All the instruments, switches and throttles really work, they are not just "pasted on"... ******************************************************* Thanks guys for these incredible examples of what can be done, and what is coming. I've never seen those before but they certainly convince me that my own gut feelings are right on track.

I think the "Nay-Sayers" here at Renderosity should get out more and take a look at what is happening. As a Flight Simmer I am already stunned by the incredibly high quality and near photo-realism of the newest aircraft models- and the sky-weather systems in REAL-TIME are way better than the clouds and skies in most Vue and Bryce renders.

But what should really wake-up some of the more aware Poser modelers has to be those nvidia demos, like the one cuba posted. The Machinima site is also one I'm going to go back and spend some time looking at.

I have a relatively top of the line gamer card which supports DirectX 9 (256MB) and it was around $175- not $500,
and with it I can crank up the realism in Flight Simulator to get extremely realistic water and sky effects, as well as metal shine, sun-glint on aircraft windows, etc.

All you have to do, which doesn't require any drug taking,
is EXTRAPOLATE where the consumer computer offerings will be by this Fall with even faster 64 bit machines and video cards using real 64 bit operating systems. Look at Microsoft's High Level Shader language, what nvidia is doing, etc and you have the makings of a major shift towards much more realism and high level detail in consumer games.