Acceleration, DX10, SP2 Info up

Phil Taylor has updated his blog
with information about what is in and what is out for the DX10 preview. A few items of note:

• The dx10 codepath is being referred to as a preview. Phil goes into some detail about this, but most importantly, we see a definite shift in protocol towards back-compat with this update. ACES wants to get in all the new features and performance possible, but I'm sure that's hard when they have to spend all their time figuring out why a three year old plane is all messed up in their new, more efficient pipeline. I, for one, agree with this completely.
• The water is gorgeous. I'm just putting this out there so you guys with Vista and DX10 can be ready for it. I don't have the horsepower to run anything above 2.x low on my system without taking a hit, but after SP2 comes out, running under DX10 will allow me to hit 2.x Max.
• HDR Bloom - bloom always was a massive fps hit on pretty much everyone's systems. Now it's an accessible feature, and it looks better. You guys notice how they fixed the things that were already in the system instead of pumping out new things to potentially cause more problems? In other words, instead of cloud shadows, we get a better sim. I'm ok with that as well.
• VC Shadows - you guys are going to love this, if you fly in the vc at all. It adds a great level of immersion. We saw an example of this in the train sim preview vids.

I suppose, given that all we ever got to improve FS9 was a single incremental patch, that ACES has shown a greater attention to community needs by at least 3 times this go around. I think that's important here. This is a sim that keeps getting better, and not just because of the 3rd party guys this time around.

Time to get ready for work, but I have some news coming up soon.