Flight Simulator X with DX10: a disaster

[NewsBot]

As you know from my recent computer problems thread, I updated my system. Part of the reason for this was so that I could check out Flight Simulator X with DirectX 10. I did, and it's a disaster. Phil Taylor's blog (PM on the Flight Simulator team)*said that FSX would be faster with the DX10 renderer, but it's not, it's considerably slower. It also looks worse.

 

Exhibit A

This is a screenshot taken with the regular DirectX 9 renderer. All settings are on ultra-high (global settings, I didn't set all the custom sliders to max)*with anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing enabled. Notice it's hitting the target framerate of 30fps.

 

Exhibit B

The same screenshot, taken with the DirectX 10 renderer, with the exact same settings otherwise. Notice how the framerate is now only 15fps. Also notice how the aircraft's shadow is not anti-aliased! Here's a side-by-side comparison.*The shadows in DX10 look considerably worse than in DX9.

 

Exhibit C

This screenshot demonstrates the DX10 virtual cockpit shadows feature. DX9 doesn't have this feature at all. While the idea of cockpit shadows sounds very good, it looks horrible. Look at how jagged those shadows are! I thought this was 2008, not 1998.

 

It's rediculous. I'm also not th only one who's reported this behaviour. Maybe it's all much better on nVidia cards and ACES didn't test it on ATI or something.

 

Note that because of the incorrect DDI version in dxdiag on Vista 64 bit I also tried this with Vista 32 bit. Although the DDI version is reported correctly in Vista 32 bit, the results with FSX are exactly the same (and in fact, those shots were taken on Vista 32 bit).

 

On a positive note, the hardware upgrade did improve performance significantly. This screenshot (DX9) shows I get good performance even with rediculous amounts of scenery on screen. I'd be lucky to get 5fps with those settings on the old config. It still struggles with the PMDG 747-400X*because that plane is a real CPU killer, so I still need to reduce settings to fly with that, although no as much as before. Interestingly, it's mainly the virtual cockpit that's trouble on that plane, in outside views I can get 30fps fairly easily (with slightly reduced scenery and water effects) but in the cockpit it's much harder to get decent performance.

 

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