Chuck “PFunk” Bellows (SimHQ) is reporting from International Flightsim Convention Denver 2006.

Microsoft FSX Beta Demo

The first version out will be a DirectX9 title it seems and once the DirectX10 hardware becomes more commercially available, a free patch will be distributed for the end user to all the goodness that this new API promises. DirectX10 will not be backwards-compatible with previous versions of DirectX. Legacy support was cut in order to gain the detail and realism that they wanted out of it. DirectX10 will also be Vista-only and using it in conjunction with FSX is going to push your rig to the very limit.

There will be two different versions of FSX released, Deluxe and Standard, with a $20 difference in price between the two. Details on what would be offered in each weren’t completely finalized, but users could definitely expect a lot more content for the Deluxe version

Enhanced roads and rivers have been brought in from Streets and Trips. You can actually do IFR (I Follow Roads) flying now and you’ll even see motor traffic on the streets and highways, including vehicle headlights. Zoo Tycoon contributed to the effort by lending the team the animals it would need. You’ll see herds of animals and they will follow migration patterns. They have also mapped over 6,000 stars so it’s now possible to fly by using the position of celestial bodies in the night sky. Expect about a 14GB footprint on your hard drive for all this goodness

If we crank up all these details, what happens to the frame rate? Bryan was honest. “It’ll choke it right down,” he admitted. FSX is designed to push your hardware to the very limit. “FSX is pretty much a benchmark platform,” Schnepf explains, “Back when the very first Flight Simulator was released, it was used to test a computer. If you had the hardware to run it, your machine was classified as a PC. FSX will be played on a new class of computers.”