A demo of Flight Simulator X has been released after premiering on GameSpot. We've got a local mirror, including a torrent.

Well, this has been disappointing so far. It barely runs on my PC (when it's not crashing) and looks terrible - I think it must've autodetected my PC as being low spec or something and set all the graphics options to be really low. I cranked them up and tried again and it didn't look a lot better, so I maxed everything out and tried again - after waiting about 5 minutes to load it just blackscreened and I had to kill it.

Well, this has been disappointing so far. It barely runs on my PC (when it's not crashing) and looks terrible - I think it must've autodetected my PC as being low spec or something and set all the graphics options to be really low. I cranked them up and tried again and it didn't look a lot better, so I maxed everything out and tried again - after waiting about 5 minutes to load it just blackscreened and I had to kill it.

There's a blog post up on MSDN Blogs somewhere with one of the developers saying that they basically got pressured into making a demo before performance optimisations were in, and that you're going to kill your system if you do full details without the code that went in a day after the demo.

Still, in my mind they'll have to do a lot more to dethrone X-Plane, graphics or not.

That X-Plane game looks kinda cool - might try a demo of that when I get home too.

I agree with trog, I have a 7800 GTX with 2 gig of ram and the game chugged at medium settings. Dicked around with the graphics options for 1/2 hour with no better results. Always auto detects all systems in low settings.. Far Cry has much better detail and I can run this 1600 x 1200 in high res. With AA off it looks like lego land and you get 10 to 15 frames per second on any setting other than low.

MS get your act together the Flight franchise was good , this demo may kill it.

what about that Google one (Goggle?). Is that any good?

My dad is ape s*** mad over Flight Sims, he has the full setup with multiple monitors, the proper controls and so on. He gets s***ty at me when he invites me in to have a look at the latest scenery pack or some s*** he's got for FS/X-plane and I start making 747s do barrel rolls and nose dive into mountains.

Holy thread bump batman!

FSX killed my PC, such a failure.

Oh wtf, I didn't even notice time stamps.. for some reason this was like the 8th thread down on my thread listings.

SORRY YA'LL

Oh wtf, I didn't even notice time stamps.. for some reason this was like the 8th thread down on my thread listings.

SORRY YA'LL

yeh, I am becoming increasingly confident there is a bug that bumps threads randomly. It's really weird.