option and use the control panel to force AF, which worked.
 
However, while it fixed that problem, we did notice texture crawling, yes you heard me, texture crawling on the ground when the plane was flying high in altitude. It was as if there were little pockets or areas that swirled around and danced like little marching ants randomly down on the ground, mostly around sharp angles such as going over mountains. The two BFGTech GeForce 8800 video cards did not do this; they had clear and smooth texture filtering with no problems. Unfortunately this is a problem that cannot be shown in a screenshot, and it is more visible with an LCD than a CRT, especially when you raise the resolution.
 
As for performance we had to set aircraft and traffic both to “medium high” on the ATI Radeon X1950 XTX, but 4X Performance Adaptive AA did work well. In this game you want to push for the highest AA settings you can, it really helps a lot. Therefore the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX at 16X AA looked fantastic.

We know we aren’t completely CPU limited in this game because when we went up to 1920x1200 we did lose graphics performance and had to lower some graphics settings to bring us back up to playable. At 1920x1200 we found that turning down the traffic to “medium high” worked best on the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX. We also had to turn AA down a notch to 8X TR SSAA. This still provided the best image quality out of the bunch and looked great at 1920x1200.
 
With the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS we also had to lower traffic to “medium high” and bump the AA down a notch to 4X TR SSAA. It seems the 8800 GTS is always one step behind the 8800 GTX, but still rather close.
 
The ATI Radeon X1950 XTX was the slowest and we had to turn aircraft and traffic to “medium high” and lower to 2X Quality Adaptive AA. It was at 1920x1200 on the LCD where we saw the worse of the texture crawling with this video card, again most noticeable once you gain altitude in your plane and watch the ground.