Hi Alex,Interesting you should mention real weather, as the reason I am considering an upgrade is becuase of very low frame rates in some wx scenarios. Can you give me some idea of how your card performs when aircraft is on the ground with fairly extensive cloud cover and visibility of 10nm or greater, along with AI traffic, high scenery detail, etc(Please quote your system specs, as well)?Many thanks,Frank

Frank,FS will use anything top of the line, and then some. Two primary things will affect your FPS beyond your CPU:1) memory on the video card (aside from GPU speed of course), because DirectX can store more textures and shapes on the video card itself and doesn't have to move it from main memory, comparatively a slow operation2) main memory - scenery gobbles up much memory in FS and the more memory, the more cached scenery you can load.It remains possible to bring the latest and greatest hardware to slide-show single FPS withing FS, just because of high polygon counts that will continue to exceed available processing capacity.Both the high end Nvidia or high end ATI are both good candidates for FS in that they are faster than the cheaper offerings, but it boils down to how much you're willing to spend. ATI seems to have at the moment a slight edge with its architecture, but that varies from week to week it seems.Side note: I still find it amazing that a $50 simulator can end up costing thousands, if not tens of thousands (some people are REALLY into it) with all the add-ons and hardware you can plug into this thing. Pretty soon it's going to be cheaper to just get a license and buy an airplane :)

Thanks for your comments and musings, Etienne!Yes, I

I have a Saffhire ATI X800XT PE and it simply rocks but set me back 530.00 US! FS is tough, better CPU would do better for frame rates in FS but make no mistake it will improve your use of max res and AA+AF...[h4]Randy J. Smith[/h4]

Frank,I have a Sapphire ATI9800XT w/256Mb memory on a dual channel AMD FX51 box, roughly a 3.2 to 3.4 GHz equivalent in the Intel world (yes, I overclock the thing) based on some benchmarks I run. I use 4x AA and 4x AF and regular drivers (Omega proved a tat unstable for me). FS does run with higher priority than other processes.With ASV (via WideFS, but rendering is of course local) with max scenery sliders and the 512x512 mip mapped clouds, I seldom go below 18FPS in the Flight1 ATR or LevelD 767 VC at a reasonably complex airport (Gary Widup KDEN or KPHX for example). Add SimFlyers to the mix and the slideshow starts. In flight, I max out at my 24 FPS. Curiously, if I switch to FSNavigator while in flight, my FPS drop to 9 and I have to reboot, but that doesn't happen if I'm on the ground. Go figure.Hope this helps,E.

Thanks for the response, Randy.The 850 is currently around 570 US dollars over here(Ireland).BR,Frank