We start flying
To begin with, I must say, that Windows 7 performs significantly better with FSX than Vista. I have extensively increased the settings for the display and the scenery; partly by settings in the nVidia Control Panel, partly by settings in FSX itself. If you want more information about the settings that I use for my PC configuration it can be reviewed in the FAQ’s on this blog. In any case, with the settings much higher than on my Vista installation FSX performs much better even with 2 screens. Sometimes I barely reached 20fps on Vista. On Windows 7 however 32 fps is my target setting. FSX never has gone beneath that yet. Undoubtedly there will be sceneries that are so complex that FSX will perform below that target. Anyway. what matters now are some problems I ran into. It is perhaps important to mention that I have turned on the ‘ direct x 10 “Preview” of SP 2 in the display settings tab of FSX.
Usually I worked with 1 screen and in the so-called windowed mode. That is to say, FSX runs in a window, not in full-screen. With a single-monitor configuration, it is possible to change the window mode to full-screen (ALT + ENTER) without problems. With a second monitor this is certainly not the case. In that situation FSX may stop working at all. Also saving a flight in full-screen mode with different views occupying the second screen by and loading this again leaves me with a black primary screen and some views on the secondary screen. In a windowed mode saving multiple views on multiple monitors is acceptable. I say acceptable because not all screen settings are saved properly. The views on the second screen are usually in their default size, and on top of each other. If the same thing happened in Vista I do not know. And, perhaps disabling the direct x 10 preview helps to solve this issue. If so I will write about it here.
As promised I have tested the direct x 10 preview to the ordinary (direct x 9) version. In DX 10 mode (can be set after you installed SP2 in the display settings tab) everything doesn’t looks more attractive. Lines on the taxi lanes are dancing in the picture, the concrete lanes themselves are very disturbing. In short, it does not appear that this is a vast improvement. Once in the air it is not so much of a problem however.
I cancelled out the DX 10 preview (restart FSX) and noticed that at the same airport (Rotterdam Airport in my case), the view was much better; no more dancing lines. Then, of course, I have been experimenting with fullscreen and that seemed to be surprisingly well, until now. It seems at the moment, that the DX 10 preview is not yet good enough. Let’s hope for a new service pack that fully integrates DX 11 in the very near future .