I was appraoching YYZ in heavy rain and overcast using the 700 with VC. I also had FS2Crew and RC running plus I'm using ASV with clouds set at 30 miles and 50% 3D. It was literaly a slideshow, no more than 3fps. I don't get it, I use FSAutostart and ussualy get fps in the 20's. Then I get the old low vertual memory. I've got 1.5 gig memory and have maxes out vertual memory.Dave FisherCYYZP4 Prescott 3.2e 478p 800mhz 1mg CPUP4P800SE Asus Motherboard1.5 gig PC3200 DDR RAM 400MHZGeforce Ti 4200/128Maxtor 80 Gig ATA 133 HD x2WDC WD800 80 Gig HDhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/ng_driver.jpghttp://fs2crew.com/linepilot.jpg

Dave,I would say this is due to a lot of cloud textures. A heavy thunderstorm or any heavy layer of cloud will take a large toll on your performance if you go with the default cloud textures. I think you can set the cloud texture size in ASV. Go with 128x128 or less. As I understand it, the gForce cards also suffers more from heavy clouds compared to ATI. This was my reason to switch from my geForce to ATI last year and it made a huge difference.If you on top of that are using the SimFlyers CYYZ and/or Flight Ontarios Toronto scenery any approach has the potential to turn into a slideshow...Hope it helps,

did you update Active sky? i believe it fixed a memory leak from the previous version

When I built my computer my buddy that helped me out said I would only realistically need 1GB of memory, he said that the newest games out there would only need that much... I gave him a smart look and said, "You've obviously never seen todays flight simulators" Now here I am, having just replaced my motherboard after only about 3-4 months of it being brand new due to all kinds of overheat problems. I guess my point is that no matter what system you own... Flightsim will always find a way to bring it to its knees! And yes, Mats... the overcast clouds are probably one of the most common causes of major FPS impacts. As you can see my system is fairly high end-ish and I have points of 10-13 FPS when flying at 33,000 feet above a cloud layer, UT USA is almost unusable for me due to blurred out textures and huge FPS drops when landing after a lengthy flight.2 gigs here I come :-walksmile Regards, Tom

Seems to me your bottleneck is indeed the vid card - any newer gen nvidia or ati board, preferably with 256mb ram (more room for larger textures) will help a great deal.Even my very modest X700 handles the 744 vc in bad weather on approach to densely populated airports with very flyable fluidity.regards,Markhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/747400.jpgXPHomeSP2/FS9.1/3.2HT/1024mb/X700pro256

oops - ethernet conn problem - double post

Just FYI - I went from 1GB to 2GB on a reasonable system (ie similar to yours) and it made very little difference, if any.Assuming you run a clean system, CPU and Video Card are the key! :-)

A new vid card and motherboard are on my shopping list. I need to switch over to PCI before FSX. Dave FisherCYYZP4 Prescott 3.2e 478p 800mhz 1mg CPUP4P800SE Asus Motherboard1.5 gig PC3200 DDR RAM 400MHZGeforce Ti 4200/128Maxtor 80 Gig ATA 133 HD x2WDC WD800 80 Gig HDhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/ng_driver.jpghttp://fs2crew.com/linepilot.jpg