Thanks for the reply!Well it

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I am not flaming you or anything I know very well that not all tweaks works on all computers ;) and yes I have backups of everything but it don

Hi,I know you are not trying to flame or anything. Just trying to get the point across that I don't know what's wrong and I could only grasp at straws really. Like I said, I have been living with all the tweaks in my guide essentially since FS2004 was realeased. ;) And I have made a few suggestions for you to try, but I got the feeling you have an aversion to trying them. Believe me, I know the feeling of tweaking something out of curiosity only to find that it has been made worse, or been broken.I would have to agree that Fast Writes don't do much for ATI cards(at least for me) because I have turned it off before, for several days, and I didn't notice much change if any. Still, I go ahead and leave it on knowing it doesn't make much(or any) difference since there doesn't seem to be any problem.My OS, Paging File, and FS9 are also all on the same hard drive. My paging file(swap file) is set at 1.5 GB's though. I have not really checked paging file usage(or I just don't remember what it was) while running FS2004 but I have checked my RAM usage before and found that my entire 1 GB of RAM was being used. So for me I think that having a little extra room for the paging file is a good idea. But I also leave a few things going on my desktop while running FS2004, like my Mozilla web browser, a Notepad, Windows Explorer, as I've never really noticed a whole lot of difference in FS2004 FPS performance when doing so. That way I can ALT-Tab back to my browser and check on the forums and or go download something or whatever else while the sim is still running and/or paused. But when I restore Mozilla from the taksbar I notice that often Mozilla has been sawpped out to the paging file. Not every time but usually, and most often when I have been flying an aircraft that uses 32-bit textures. I can tell because when I restore it from the task bar Mozilla comes up as only an outline of it's normal self and then there is a lot of hard drive activity and Mozilla fills back in during this activity. On slight occasion, there is some hard drive activity that causes my FS2004 to stutter a little. It's really pretty rare and doesn't last for very long at all. But perhaps if my paging file were on a different hard drive from my OS and FS2004 then I wouldn't even get that. I don't know. I can certainly say that I do not get a lot of hard drive thrasing when turning, panning my view, or going into spot view, ect. I can say that my sim is pretty darn smooth all the time with the exception of when I'm near large cities and/or complex airports. And I could probably even fix that by turning off Autogen and/or deleting the 'default.xml' file. But Autogen is important to me.Here's my performance while sitting at KSEA.. I simply went to my post on the previous page and copied and pasted it in here. If you look again you'll see it's there, right below where I posted my System Specs. ;)"Sitting at KSEA on the active runway in the C172 in the 2D Cockpit(no panning around) with AI Traffic at 100%, using the Fair Weather theme, and time at 12:00 noon I get an average of 14.6 FPS. After about a mintue and a half or so it went down a little. Probably due to the AI starting to move around and taxi. It went down to an average of 13.8 FPS."Good luck P

Hi,Anybody wanting to download this Guide can download it from the following location. The zip file contains plain text and MS Word format files.FS2004_and_WinXP_Optimization_Guide_V2.zipCheers,JimSystem Specs:3.06 GHz Intel P4 on Asus P4T533-C(533 MHz FSB), 1 GB PC1066 Samsung RDRAM, NEC MultiSync FE2111SB 22" Monitor, ATI Radeon 9700 Pro Videocard w/ v4.2 Catalyst Drivers, DirectX 9.0b, Creative Audigy2 Soundcard, 120 GB w/8 MB Cache Western Digital HD

I am not reluctant to try your settings I have tried them all :) And in theory it should work. But I just wonder one thing. Do you got some add ons like Porter, 737NG, B1900D or Citation X or similar? When on the preview screen or when FS9 have loaded your flight do you have some seconds of all grey before the textures load or do they load pretty much instantly?

Hi Par,I have all the ones you named off. Those ones, plus the POSKY 757 and Meljet 777 all take a second or maybe just a smidge longer to load(with one exception, the Citation X. It's textures load very fast). And I can hear the textures being loaded from my hard drive during that second. The same things happens if I go into spot view, the textures on the plane take about a second to load. The next time I go to spot view I don't hear the hard drive so much and it seems to load just a little quicker. I think it's because most or some of the texture got stored in my System Ram, and this is one area I think is helped by having a my AGP Aperture set to 256. Just a guess, I could be wrong! If I switch back and forth from cockpit to spot view fairly quickly then the texture does not need to get reloaded(stayed in my video cards ram) and therefor is on the plane instantly. I either get, or get very close to my top FPS average of 22 in all the Virtual Cockpits of these planes except maybe one, the PMDG 737.So no, my system, like most anybody elses, does not load textures for these planes instantly. Not when using the high graphics and sim settings that I am anyway. Unless perhaps a person has converted them from 32-bit textures to the DXT3(with alpha channel) compressed format. The texures load fast on the Citation X(at least for me) because they are already in the DXT3 format. ;) The faster your Hard Drive and System Bus speed the quicker the high quality 32-bit textures will load.Check out the size of these texture folders on some of these aircrafts you are asking about. On my system the size of the default texture folder for the Citation X is: 29 MB's. Size of the texture folder for my POSKY 757 Air 2000 OC: 88.7 MB's! :-eek The size of many of my PMDG 737-700 texture folders is 44.5 MB's. But the PMDG also loads a lot of code for it's complex avionics. The Citation X has somewhat complex avionics too, but not quite as much so as the PMDG 737.Cheers,Jim

I gained approx. 2 fps from this guide and I'm shocked. I usually have to invest in h/w to get this sort of gain. The biggest factors for me were: 1) ATI SmartGart was clamping down my AGP settings (I only discovered this after going through the guide) and 2) the autogen. modifications. Regarding SmartGart, I don't understand why it was disabling AGP acceleration. I have modern equipment capable of 8x with fastwrite enabled. I downloaded the ATI utility to remove SmartGart and I've been running smoothly (and faster) since then!! Thanks for this frame-rate friendly guide!!

with most sliders to the right, weather, and a lot of AI traffic.

Ahhh, that's great! I'm very glad to hear it helped you! :D Hip-hip Hooray!Cheers,Jim

To non-Intel motherboard chipset users, especially the ones building your own system: don't forget about installing any AGP mini-port drivers that come with the board BEFORE installing the video driver (e.g., ATI) software. It made a HUGE difference in frame-rates for me. If you're not sure whether you need mini-port drivers, download diagnostic tools like SiSoftware Sandra, which will let you know if your AGP bus is running at full capability (e.g., 8x). One sympton I should have figure out earlier was that ATI SmartGart kept resetting my AGP speed to 1x. I downloaded the ATI SmartGart removal utility. WRONG. That only masked the more basic problem -- no mini-port drivers.

I decided to finally give the FS9 folder compression a try on Sunday. First I found the latest drivers for my ATI Radeon 9800XT. Then I cleaned all the useless things off my computer (Spring cleaning). Next I performed a disk defrag. When I restarted FS I could not tell a difference in smoothness or framerates. I did a few circuits around Fly Tampa's KSAN, KTPA, and KMIA with all sliders maxed out except for the weather sliders. I was flying with the "Building storms" weather theme with 3D clouds, and 100% ultimate traffic. I was getting around 19 FPS with these settings. Then I shut down and performed the FS9 folder compression. After it was complete I performed another disk defrag and restarted my computer. When I launched FS9 it took longer than usual to start up. Then I set up a flight at Fly Tampa's KSAN with the same settings as before. I was amazed at what I saw. The first thing I noticed was that the picture quality was amazing! I was able to see details in the scenery from farther away than ever before. It was like night and day. The picture was very crisp. Then I checked my FPS and they sat steady at 30 FPS. This is what I had locked them at just before shutting down the sim the first time. Then I added the maximum amount of rain and it still held steady at 30. I took the lock off and the FPS rose to 35. With every thing maxed out I flew some circuits with it locked back at 30FPS. The sim runs so smooth now!!! I tried at my other Fly Tampa airports and the same results!! The biggest thing is that my frames hold so steady now and the sim runs so smooth. I have read abouth how this tweak is hogwash and this and that, but it worked for me. Thanks TinSoldier for this post. This and your first list of tweaks has really helped me out. Keep up the good work!Regan

Out of curiosity, what score are you guys getting in 3DMARK 2001SE? It's a free trial download, and generally a good performance checker. It's useful to see when system tweaks are effective or not. You can then pin-point FS specific problems and system problems.I am getting 21119. My FS9 performance could still stand some tweaking.

>Out of curiosity, what score are you guys getting in 3DMARK>2001SE? It's a free trial download, and generally a good>performance checker. It's useful to see when system tweaks>are effective or not. You can then pin-point FS specific>problems and system problems.>>I am getting 21119. My FS9 performance could still stand some>tweaking.>>I tried this benchmark test and I only got 17501. What are some of the things I need to adjust before running this test?My computer specs are as follows:Dell XPSIntel Pentium 4 3.19 GHz 800 MHzATI RADEON 9800 XT 256 MBDisplay Driver Version:6.14.10.6436Memory: 1022 MBMotherboard: Dell Computer Corp. 0U2424BIOS Version: DELL - 7Operating System: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1

Hello,Regan, I appreciate your Thank You and you are welcome. Very glad to hear this post helped you out. :) I have never tried the folder compression. Perhaps I will try it sometime, I don't know. After reading you post it's tempting!Christian, I'm not really too much into running benchmarks. If I decide to downloaded it and check it out I will come back here and post my results. I am running newer system components now because my old motherboard went kaput, so I'd be sure to post my system specs.Cheers,Jim