Hey Damian. As I have said before and will say again how awesome the AS series is and how much realism it brings to the table. I am just wondering what I got to do to increase the performance. Lately I built a new system.AMD FX60Dual 5800 GTX's1 Gig OCZ 4000Asus A8N32-sli moboNow this system is almost the best money could buy except I can get a bit better by going with some 7900 cards now. I spent a small fotune on my upgrade. Putting weather aside I can load my LDS, PMDG, or whatever in Seattle and have just about all my sliders maxed out. I can easily get 35-40 fps and talking about smooth. not a glitch. Now when I bring AS intot the picture it sure drops the performance. Usually to about 20-22 fps and a little stuttery depending on the cloud conditions. I have even dropped the res to 128 bit clouds. could you tell me what settings have the greatest performance effect? I would really like to see a bit better performance than I am getting. Thanks a lot!

Hi,IMO the only weak link in your system for depicting clouds is unfortunately the Nvidia cards, which aren't good at handling anti-aliasing of clouds (compared to the ATI's). You could try reducing AA and do make sure AA is turned OFF in FS9's interface, as this is known to cause performance issues.Other than that there are many options to help with cloud performance including reducing max # of cloud layers, reducing cloud draw distance in FS, disabling overcast enhancement, using DXT clouds, etc.I would also recommend locking frames at about 25, any more is not needed and it will help keep things smoother and allow FS to draw better visuals.Hope that helps...Best,

Well I have the dxt3 AND 128 bit clouds installed. I dont really want to degrade the appearance of everything else with AA 2X. When I clear the weather the FPS and smoothness jumps through the roof. I did reduce the clouds layers to 3. It just seems that the clouds drop the fps by 15-18 which to me is considerable.

HI monsoon,Try 32 bit 256x256, on some system DXT have worst performance compare to 32 bits.Could your check your AGP aperture in your bios? is is set to what's? 128MB or 256MB can be better depend on the system overall capabilty.Improving Overall Performance1) I recommend to set the clouds draw distant to the lowest and sight distant at the lowest, after testing, increase them little bit and test again the result in Fs2004.2)When there is many layers at the same time, the clouds density slider can help for performance.-ATI Video Cards do not antialise the Clouds in Fs2004 even if AA is enabled, better performance.-NVDA Video Cards for some X reason Antialase the Clouds in Fs2004 if AA is enabled, you will have lower performance.Video Cards SettingDepend on many system and configuration, you can start with the basic Setting and increase them after slowly and see your performance.-AA and AF at 2-Image setting to performance-Turn off Vsync In Fs2004 Display Setting-Antialasing is disabled -Lock your Target Frame Rate Slider at 25 or higher.-Set Mips slider default (4) -FS display filtering, test with Bilinear or Trilinear.-Test Fs2004 in Windows mode and Full Screen mode.Improving game performance for fs2004 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...069&Product=gmsSound Related Issue for fs2004http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...394&Product=gmsMicrosoft Optimizing Visuals and Performancehttp://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimul...ize_visuals.aspThanksChris Willishttp://www.hifisim.comhttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6...development.jpg