Insight...

...It's one of the hardest thing to gain when dealing with customers from afar. Still, it is possible. I suggested to the folks on AvSim to capture some objective data to back up their experience when running the new sim. Specifically what I suggested was to send the output from DXDIAG.EXE and a snapshot of FSX settings (by saving them to a separate .CFG file) to our tell_fs@microsoft.com alias. I don't know if the folks that own that alias really wanted all the mail but, hey, I thought it would help. In fact, here's an email we received today:

Hi, I was advised by Tdragger from avsims.com to write an e-mail with my dxdiag and fsx.cfg file attached.  I am expecting more out a brand new game with brand new technology.  FPS is slow and the graphics are not good.  The thing that gets me about the graphics is mainly the ground.  It looks so blurry and zoomed in.  It looks like a satellite picture that is zoomed in so we are flying over a zoomed in picture.  Then the buildings and houses are just put right on top of it.  Not realistic looking at all.  I was wondering if it could be the fact that I need to upgrade ram or video card because my cpu is fine.  Thanx for your time.

 

-Dave

One of our developers forwarded the email internally with this reply:

Sounds like he's running out of video memory and G2D/D3D are throwing out the highest detail mips to free up space. He's got his terrain texture resolution set to 7 cm. Setting it back to 1 meter might free up enough memory to clear up the problem. Anti-aliasing and high screen resolutions also chew up memory. Turning off anti-aliasing or switching to a lower screen resolution may help.

Heck, sounds reasonable to me. I hope Dave checks my blog!

 

Anyway, I can't guarantee you'll get this sort of customized help but if you're so inclined, here's how to produce the files I mentioned:

  1. Click Start, then Run...
  2. Type 'dxdiag' and press Enter.
  3. Click the 'Save all information' button.
  4. Save the file (default name = 'dxdiag.txt').

Then...

  1. Run FSX.
  2. Click 'Settings' from the left hand menu.
  3. Click the 'Save...' button.
  4. Save the file (will have a .CFG extension).

Send those two files--to us or anyone you think might help!