Hey, I've just heard about the new Mercedes. It only has the performance of a moped right now because it won't run on current technology.
I'm having my frustrations, trying to get good performance out of FSX... that's for sure. But that's not a fair statement. Current technology CAN run FSX. quite well.
A $500 CPU.. $500 video-card .. and $500 worth of RAM along with $500 for M-board and all the drives, etc... could handle FSX pretty well. That's a $2,000 computer. Hardly a lot for a gaming machine by anyone's standards. And for $3,500 you could build a computer that would run it MORE than well.. right ? I mean.. we are NOT talking about technology that doesn't exist.
You could build the computer I'm running now from scratch for about $1,000 and it's "OK". (Athlon3700, eVga7800GT256, 1GB Corsair3200). Up until FSX.. that was a pretty darn good gaming rig, albiet middle-of-the-road.
If FSX is going to do extraordinary things, pushing a TRUE, state of the art gaming computer (prob $4,000 or more) to it's limits (as it should).. the fact that it brings a $1,000 computer to it's knees is to be expected.
What could Microsoft have done to improve on FS9 enough to make it worh being a three year newer simulator that would run just fine on marginal computers ? Not much..
You can't get mad at Microsoft over the technological leap (and if you're still getting angry with Microsoft for releasing buggy software, you're headed for the loony-bin).
FSX will run fine on a state-of-the-art, gaming computer.