dpny

Already pushed it to 4.5 GB of RAM without really trying.

You can buy both FS9 and FSX on Amazon for maybe $30 total, including delivery. I have them both installed in a Windows VM just for installing and converting MSFS payware scenery. So far everything has converted well.

I'd avoid the X-52: mine has been problematic from the time I bought it, and the replacement unit Saitek sent has the same problems: dirty input from the rotary switches. I'm going to replace it with CH stuff when I can. The X-52 Pro may be built better, but check with people who own it first.

No: missing art assets, 32-bit memory limits, ATC/AI planes still doing crazy things. v10 isn't there yet.

738: http://www.benedikt-stratmann.de/

I disagree about 2D cockpits being more realistic: you can't move your head around. You can't look left or right out the window, or glance up and down. It's especially galling in helicopters, where I move my head constantly. TrackIR + a good 3D cockpit beats 2D any day.

How are you defining realistic?

Buy a new video card.

At the moment, v10 has a lot of promise, most of it unfulfilled. Stick with v9 for now.

I don't see any UFMC errors, but remove Gizmo from your plugins folder. It's throwing a lot of errors.

Price aside, the issue with the Mac Pro right now isn't the CPU: the Nehalem/Westmere's are more than enough CPU for v10. The problem is the last officially supported GPU is the 5870, which v10 is more than capable of bringing to its knees. It's possible to run the 6000 series ATi cards in the current Mac Pros, but that family of cards is an incremental improvement over the 5000 series. The 7000 series, however, is a whole, new beast. People poking around have found references to the 7000 series cards in the 10.7.4 developer releases, but to my knowledge no one has yet gotten one to work in a Mac Pro. if Apple does kill the Mac Pros--and I hope to God, or whatever, they don't--then Mac users will face the real problem of becoming second-class citizens in the X-Plane world simply because of the lack of GPU options. However, if Apple does introduce new Max Pros at WWDC, with the 7970, I will be first in line to buy the new card. edit: looks like, even if Apple does kill the Mac Pros, if the new iMacs ship with 7000 series cards it's very likely one could use the .kexts to power 7000-series cards in MPs.

Austin's said seasonal colors are coming in the v10 run. Number of AI planes is directly related to number of cores. With 4 or more cores you should be able to run a lot of AI planes with little or no frame hit.

32- and 64-bit have nothing at all to do with "computing power". They only affect how much memory a process can take advantage of. 32-bit applications can practically address a maximum of about 3 GB of RAM. A 64-bit process can access a theoretical maximum of 64 petabytes of RAM--64 million GB. As the issues with X-Plane's clouds are all tied to harnessing GPU power, 64-bit won't do anything. What 64-bit will do is allow X-Plane to store much more texture memory, which means version 10 will finally be able to run with high objects, his texture res and lots of custom scenery without crashing. edit: you probably already own a 64-bit machine. Almost any processor made in the last six or seven years will be 64-bit. My eight year old G5 has two 64-bit processors.

Weather and clouds have nothing to do with 64-bit. Laminar bit off more than they could chew with the new clouds and have had to scale back.

On any modern card AA should't effect frame rate much at all.

And if, IMO, v10 isn't yet a replacement for v9, it has made enormous strides since release.

BTW, I can see the effect of the new art: cities are no longer filled with large swatches of suburban homes. They're now filled with endless blocks of three, four and five story apartment buildings, which really is an improvement.

I can use HDR, but it's Low Frame Rate Theater in any built-up area.

The new airports are wunnerful.

3D panels + TrackIR changed the way I fly.

Way back in the v10 pre-release days, Ben had a blog post in which he said it's possible that v10 might actually saturate the PCI bus.

Factor into that v10 is still very much a beta, and will really be until 10.2 or so. A lot of the art assets are still missing. I imagine that performance will steadily improve as the run of v10 goes along, but, IMO, we're looking at months until it really becomes a replacement for v9.

To be fair, I don't think Laminar nerfed the clouds as much as they're realizing they bit off more than they could chew. v10 is a vastly ambitious upgrade to X-Plane, amounting to a rewrite of just about every part of the sim apart from the flight model. The clouds are fabulous in theory--thousands and thousands of tiny puffs--but I don't think they're really usable unless you're running 7970 or a 580/590. Since a tiny percentage of the install base is running those cards (and no Mac users are, who make up about 40% of X-Plane users) I think Laminar bowed to reality and dialed things down some.

Who stuck cotton balls all over the sky?