Hello Jonathan,

At the moment I’m trying to create a Goole Earth based scenery of The Netherlands at zoom level 15. The daylight part is done, still working on the night lit scenery. See some screendumps at the end on my home page link.

Thanks for the answer.
About the sun, really do take a look at the youtube video – their sun in the racesim is SPOT ON! Maybe you can be inspired by that. If you pay 10€ you’re able to try the pre-alpha of the game to see the effect by yourself.

That’s okay, you can answer for me, your answer is spot on. I think we actually have _all_ of those things in v9.
1 & 2 – look at the sun in v9 – watch a blinding glare cover the whole screen. The windshield cracks will become hard to see through too on some windshield types.
3. Thunderstorms are totally full of turbulence. Fly into one and it won’t be much fun.
4. Wet runways cause skidding – that’s been in there for a while too!

But maybe in one year, X-Plane will support those SLI/Crossfire architecture, and the FPS would be increased dramatically..

Just wait and see and.. save !

Valentin,

the Radeon HD 6990 is actually a dual-GPU card, i.e. a single card with two GPUs fitted on it.

This is completely equivalent to having two cards, i.e. it relies on the CrossFire technology to work, which we know X-Plane can’t take advantage of. Therefore You would gain no benefit compared to the single-GPU (and much cheaper) Radeon HD 6970.

My personal advice is to go with the 6970 or equivalent single-GPU solution from Nvidia (GTX 580).

Regards,
Filippo

I don’t want to answer for Ben here, but there is already Hail, runway / snow on runway and braking effects on wet runways, effects in X-plane 9. And if X-plane 9 thunderstorms LOOK ridiculous (sorry….I mean cumulus clouds rotating), they are still dangerous to fly into in X-plane 9. YOu could lose the plane due to abusive G-forces.

For the sun I can’t answer. But for these points above, I doubt that they remove it from the next version

Just to be pedantic… 🙂

It’s worth noting that GeForce 4 MXs are actually DX7-compliant cards. The GF4 MX brand was obtained recycling the good old GeForce 2 architecture. In fact, GF4 MX cards lack hardware programmable shaders.

If X-Plane 10 drops support for cards that are DX8.1-or-earlier-compliant, this actually means dropping:

– all GeForce models up to GeForce 4 (both Ti and MX flavours)
– all ATI Radeon models up to 8×00 series, and ATI Radeon 9200 series (despite their name, these are actually DX8.1 GPUs)

Hope this info helps people who own aging hardware and aren’t sure whether it can run XP10 or not.

Best regards,
Filippo

The latest ATI 6990 is currently the fastest single card, but some benchmarks show that the combination ( SLI ) of two nVidia 580 would be greater than just one 6990.

But I read below that currently, X-Plane 10 wil don’t benefits of SLI/Crossfire architecture..

So, what do you advice to me ?

After all, I have the time, I’ll buy it in one year, when the technologies will be even better than now..

Best regards, Valentin from France, a X-Plane enthusiast since V8 !

1. Will XP10 have HDR with heavy effects when looking into direct sunlight? In reallift sun is so much sharper than other things so an effective HDR will be very important for a real life effect.

2. Will XP10 have extreme sun depiction like seen in some other games – so you really give the sense of looking at the sun.
Take a look at this coming car-simulation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wOxYVlw6oLU

.. at around 0:32 – they have fantastic sun depiction and fantastic HDR aswell. Worth a look. C.A.R.S. really have state of the art graphics.

3. Will the weather have thunderstorms that can be dangerous to fly into? In FSX you can always juts fly straight through everything – it has no effect at all which is a unrealistic.

4. Wil the weather have things we havent seen before in FSX, xp etc like: Hail, runway water/snow that have an effect on the physics (braking, skidding etc).