OK I had enough of the ATI Radeon 9800 series. I've purchased a 9800SE and a 9800 Pro only to RMA them the next day. Reason being is in all flight sims I play on my PC with the exception of Lomac the 9800 cards are slower than my Nvidia Ti-4200. Now for a card that is 4-7 times faster in certain games I certainly expected more for $200. With almost every detail maxed except for a/c reflections no a/c or ground shadows, max cloud draw distance 40 miles, 3d clouds 100% and water set to low and with ultimate traffic @ 100% my machine can get 23 fps looking down the runway at KSEA, fair weather theme. This is with 4x AA and 8x AF. After taking off and panning over to the ramp the fps drops to 14 because of all the traffic. With the Radeon 9800 Pro the max fps are 20 and quickly drop down to 9. Ive tried almost every driver, bios setting, windows optimization etc to improve frame rates. I certainly expected 35 fps or more. For some reason the Radeon cards perform horribly in the two sims I play most Falcon 4 and Fs 2004. I got the same frame rates with the 9800SE which is incredibly strange. Ive tried overclocking the R9800 but the frame rate remains the same. So I am going to keep the Nivida now and just by a watercooler and overclock the hell out of it. After overclocking my Ti4200 I gained an extra 5-8 fps in dense areas with a modest 285/492 clock speed. Can someone explain the problem here is my PC the botleneck?Barton 2500+ (1.83 Ghz) OC 2.02 Ghz768MB PC 3200Jetway KT400 MoboNvidia Ti-420080GB ATA 133 HDWindows XP Pro SP1 + updatesI can get 5500 3d marks with the radeon 9800 pro and about 1700 with the Ti4200 but I could care less because I do not play 1st person shooting or RPG games only flight sims. I just bought an abit nf7-s version 2 mobo hoping to improve performance but I havent installed it yet. I'm all out of ideas. Maybe someone can enlighten me here.

I get about 25 FPS around KSEA if I remember correctly, using lots of PAI traffic at 100%, most sliders maxed. I'm using an old Radeon 9700 Pro, not overclocked :)Of course, when there's a lot of AI traffic, autogen etc. the CPU is much more important than the videocard so you probably wouldn't see a huge difference between an older videocard and a newer one in those circumstances.One thing worth trying is renaming the fs9}autogendefault.xml file to default.xml.bak and setting vector_objects to 0 in the fs9.cfg file (or manually edit the terrain.cfg file). The autogen performance bug is even more noticable on high-end videocards because it puts an incredible load on the CPU.

Unless you uninstalled the Nvidia drivers corerctly and installed the correct (latest) Radeon drivers, you are going to get results like that. How did you go about it? There have been lots of threads on the subject of changing card brands.Allcott

"I just bought an abit nf7-s version 2 mobo hoping to improve performance but I havent installed it yet."You should back-up all critical data and reformat. Then install the NF7-S. And put that 9800 Pro in the new m/b, not the Ti4200.Also recommend that you use Omega's drivers. They are much easier to set-up than when the CATs are tweaked with ATI's Control Panel. Omega does all the tweaking for us.http://www.omegadrivers.net/Greg

I just bought a Radeon 9800 Pro from best buy for $179 to replace my G4 4600, which is the bottle neck in my AMD 3200 high end rig. the main reason was to cut thru the weather as I do a lot of bush/GA flying, mostly payware aircraft, and the old card just didn't cut it, without AA.12 flights later, I am VERY HAPPY about the purchase!!! While I think the IQ is a little nicer with the nVidia drivers, the performance it awesome! Real weather, default cloud textures, everything maxed, AA and AF at meduim settings, in the FSD Porter at the new CYCD scenery with Holgers BC mesh and enhancements and ultimate traffic, what a dream flight!!!Hope you get your bottleneck worked out, it is a great card!!(although I would love to try the X800 out! LOL) Regards, MichaelKDFWhttp://www.calvirair.com/mcpics/PBTMCa.jpgCalVirAir International VACalVirAir International

If the reason you get low FPS is because of Traffic density then its definatly you CPU. Also Try taking out Shadows. Sure it doesn't look good but i found it to be a big helperas far as low FPS goes.

I properly uninstalled the nvidia drivers with driver cleaner 3. There were no trace of nvidia drivers left on the system when I installed the R9800 pro. I tried both the omega 4.7 and catalyst 4.7 drivers and many others with the same result. It looks as if everyone is getting similar fps regardless of hardware. Jimmi6 your video card pumps out the same fps I get with my ti4200. Looks like I have to be contempt with good/moderate performance. I have shadows disabled as I find them irrelevant to enjoying the flying experience but I compared the two cards under the exact conditions. I put more emphasis on the actual performance of both cards as opposed to quality or various settings. I'm curious if any of you can run a similar test and post your results. happy flying.