HiI have an option to buy the Radeon 9600XT card. Any commends on this? Is it a good card to run FS2004?Stelios

I just replaced my old GeForce 2 with the Radeon 9600xt, 256 meg. $189 at a computer show, so I had a hard time passing it up. By far the best price for a 256 meg card. Installed and came up just fine. I have an older PC, 1.8 Ghz P4. My AGP slot is 4X, and the card is rated to 8X, so I'm losing some performance there.The card gives a much smoother display. It's pushed a few heavy-scenery airports up to the point where I can actually land at them again. It doesn't seem to make my framerates go up a lot, but the overall smoothness of the sim is much better. Best of all, I don't get the long, slow delays with white airplanes all around me while the textures update.I do have one problem, which I posted a few days ago and got no response. When I switch away from FS2002 (like to AFCAD or something), when I come back my view outside the aircraft is black, and I can no longer switch views. My trial-and-error solution is to go to the Hardware Settings section and switch my resolution from 1024x768x32 to 1024x768x16, or vice versa. This seems to reset things and I'm back in business. FS2002 is the only thing I've seen do this, although I don't play very many other games or do graphics-intensive things. I did update the drivers, but it didn't help. I put in ATI drivers, so I may look into the Omega drivers other posts have recommended.

"I have an option to buy the Radeon 9600XT card. Any commends on this?"I guess it depends on what it costs. You can buy a Radeon 9800 Pro for $200 or less now. I replaced my 9600 Pro 256 with a 9800 Pro 128 and got a very decent increase in performance with FS9. I also ran a utility that measures video memory usage and it never reached 128MB running FS9.David

Well, I replaced sometime ago an Nvidia Geforce 128 Mb for an Ati Radeon 9600 Pro 128 Mb and the change was substancial, so much that I am thinking about getting the X800.Maybe it doesn't use the 128 Mb but for sure there's something that makes a big difference between cards.Depends on what you already have and the price to pay for it. If it is cheaper than the market and the card is better than the one you have now go for it.

"Maybe it doesn't use the 128 Mb but for sure there's something that makes a big difference between cards."You're absolutely right. It's the design of the card, such as core, pipelines, memory speed, and amount of memory, depending on the application you are running.David

I upgraded from a GeForce MX II to an ATI 9600XT. The ATI card does an excellent job in FS9 and some other games I play, much better than the MX-II (which was a good card when I bought it years ago). I spent $169 I think for a 128meg version back in April. If you get the card at a good price and you have the money, you won't be disappointed. It's a great, inexpensive card that works well with almost all games and has great drivers from ATI.

Thanks guys for all the info. I was ready to get it but now I can get my hands on an Asus NVidia GeForce FX 5900. Decisions, decisions...Stelios

Finally I got the Asus NVidia GeForce PCX 5900 PCI Express card.Lets hope that I won't be disappointed.Stelios