I’ve been playing around with Microsoft Flight Simulator X a bit this week. Overall not bad. I was pleased to see my PC handling the graphics very well, even with the detail set to high on various settings. I was worried the graphics overhead may have increased from the old version but at first glance that doesn’t appear to be the case.
There have been improvements to the appearance of water which now looks more realistic and there is now the option to show more objects such as ships and cars, althought the cars look nothing more than a black blob moving along the ground. It’s a shame more detail couldn’t have been added here. The ships have good detail though. I’ve also noticed birds flying around at low altitude which is another nice feature.
The demo is limited to a few islands in the Caribbean. That’s good for showing off the water effects but the real test of any Flight Simulator is trying to land in a heavily populated city. That is when the graphics are often pushed to the limit, so I may well find out my PC struggles when playing the full version. Maybe it is me being cynical but I wonder if Microsoft deliberately left out a big city from the demo so the graphics wouldn’t struggle 
Overall I like the demo and I would consider buying the full version.
- Leave a comment
- Subscribe
- FREE Newsletter
- del.icio.us
- Stumble it!
- Digg It
2 responses so far ↓
1 Sopwith // Feb 15, 2007 at 1:22 pm
“cars look nothing more than a black blob moving along the ground. It’s a shame more detail couldn’t have been added here.”
It’s a flight sim! If Microsoft had made more effort in giving us detailed cars we would have next to no frame rate at all, leave that for the car sims and let’s keep it detailed where it matters, ground scenery and airplanes.
2 Dean // Feb 15, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Fair point. I can understand the need to focus detail on the ground scenery, other aircraft, cockpit, airport buildings, etc. At the end of the day that is what counts.
My point was though, that if something is going to be added to a software product, be it a flight sim, or anything else, then it should be done properly.
The black blobs which represent vehicles are just a half way house and a waste of time. They shouldn’t even be in the product as they stand, so I can agree with you on that point.
Having said that, if you fly a plane in real life you would see moving objects on the ground at low level, such as traffic on a road. If you wanted an ultra realistic flight sim then one could argue that you would expect to see those items, even if they are just eye candy.
I’m sure the way modern computing power is developing that it wouldn’t be too taxing on a high-end PC and graphics card spec.
There are numerous options in the graphics sections of these flight sims to tweak the display, such as turning various graphic features on and off, such as traffic. So if you suffered low frame rate then you would simply switch the traffic feature off.
Interesting debate this. Thanks for your comments.
Leave a Comment