Service Packs: A Staple Of Any Microsoft Product

On the release of Flight Simulator X one year ago, criticism was leveled largely against the game's poor performance. The game's visuals were a definite jump from its predecessor, Flight Simulator 2004, but came at a very steep hardware cost. On even the most well-equipped system, cranking up the visual fidelity dropped the frame rate to single-digit territory; a sort of aviation slideshow. Vendors' driver updates alleviated the problem somewhat, and a first Service Pack earlier this year offered performance enhancements, but Flight Simulator X still remains a resource-intensive piece of software. Particularly troubling is the game's performance under Windows Vista, which continues to lag behind performance on Windows XP.

Getting used to the tow takes some time, but soaring missions can be a great experience if you find the right thermals.

The venerable Cessna 172 Skyhawk, a staple of civil aviation for decades.

Developer ACES studio (a division of Microsoft Game Studios) initially offered that a second service pack would be released at the time of Acceleration's release, and would be rolled into the expansion pack. While the Service Pack 2 enhancements are rolled in to Acceleration, a standalone installer for those who don't purchase the expansion is still in beta testing (though it's scheduled for a "late fall" release). Even so, many of the anticipated feature enhancements and performance tweaks aren't present in Acceleration.

DirectX 10: What Could Have Been

This "artist's rendering" of the potential quality of FSX with DirectX10 rendering came back to bite developer ACES in the rear; actual DX10 rendering is nowhere near the quality of this shot.

So what technical and visual tweaks did ship with Acceleration? First, a number of performance enhancements made it into the final build, including terrain autogen optimizations and improvements to the scenery loading and caching algorithms (for a complete list, see ACES producer Phil Taylor's blog). And what of the announced DirectX 10 support? A preview DirectX 10 mode is available, but the quality of the end product is nowhere near the quality of the photorealistic mock-ups released to tease DirectX 10. Microsoft Games Studios and ACES have no one to blame but themselves for under-delivering. Addressing the potential for disappointment, Phil Taylor states:

"I know some are going to be disappointed, and some disappointment is reasonable. I will be the first to state that Aces releasing the magic screenies was flat out a mistake; but us not matching that level of "vision" (and that is what the magic screenies were) is not a cause for a flame war against Aces or DX10. I should note, for instance, that the DX10 code path performs better under load than the DX9 code path, and this means the DX10 features are more useable. And DX10 does look better, both in the cockpit and in the world."

Taylor gets credit for taking responsibility and for being candid, but the minor visual enhancements simply don't live up to the hype. For the pedantic, the list of DirectX 10 enhancements which ship with Acceleration (and, eventually, with the standalone Service Pack 2) are:

Virtual Cockpit shadows
HDR lighting
New water shaders and effects
Efficiency improvements with autogen, shaders and bloom lighting.

Welcome improvements for sure, but hardly a sea change. To add insult to injury, my testing consistently indicated that DirectX 10 rendering (on Windows Vista, of course) is consistently and measurably slower than DirectX 9 rendering (on both Windows Vista and Windows XP). But another round of enhancements is in the works, right? According to Taylor, the answer is "No":

"With that said, you now know what is in FSX-SP2 from a DX10 perspective. At this point, from a studio perspective it is time to move on from FSX so we have no future updates planned for the engine. "

Again, points for candidness, but this is a disappointing statement, particularly when many individuals are still experiencing performance issues on top-end hardware. With any luck, and some pressure from the dedicated and outspoken Flight Simulator X community, Microsoft will hear the complaints and work with hardware manufacturers to sort out the remaining performance problems to the benefit of all customers.