Hardware Guidance: Four Cores and DX10

I think we've reached the point where, if you are putting together a new computer and have X-Plane in mind:

• Get a quad-core machine if the pricing is favorable (and I think it should be now).
• Get a "Direct X 10" compatible graphics card.  That would be an nVidia 8, or 9 series (or I guess that crazy new 280 card) or a Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000.  DX10-type cards can be had for $100 to $150.

Quad core is easy: X-Plane 921 will use as many cores as yo have for texture loading (especially in paged scenery), uses two cores all the time, and uses 3 during DSF load.  The infrastructure for this additional scalability (previous builds used two cores, more or less) will let us put 3-d generation on 4 cores or more.  More on this in another post, but basically X-Plane's utilization of cores is good and getting better, so four cores is good, particularly if it's not a lot more expensive.

Now for DX10, first I have to say two things:

1. We don't use DirectX.  We have no intention of switching to DirectX, dropping OpenGL support, or dropping OS X/Linux support.  I just say "DX10" to indicate a level of hardware functionality (specified by Microsoft).  The DX10 cards have to have certain hardware tricks, and those tricks can be accessed both in OpenGL and Direct3D.  We will access them by OpenGL.
2. We are not going to drop support for non-DX10 cards!  (We're not that crazy.)

X-Plane does not yet utilize those new DX10 features, but the DX10-compatible cards are better cards than the past generations, and are now affordable*.  By making sure you get one of these, you'll be able to use new graphic features when they come out.

* The roll-out of DX10 cards has been similar to DX9.  With the first generation cards there was one expensive but fast card and one cheap but slow card.  With DX10, NVidia got there first, with DX9 ATI did.  Like a few years ago, now that we're a few revs into the new spec, both vendors are making high quality cards that aren't too expensive.