This is very interesting.
I am running a Q6600 myself at 3.0Ghz. I'm quite OK for the moment performance wise with DX10. Are you saying it is worth trying Win 7 with DX11?
Can I also ask if you are having the rendering issues we have with DX10 preview mode like flickering taxiways and missing navlights? What is your GPU?
Well, I was never able to get mine up to 3ghz as even though i had three gigs of ram in it, it was mixed speed with 1 stick at 800mhz and the other two at something else ( still dont know what they are ). Best i could get it was 2.73 ghz on the cpu. Now, i said everything in past tense because a little over a week ago, i did something downright stupid ( though i dont know what) and fried my motherboard, which was an xfx 650i pushing a single xfx 8800GTX gpu. I've ordered an evga nforce baced 780i as a replacement and it should be here this friday ( aka the day i get my social security check ::lol: ).
under vista, dx-10 didnt do an awful lot of anything really. it made the images have more contrast and might have improved the speed by half a frame or something. there was tearing across textures in canberra and anywhere else i had custom textures installed, whether they were textures i had created or ones i got from someone who knew what they were doing like OzX. And even having spent a year carefully tweaking fsx for better performance, external views were nearly impossible because of the almost ratchet like jerkiness i had.
Nidia's CUDA drivers helped immensely, but there were some fundamental conflicts with NHancer and Riva Tune that caused me to remove those programs from my system. However i was able to go from 13FPS to over 30 FPS with them depending on the aircraft.
Thats kinda of a before windows 7 snapshot.. Like everything Microsoft Windows 7 is a mixed bag of blessings and curses. Over all, It's the best operating system they have made since DOS 3.0. In it's beta form, it outshines anythuing that has ever carried the windows name. It's faster, smoother, less prone to faults and crashes, and multi media that will knock your sox off. I put a blue ray dvd in the machine not long ago. Under windows vista i couldnt even get it to play right, Under windows 7 i now have to actually decide each month if i'm going to buy a new plane, or a new blue ray dvd ( yeahh.. i really need a life ).
Out of the box windows 7 comes only with dx11. there is no dx-9c. I installed it however as i re-installed fsx so i dont know if dx-11 will handle native fs9 aircraft.
Speed wise i was getting between 19 to 60 fps depending on the aircraft and scenery as opposed to the 3 to 13 fps of dx-10. Quality wise? I'll post some pics from both dx-10 and plane old fsx under windows 7 below and let ya'll decide. I personally love it.
What i DONT love is Microsofts hijacking of your computer. Even as administrator, you are no longer the administrator, nor owner. This can be seen when you install a program and when it asks for name and company, the name comes up as microsoft ( not youyr login ) and the company comes up as microsoft ( not your company << if you have one>> ).
I dont like the fact that they have gone SO far in making sure lil Tommy tumblenuts cant do ANYTHING that could possibly ever present him with one of those amazing growth opportunities we all have ( like typing rm in the root directory of a unix box ) that it makes doing anything besides sitting there like a complete novice juust running programs almost impossible.. I hate being treated like a moron..
There IS one little trick to eindows 7 that from a developers standpount makes it extremely worth having ( even if you have to manually rip out all of the windows security crap ). It's able to use more than one network interface card at a time. My roommate with his P-4 has been able to achieve a standard 10 megabit per second download rate using a wireless interface along with a standard 10/100 nic built into his mobo. This is all the while i'm seeing only a few hundred K in download rates with my one so called gigabit nic by nvidia. Three nights ago i watched him get 18 meagabit per second download rates, pushing the network to it's absolute limit. I spent over 3K on my machine, he buil his outta scrap. go fig :{..
Anyway, i digress, but i wanted to present an overall impression of windows 7 rather than try and get all technical, where i learned a long time ago that it's better to no confuse myself with trying to remember details that i'm nit 100% sure of.
in FSX, on windows &, frame rates are higher, motion is smoother, networking is a blast, and the graphics? well, like i said, i'll let you decide.
First up, FSX in windows Vista with DX-10, using REX, GEX, and ASA.
and now a couple from windows 7 with REX, GEX, and ASA. DX-10 is NOT turned on..
SO, there ya have it. For me, windows 7 is definately worth it from an FSX standpoint. As for the rest of it? My next OS is going to be solaris with virtual box installed so i can keep MS right where they belong. In a tightly sealed box..
Pam
