[en] X-ray FELs, such as the LCLS and TESLA FEL, require electron beams with large peak current and very small emittance. The X-ray peak power, temporal and spectral properties, depend significantly on details of the electron beam phase space distribution. The electron beam distribution is determined by many effects, as the emission process at the gun photo-cathode, bunch compression, acceleration and wakefields within the undulator. Although analytical results can give an estimate of the expected performance, the complexity of the electron beam generation, acceleration and compression can only be evaluated using a numerical simulation of all these processes, a start-to-end simulation. In this presentation we discuss the LCLS X-Ray FEL performance estimated by a start-to-end simulation, and we compare the results with those obtained using a simpler model