Hi fellow flightsimers,lately, I was wandering what performance hit for the 737 I have to expect if I'd build in a second (PCI) graphics card into my computer and use it for two additional external 3D views (without the 3D cockpit of the 737). Last weekend I tried it with one additional external view on the second video port of my AGP graphics card and the frame-rate loss was of the order of 20%. I have a 2.8 GHz P4 with 512 MB DDR400 RAM (probably 1 GB soon) and a Radeon 9800 pro. Any experience?By the way, the 9800 is not overclocked at the moment. Does anybody know what I could gain with overclocking and what program I should use?Best regards Alexander Kappes

simbuff was nice enough to answer your question. And I am nice enough to post it in the right topic! ;)"HiyI installed a PCI graphic card in my computer. I have a Radeon 5700 dual head end a PCI 5200 I use it to show the weather radar. If you use the resolution 640 x 480 it has no effect on the framerate.kind regardsmarkMark":)

Dear Mark,thanks for the fast reply and you kindness :-). However, I think weather radar is something different than two 3d outside views and of course I want to run it at let's say 1280x960 :-).Best regards Alexander Kappes

You'd have to experiment with the overclockingI have a 6800 GT and clocking produces little effect, probably due to being under-supplied by the processor!

Hello AlexanderUsing a extra PCI card will definately be better than using the second head on the AGP card.when you connect two monitors on each head of the single AGP card, the card is sort of divided into two logically seperate parts. So you're providing way too much work to the one GPU where as you could simply ease everything by spreading the work force over two GPU's.But it would help if you hade more than 512mb RAM, so that can compensate for the lesser memory on the PCI card.

>Hello Alexander>>>Using a extra PCI card will definately be better than using>the second head on the AGP card.>I have two monitors on my nVidia 5900 Ultra 256 MB, and there is absolutely "no" FPS loss what so ever. I have as many as 5 guages on the second monitor (can't fit any more) when flying the 737 and other addon aircraft.The resolution is set at 1280x1024 @ 72hz. FS is locked at 20 FPS and is set to Ultra High for everything except weather (High), and "no" water effects. I run AS-2004, FS Real Time.I have a GB of DDR 400, an AMD 64 bit 3000+, with the DirectX sound set down one notch.I also have my fs9.cfg set up as per the suggestion found in the PMDG support section under "tips and trick" (I think that is what it's called).

Hi, yes, I think just with the gauges I also observe no frame hits, only with the extra 3D outside view. By the way, do you think that 1 GB DDR is enough, i.e. is there no swapping in all flight situations? Ever tried it with a additional 3D view?Best regards Alexander Kappes

Dear Terence,of course your right, but is it so clear that the frame rate drop is due to the higher work load for the GPU and not also because the CPU has to provide more of the external scenery? As I mentioned, I will prbably upgrade to 1 GB rather soon, do you think that this is enough or is 1.5 GHz much better?Best regards Alexander

I upgraded to 1GB recently, and still cannot run FS with PMDG without swapping. It will usually and eventually crash with the not enough memory message. I think 1.5GB of RAM would be enough, although I'd like to get 2GB all in all, to switch off swapping for good.

Alexander,I should have given you the whole thing. As always in any case, the graphics card alone cannot help your system by any means. You will need a good CPU lots of RAM and a good gfx card to work hand in glove with none of these leaving a bottle neck.You have pretty good system specs and 1gb RAM should do fine, and extra 512mb 400MHz stick that is.Word Not Allowed,You're using Windows XP, good luck being able to run any memory intenstive program without a pagefile.Windows XP like most if not all windows OS's is crap at handling a pagefile and memory. Getting 2gb RAM will be a waste, remember unsued memroy is wasted memroy.But it is strange that with 1gb RAM you get out of memory errors. You need to have a ogefile and set it's minimum to 256mb and max to 512mb. You should have no problems with this. I have a megre 256mb RAM and I run the pagefile at above settings and I havent got an out of memory error in ages. And I use the PMDG bird along with a lot of other programs running.

Just to add a note.... I don't use a page file. It is set to "zero". Everything runs off the 1 GB of system RAM I have (and the 256 MB on the video card).I have never experienced any out of memory errors.

>I don't use a page file...>I have never experienced any out of memory errors.No. But when you do you will know what problem really means! ;-)Cheers,