I am curious what frame rates others are seeing with PMDG in FS9 and using a similar system to mine: P4 1.8 1 GB ddr ram GeForce FX 5600 256 mb. ramMy frame rates are for the birds! While they are better with MS airplanes, I seldom see rates better than 10

FPS in FS9, while certainly affected by complex panels, seems to me to mostly be a cat and mouse game with cloud rendering. If you can tame the cloud beast in FS2004 you get a big headstart towards a more fluid sim. In my experience thus far, FPS is predominately tied to both screen resolution and anti-aliasing setting, along with bandwidth hogging properties of the default cloud textures themselves. I have an Althon 2100+ based system with a 64 meg GF4 Ti4200 video card. A good compromise for my setup is most cases is 1152x864 full screen resolution along with 2x anti-aliasing and low bandwidth cloud textures installed. Don't use FS2004's anti-aliasing switch, use your Nvidia control panel (or the equivilent with other video cards) to set up anti-aliasing 'externally' from Flight Simulator. Leave FS9's anti-aliasing unchecked at all times as FS9 will automatically invokes CPU killing 4x AA if you do so. Try searching the AVSIM file library for Chris Willis' FS2004 cloud set. These will overwrite the default FS9 cloud textures with considerably more frame rate friendly ones, utilizing a ton less memory as well. Follow Chris's included instructions on what weather/cloud setting to set up in FS9. Turn rate of weather change to zero. Turn off ground scenery shadows, if enabled.Turn off all air traffic (dynamic traffic gobbles up more precious CPU cycles and memory). Turn down or completely turn off autogen scenery. Turn terrain mesh down to a maximum of 80 percent. Turn max global visiblity down to 30 or 40 miles. Experiment with scenery complexity settings to find a compromise that gives you the performance/eye candy ratio you can live with.With my PDMG panel I resized the front outside view to half size (the outside front view sized to just where the top of the 737's glare shield borders the bottom of the outside front view window. This is a long time FPS enhancing tweak for front panel views and also serves to enhance the perception of speed when taking off and landing. Try searching the forums here for additional FS9 tweaks as well. But again, the FS9 clouds themselves are your biggest enemy, get those big balls of digital cotton to render fluidly is your ticket.

Also, regarding screen resolution, try going to a super high res like 1600 x 1200 (if you monitor will do it) and turn anti-aliasing off altogether. A lot of FS2004 people seem to be very happy with the look of the sim and the performance with this combo.

I know that if your computer cannot seem to approach 40, you should turn down the locked frame rate number to something lower - the reason - your computer is wasting precious resources trying to reach 40 when it may never do so. That's the purpose of the "lock frame rates at" function. It is to prevent your computer from wasting resources trying to do something it may not be able to do. The only odd thing is that yor system seems to be pretty nice. I wonder why else the frame rates might be low. Not sure what else to offer. Hope it helps.Chris

Thanks to all that have responded ... I will try some of these tweaks. I did a quick flight this evening from KSNA to KLAS. After climbing through FL180, I went from full panel to "landing" view. Whew! What a difference in rates! They jumped from 12-ish to almost 20; some of the best I have ever seen.Keep the tips a comin' cause if not by me, someone else can use them.Regards,Sean