I am thinking of buying the 9600 Pro. Should i buy it? The one i am thinking of buying has AGP x8 , 128 MB DDR SDRAM. Will it improve my performance with FS? My PC's specs are AMD Athlon ,1.2ghz ,768mb ddr ram ,Geforce 2 gts 32mb , 60gb hard drive .

that card will help your FPS increase (I do prefer Nvidia over ATI htough). Your cpu will be your next bottleneck.

I'd say just go for it , I have a Geforce 4 MX-SE 128 MB DDR And I have to say Im gettin fed up with Nvidia lately, the Geforce MX cards are just plane crap (am I allowed to say that :-lol )I mean they are not really cards for gamers and for sure as heck not for FS! The performance Im getting now with my system : (dont laugh! )This is really patheticI have: Intel Pentium 4 2,8 GHZ Hyper Threading cpu 512MB Kingston DDR CL2 low latency (Hyper X) 80GB harddisk and the Geforce 4 MX-SEI put every slider to the min in FS still had 4 x AA and 2x FA enabled and my frames were 12.3 at a small default airport with no clouds! So my suggestion is go for it, the choice between ATI and Nvidia is ofcourse yours to make.There have been reported some issues with flickering menu's with ATI cards , but the GeForce series have some issues too.And besides that Im getting sick and tired of all the Nvidia drivers, every 5 minutes there is a new one and most of the time my performance gets worse instead of better.P.S. He's right about the CPU , that will be the bottleneck after the upgrade, nevertheless you will see an improvement in FPS aswell as image quality.just my 2

Thanks Shocky!I've been tweaking my FS and i get a FPS of between 15 and 25 (with clouds) at a default airport. I think i am going to go for the 9600 pro and then upgrade the CPU. Would an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 1.8Ghz be enougth to get past the "bottleneck"?

Good choice :D Im about to get rid of the GeForce card today and buy myself the ATI 9700 Pro :D cheers! :-waveshocky :-hah"I got the answer, now I only need the question" :-hah

Nice! How much are you getting it for?

Well I saw it for 299

lol! i can imagine you...."must get graphics card!!!!!"

What's up fellas,Another thing to consider is looking into a Radeon 9500 Pro with 128 MB of ram. Looking at the benchmarks it outperforms the 9600 Pro in some areas. The price is about $15-$30 dollars less as well. It has Direct X 9 and AGP 8X capability as well. From what I understand, the 9600 Pro is a dumbed down version of the 9700. ATI does this in order to keep the price down. I am getting a new system with a P4 2.4 Ghz @ 800 Mhz FSB (w/ hyperthreading) along with a ASUS P4P800 mother board. Take a look at price watch for the best deals. It saved me over $200 compared to going to the local computer store. My processor and m/b come Monday and I already have the other components:PowerColor Radeon 9500 Pro Evil Commando XKingston 2 x 256 PC3200 DDR400 Value RAM (As a tuned kit for 512 MB of RAM)and Enermax 450 Watt PSUTake care :-)-CJ Starr

Hey guys, I have a very similar system to yours, AMD 1.2, 640RAM, Radeon 7200 64RAM. I'm also interested to know what kind of frame rate improvement I will get upgrading. Or am I better off saving my money towards a new system. I was just looking around ATI's web site and for what it's worth, you can save $50 on the 9600 PRO if you trade in your old graphics card, bringing the price down to $150. You have to order it through ATI but they let you wait till you receive your new card before you trade in the old one. If anyone upgrades, I'm sure a lot of us would appreciate some feedback on what kind of improvement you get.mouse

Well for what it's worth.. I upgraded to a Radeon 9700 Pro yesterday, (system specs are somewhere in this topic 2nd reply ;-) ) and my frames increased drastically!I now get 25Fps with all settings maxed out 4x AA and 6xAF :-waveshocky :-hah"I got the answer, now I only need the question" :-hah

Nice! Well i've decided just to tweak the current grpahics card and get the most out of it and not buy a new one. i get near to the same frames as you with my current card.