MS’ Flight Simulator 2004 was tested with high settings enabled across its four display option panels, with ground scenery cast shadows enabled. Trilinear filtering was also enabled and the max texture size slider bar placed in its middle. Sound was set to low. SimHQ’s test demo consists of a short dusk flight over Hong Kong city.
Ironically enough, it’s a Microsoft title that displayed the first real performance hit while running on the new OS. MS’ Flight Sim 2004 dropped over 20% at the lower resolutions, though the difference was reduced to only slightly over 5% at 1600×1200.
Pacific Fighters, patched to version 3.04, was tested in OpenGL with all video options set to medium (normal for Objects detail) using the in-game F4F vs. G4M track.
Windows XP Pro x64 bounced back with Pacific Fighters, again displaying only a small performance gap with the 32-bit version. Players wouldn’t know which OS they were using if playing with the test settings configured on their systems.