FSX a bit sluggish for you?

FSX has been out in several places around the world already, and the forums are buzzing with FSX related discussions anywhere from extreme praise to extreme disappointment. I remember this sort of views back when FS 2004 and FS 2002 went public. I often sit back and watch, letting the dust settle a bit (and it will), but I thought that I would voice some of my own thoughts here while the air is thick...

I'm of the opinion that the technological advances we are presented with in FSX are much like the advances made if we were to have gone from FS98 straight to FS 2004 -- that much has changed. So, essentially we are faced with a platform that puts an incredible load on the CPU and GPU, simply because of the sheer volume of 1's and 0's being processed many, many times a second. We have gone from a program previously using 4 ~800MB to two DVDs totalling 8 GIG of data!! FSX is simply way ahead of its time with regards to hardware, as it has been in the past, but with such a huge leap in data content, that jump in demand on the PC has grown exponentially.

So, what do we do as a community? We dig deep and find areas that can be optimized to help our PCs of today run FSX at acceptable levels. One of the great things I enjoy about the FS community is the diverse number of sleuths who investigate all nooks and crannys to find tiny performance gains. Combine these gains, and noticable performance improvements are bound to be found.

Over at AVSIM, these sleuths have already been doing a good job, and have been posting their findings. I recommend following this thread in the coming weeks. I'm sure there will be many more performance tweaks to surface...

In two years, I'll revisit this and see how the perception has changed... It will.