Bobby,Gary,I really appreciate your posts. Frankly I also believe more in a smoothness test than anything else. First of all, even with a give situation it always occured to me that there is a randomness in the FS weather engine which you cannot control. A few clouds more of less and the whole objectivity is ruined. And then I also found that fps are a very bad decisionmaker for FS. What do all those fps help if I get a stutter every ten seconds or have blurry textures or inferior IQ. I have my flight that I no very well. And believe me, if there is a difference I will notice it.Alex

>I obviously have a vested interest in the heavy CPU use situations, >so can I ask that for at least one of your benchmarks that you set >up the most FPS-busting scene that you can conjure up (eg. detailed >airport like EGLL, complex aircraft, max AI - preferably UT, >multilayer cloud cover, detailed mesh/landclass if you've got it, >full graphic details - including aircraft and scenery shadows). LOL... I can tell you right now that even an increase of 50% from 6fps will only bring you uo to 9fps.Alex

Alex,Very interested to hear of your results, either FPS-based or smoothness-based.Gary

Gary,Bobby,I received the card today and went through some major BS after installing it. The blame was mine, as I had done something completely idiotic with powerstrip to maintain my 1536x960 res. I finally figured it out but it was after 1 a.m..Also today I received my FS Global mesh which I had to install. And yesterday night I also installed some GA AI planes and made bunch of new flightplans for them. I also changed the res to 1600x1000 as it is included in the Nvidia driver and installed FSSKY World yesterday. So much for the objective comparison. Sorry, but I am the guy who can't leave good enough alone.Before you read on you gotta know that I have a very specific system with a touchscreen, WideFS, a myriad of GoFlight units etc. etc.. So what applies to my system might look totally differnt on yours, as I really do anything possible to kill my CPU.So now the first immpressions.FPS gain in heavy scenery? Sorry to pop your bubble. Forget about it. 5 cloud layers and full AI over Seattle still bring me down below 20. Too bad. Overall fps gain? Of course. But who needs the jump from 30 to 60.Now to the positives. What absolutely amazed me was the gain in 2D IQ. I have a touchscreen that hosts many gauges among them he Reality GP Garmin and the readability is absolutely amazing. It looks like someone has removed the scratch protection from that monitor. The Radeon absolutely sucked in this departement.AA is at least as good as the Radeon. What I was hoping to get rid of was the shimmering autogen and it stays as bad as it has been with the Radeon. This really amazes me as I had read a lot of posts here of people who claimed that the Nvidia cards don't have that problem. I really wonder what kind of monitors or eyesight these people have. Now the real gain:Seems I got rid of the blurries once and for all. Even if the fps drop the card seems to be able to load the high res mips almost up to the horizon. The whole picture including the sky seems to be rendered clearer, crisper, sharper. The visible line between high res and low res mip maps I always had with the Radeon is not even noticable with the Nvidia.So first bottom line is. If you expect to finally fly your PMDG out of a large Simflyers airport with full Ultimate Traffic then forget about it. But remember that I am doing lots of things to really make my CPU sweat with other stuff. Therefore your milage will vary. I am sure my CPU is holding back the card. The fully packed panel on the 2nd monitor alone kills around 20% of the fps.However the gain in overall smothness and IQ was well worth the investment at first glance.More to come tommorrow.AlexBTW setting are 4xAA and 8xAF liek I had with the Radeon.

Alex.....Excellent!!!!!!Those extra 8 pipelines make a world of difference, especially in the scenery department.Thanks for the reply.Bobby

Alex,"FPS gain in heavy scenery? Sorry to pop your bubble. Forget about it. 5 cloud layers and full AI over Seattle still bring me down below 20. Too bad. Overall fps gain? Of course. But who needs the jump from 30 to 60."No bubble popped. In fact, this is what I was hoping would happen (from a logic satisfaction perspective, not jealousy ... OK, maybe a bit of jealousy ;)) IQ is important to me too, but I'm happy in my ignorance at the moment!I'm now warming up for an A64 upgrade, to help bring up my bottom end FPS, and I'll leave off the video card until the next gen cards appear (at which point I'll probably want one of the new ones instead :-lol). Those Winchester A64 939's seem like the go, with a (relatively) cool core to start with and lots of OCing headroom. My flight sim nut son is encouraging me all the way on the upgrade, as he gets my upgrade offcuts and will get a nice performance boost himself over his 1.4GHz Athlon steamer.Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback on your upgrade experience.Gary

If its any help, and as a point of reference I get about 10 fps with all sliders maxed and all boxes ticked except mip map 5, anti ailiasing off (set on card to x4), render to texture off, traffic 90% (100% gets out of hand). This is at UK 2000 Gatwick using PMDG 737 in VC with Active Sky (typical UK weather), FSW clouds, Ultimate Traffic and Radar Contact.

That's all you get Howard with that monster setup you have? I guess 10 would be better the 4 or 5 most of us would get in that scenario.RH

It's embarassing really! My impression is that the main problem is the volume of AI.

Yeah,and I am sure it is perfectly normal. With FS9 it is easy to kill any kind of system. It only depends on the amount of addons, graphic settings and such.I was tweaking the whole night yesterday (spouse rolled her eyes) and have made pretty good success with lowering the PCI latencies and such. Also I learned that it suddenly makes sense to switch off unnecessary services. Something that never made any noticable difference with my old Radeon. I suppose the XP3200 and the Radeon scaled so well, that shutting down a service or two didn't matter as the card was at it's upper end anyway. Now it is a different ballgame. So the whole tweaking process starts from scratch.One thing is for sure though and that is very interesting:15fps with the 6800GT are totally different from 15 fps with the Radeon. The 6800GT still ofers some fluidity at 15fps while the Radeon stuttered very noticably. What makes me believe even more, that the whole fps counter of FS is pretty bogus and misleading.Alex

Also I learned that it suddenly makes>sense to switch off unnecessary services. >The 6800GT still ofers some fluidity at 15fps>while the Radeon stuttered very noticably. What makes me>believe even more, that the whole fps counter of FS is pretty>bogus and misleading.>>Alex> =============================================================I have found that disabling all but 9 services (from Black Vipers Site) makes a big difference for me since it pretty much frees up the CPU just for running FS9 and the addons. That machine does not connect to the Internet so I can do that. From what I understand, Ken's FS Autostart will do the same thing. The other thing I did was convert to a RAID 0 configuration without a RAID 1 backup. I figure that if one of the hard drives drops out, no big deal since I have everything on CD. I did that primarily for the faster loading of MegaScenery files. The developers suggest keeping kias under 240 for their scenery but I can now blow through over 300kias without problems.I agree that clouds and AI traffic is hard on the system. I have to keep my AI Traffic (with MyTraffic2004) down to 70% otherwise it gets a little tricky when I'm near a large airport when it's busy.Bottom line? I totally agree with your assessment of the whole fps counter; I never use it. As long as the sim runs smoothly and the textures load reasonably quickly, I'm happy.Bobby

Bobby,I also made good experiences with the black viper stuff. I love the reg entries as they are really a one button solution. And I don't care if I have to reboot the computer if I need the other services as I have a 2nd one for printing and that stuff. FSAutostart seems to be a great program but you need to check out all those cryptic services most of which I have no idea what they are doing so blackviper is fine.My experiences with RAID0 configurations are bad ones. I have killed 3 IBM HDs with RAID0 arrays and went through the agonizing process of a complete resinstall of all the addons and stuff every time.IMHO in the time of 10000rpm drives and 8MB cache it doesn't make a whole lotta difference anyway.I am making more progress with the card. More later.Alex

Gents,Very interesting read. I have the following system:P4 3.2Ghz, 1024MB Cosair RAM and a 128MB 9800Pro card. Now the thing I developed was my computer "running out of virtual memory". This was with the PMDG737 going into Simflyers ATL version 2 with Activesky running. Also running was SBRelay, SBHost, AVC and SB itself. No AI traffic. Now that seems like a lot but I can get into other third party aiports no problem. What I am getting at is this...what will prevent that msg from coming up? Should I throw another gig of memory in or upgrade my graphics card? In reading the Rage3d forums, it looks like ATI is pushing this new CCC (control panel) that is based on the .net framework with its latest drivers. Most cannot stand it. Maybe its time to jump ship to Nvidia?Also, I have 2 160GB Seagate SATA drives on my computer in Striped RAID array. What does this mean? Also I saw that someone converted his RAID HD's. What is the benefit of this and is it hard to do?Thanks.

Running out of virtual memory is generally the result of running out of page file availability. I have heard many giving advice to create a static amount of page file; that is, set the minimum and maximum amount of available page file to a fixed value rather than let windows manage the page file. Have you set the page file to a fix amount? If so, reset to "allow Windows to manage the page file" and that should solve your error message. You can run out of page file resources if you're running out of hard drive space but you indicate you have 160GB drivesOne Gig of memory should be plenty enough for FS9 with all your addons.I won't get into the debate of ATI vs. NVidia but I am sure you will see an improvement from your present video card to either of the high end cards. As I said, those extra pipelines do make a big difference.Striped RAID array means you have both your hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration. Striping is when it writes partial data to multiple hard drives simultaneously. This has the result of dramatically increasing read/write speed. The problem, of course, is that if either drive goes bad, the data on both drives could be lost. Data is not stored redundantly for fault toleranceIt is not hard to do. If your motherboard does not support it by an onboard controller, you simply install an external controller in a PCI slot and connect multiple drives to it. Configuration is straightforward.Hope that answered your questions.Bobby

Bobby,Thanks for the answers. I had heard that it was bad to let XP manage your page file. Mine is set to a initial size of 1533MB and a maximum of 4072MB. I have heard of system stablility problems and bad FR's if you let the system manage it. I changed them to read 2533 for initial and 4096 (which says it is max allowed). Maybe this will work.