Geometry in X-Plane 10 is a little bit different from X-Plane 9 – it can be bottlenecked not only by your CPU, but also by PCIe bus bandwidth.
I could turn up almost everything that creates geometry.Bear in mind that the art asset set is still a partially completed one, and the shaders are still being debugged and optimized, so anything could change in both directions. The 5870 is a very solid card – to do better you have to spend a lot of money. We ran X-Plane on a current-generation Mac Pro with a single Radeon HD 5870, driving a 2560 x 1440 display.
It’s the Mac team that is nearby, but ATI’s mac drivers are of a quality such that platform isn’t really an issue. Last week I had a chance to bring X-Plane 10 to ATI and run the sim on a few different modern GPUs. Please don’t ask whether your particular graphics card will work well with X-Plane 10. Spoiler alert: the buying advice I can give is at best fairly vague and obvious (don’t buy an old piece of junk DirectX 7.1 graphics card for $29) – once the sim ships and people start posting real performance comparisons, I suspect community data will be a much richer source of information for planning a new system (or a system upgrade). This will be the first of several posts on hardware and X-Plane 10.
As X-Plane 10 gets closer to shipping, we’re getting a better idea of what its performance characteristics are going to be.