Flight Simulator X: Deluxe Edition Part 5 Page 15

By SimHQ on November 3, 2006 in _air7, hide

Though it has it warts and shortcomings, I have no problems saying FSX is a great product, and the best civilian PC flight sim in existence. It doesn’t do everything better or faster, but the total package is what I consider to be a great value. What is particularly exciting to me is that FSX can be considered an “operating system” for flight simmers, because we all know that developers are rolling up their sleeves and the add-ons are already coming down the pipe. One thing I am tired of though is the FSX vs. FS9 camps. With the affordability of hard drives these days I can’t understand why there is any issue to owning both and flying both (other than the cost of buying FSX). Or just flying one or the other and leaving the other camp alone. Personally, after spending many, many hours with FSX over the past couple of weeks, I have grown to love it. And firing up FS9 to do the comparison shots made the differences even more clear to me.

Finally, I’d just like to say that though I’ve tried to be thorough, there are many things I left out. Features, bugs, quirks, oddities, and other things I meant to mention. In fact, I have my notepad here staring at me with a couple more notes I jotted down last night, but I think what I’ve covered thus far is beyond adequate. I’ve tried to be fair, dinging FSX where I felt it comes up short, and praising it for what it got right. Everything here is my opinion though and I respect that other people have different feelings about this product. System specs have a lot to do with how FSX is perceived, so your experience may vary significantly from mine, for better or worse. Until 2008 (FS11?) I’m signing off!

– Chris “BeachAV8R” Frishmuth

Click here to download a zipped 42MB Divx video of “BeachAV8R” flying FSX Deluxe on his system. The video was captured with medium-high settings and use of the video capturing software (FRAPS) contributed a fair bit of overhead on the processor resulting in a bit of a reduction in framerates during recording. The actual in-game performance was quite a bit better without FRAPS running (understandbly).