All customer reviews

Been with X-Plane since version 5, and it has been at the bleeding edge of sim technology all that time. What has improved out of all recognition is the eye-candy, if you have the computational power to handle it. Now, don't get me wrong, Version 9 will run OK on our Sempron 2.0 single core with nVidia 6250 graphics. You just have to turn down the eye candy. Version 8 will run on the same machine with pretty pixels, and Version 7 could run superfast with the eye candy mostly max'ed out. Then we discovered Linux, and Version 8 would run 30~35% faster in SuSE Linux than under Win XP, so problem solved! No need to upgrade the hardware - although it meant ditching Version 7 which is Win only.. We were using X-Plane to develop a real aircraft for a customer. As part of the development we built flying scale models of the project, and measured their performance against X-Plane model simulations. As near as we could determine the major performance measurements were over 96% accurate in X-Plane 8 when compared with reality. That is seriously useful. Of course, X-Plane comes with Plane-Maker, so we had the tools to build our model sims to fly, and Airfoil-maker to generate airfoils, World-Maker for World making (well, airports mostly) and so on. All for the one price! Compared with other sims we have tried, this is the boss.