Preview

Aircraft and Environment
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004:
A Century of Flight - Part 3

by Jim "Hornit" Campisi

Introduction

In Part Three we will take a look at the environmental improvements and graphic enhancements to the sim. We'll also do an overview of the new aircraft available for your flying pleasure.

A note about the screenshots in this article. To maintain ultimate image quality, the jpg's have not been reduced in size. Each thumbnail and "ghosted" image below has an alt tag description which displays the size of the full page file. If you're "bandwidth challenged", check the information before opening the full-sized image!

While doing these previews I have upgraded my system significantly so I will also take a look at how different systems will perform with 2004. Remember that each system is different and while my copy is pretty darn near a finished product its still not the release software and as such likely doesn't run quite as nice as the final version does. My copy is a press beta from the May '03 time frame. There have been several versions I believe since then. When I first received the preview copy I was running an AMD 1.4 GHz Athlon on an Abit KG-7 motherboard. It’s at least a year and a half old. I had and still have 512 MB of PC2100 DDR RAM and a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 128 MB card from Gainward. It’s the Golden Sample version and I overclocked it slightly, not quite to 4600 chipset speeds. About midway through my experience with ACOF's press copy, I upgraded to a P4 System with a Gigabyte motherboard running an Intel 845E chipset with everything else pretty much identical.

What I have discovered is what we all know already. Microsoft Flight Simulator (all versions) are CPU limited games. This means the only real frame rate increase is going to come with more CPU horsepower. I have gained a few frames overall and I can run this beauty with some fine detail. I set the cloud and mesh sliders fairly high. If I max everything out she does bog down a bit, but only in the really high detail sceneries and it's still very acceptable. I'm not going to talk about frame rates as it's just not a finished copy and it wouldn't be fair. What Microsoft has done though has made it so we can have the nice looking stuff and a decent frame rate too. It appears from others on some of the popular forums, that the frame rates seem better than with similar settings in Flight Simulator 2002. I can concur with this, but as of yet I have no add-on AI in my version. This is what I have found to be the great equalizer. With a full suite of PAI (Project AI traffic add-ons) FS 2002 can easily be brought to its knees and see single digits, even with the P4. I like the terrain to look decent so it’s a trade off for me. With FS 2004 we see some really nice additions to the way autogen is displayed. You seem to get more and better looking buildings and they are placed better on the terrain making it look much more believable. Even at medium settings it seems there are more trees and buildings making the experience much better with this new version. The frame rates don't suffer as much as I thought with the additional detail. Hats off to Microsoft for that.

I'm getting ahead of myself here! The bottom line is — don't expect miracles, even with my substantial upgrade I have to make compromises. The compromises are still a vast improvement over the visuals in FS 2002 though so don't sweat it.

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