hi all, as you may know i upgraded to the system as stated below today, and after alot of installations of various software and problem solving i managed to install FS2004 and im very disappointed in the PMDG VC, i means the frame rates inside the VC and virtually the same as they were with my old AMD 2100.i know there is a few things i need to tweak but can anyone shine some light on what areas i need to look at?thx!ps i must add that there is these 1 - 2 second pauses in the PMDG 737 800 VC however the default 737 is smooth as silk.

I've never been able to get the VC on a descent addon, like PMDG 737NG, to work with acceptable framerates on any of the last few FS systems I have built/bought, including the one in my signature below. Admittedly, I want it to work with high levels of AA/AF and lots of traffic at complext airports, but this desire sends my frame rates to the low teens at times.I too would be interested in any tips on cracking the VC FPS secret.Gary

Did you to a complete reformat of your HD & fresh install of all drivers?A few weeks ago, I upgraded just my Vidoe from a GF 3 ti 200 to an ATI X700Pro & saw ZERO improvements in either FPS or in graphics quality. I uninstalled all traces of NVIDIA, ran Drive Cleaner Pro and the like to remove all traces of anything NVidia related & still got nowhere.Alas, I just wrote it off as the engine that drives FS was the true issue. Last week, I had a HD crash & had to do a complete fresh XP install. I took my time to carefully & methodically reinstall each component & it's drivers seperately & 1 at a time. For instance, I did not have my Video Card, Sound Card or Modem plugged into the mobo when I first installed XP. After XP install was complete, I 1st installed latest BIO & chipset drivers for my mobo & rebooted. Did the same for modem, sound card & video card 1 at a time & rebooting after all drivers were installed.I then did a fresh install of FS9, the Patch, & only the PMDG 1900D & its service update & Justins 38M mesh for the US. Now my FS world looks incredible, I DID see a huge graphics quality difference, & I did gain about 10 FPS on average from previous FPS in a known given situation. I now have minimal stutters also.But sadly, even though I can maintain above 20 FPS in the VC of the 1900D, the fluidity of the gauges are still unacceptable to flying.Jim

After I got my new system, the biggest thing I did to get great frame rates was to install FSW Sky World's clouds. This really helped out a lot.

Hi Clayton, sorry to hear. Apart from the other comments, I think it depends most on which resolution you use with your display adapter and that the 6600 isn't suited for 1280x (in case you want to use that res). I would even dare go a bit further and state that the 6600 is the most overrated/overpriced video card around at the moment. All it has over the GF4 Ti series, is, 1 vertex pipeline, DX9 and PS3 support plus higher memory frequencies. So, one solution could be lowering the resolution to 1024x or max 1152x. Another item holding you back a bit is probably the 40GB harddrive. Nevertheless, you've got a very good 'underground' with the CPU and the 1GB of RAM. However and as you probably know, the system will perform as well as the weakest component. In case you upgrade your HD, I'ld advise to not get a S-ATA model for the mainboard you have. IMHO, Via chipped mainboards don't like them (because of the relatively poor VT8237 southbridge performance). Hope this adds to thoughts and please excuse the quick write-up. I'm off travelling in a couple of hours and will be away for a couple of weeks. Good luck and kind rewgards Jaap

Sorry to hear that Clayton.Well this forum has a great number of suggestions for tweaks that some, maybe many of them, would help you.One thing that I keep noticing esp with NVidia drivers, is that different ones yield different performance. The latest are not necessarily the greatest. Try older ones, and when you do, use Guru3d driver removal tool. When you do that, also delete FS9.cfg and let it generate a new one.A good fresh HD format and XP install is usually the best; and after doing all that, tweak XP. There is a good guide by blackviper? that is helpful. On my system, when I reboot fresh, and press Ctrl-Alt-Del I see the running processes totalling 20. FSAutoStart will further drop mine down to about 14 processes, and make FS9 run at higher CPU priority, which I'm not too sure how helpful that part is.Other things that helped alot were things like system properties-Advanced-Performance Settings-Adjust visual effect for best performance. For some reason that helped alot on my aging PC.There are literally hundreds of tweaks you can try. With your system there is no reason really not to get good performance. Having said that, as mentioned, PMDG VC is a huge resource hog and you have to be a little realistic and know that even the best hardware today can be brought it to its knees at times.Good luck,

hello guys!!thanks for all your comments, well yesterday was totally exhausting and today is another day around 7am saturday now!, anyways i must say **cautiously** that i do see a marked improvement in the PMDG VC, guess what was the culprit?yep thats right, i upgraded my VIA drivers to later ones and bingo, everything seems to be alot smoother now, well i havent had a good long flight, only checked it for about 10mins last night around the KSEA area, still want to do a good long flight on VATSIM perhaps today or tomorrow, on another note, i installed my SB Live card and was testing the mic, however my voice is coming through the speakers, which i dont want, as ATC on vatsim hear an echo, any ideas what i should do to stop this, tried for about an hr last nite, couldnt solve the problem.i will get back to you with some better feedback as time goes by. Still got alot to connect up, antivirus etc etc.bye!:-wave

Clayton,>yep thats right, i upgraded my VIA drivers to later ones and>bingo, everything seems to be alot smoother nowDid the drivers you upgraded to come from VIA or from ASUS?Gary

hi Garywell i think it was an accident of how i found it, cause i was wanting to install my Ledtek Gforce 6600GT Utilities / drivers and there was this VIA drivers section, i went there and i thought nothing to lose so i installed these VIA drivers from my CD which was supplied for my GF card and so far so good...

Hi Clayton,"i installed my SB Live card and was testing the mic, however my voice is coming through the speakers, which i dont want, as ATC on vatsim hear an echo, any ideas what i should do to stop this"...Try muting the mic via the SB Live! mixer.Mike

I know this doesn't help much now, but I moved away from motherboards with the VIA chipset. Just too many problems getting them to run anything smoothly.Went to the Nvidia chipset and it made a huge difference. Just a comment for those of you considering a future system upgrade.Scott :-)ATP/CFII/DA20 Type Rated - Instructor Pilot - USAFA (KAFF), Colorado Springs, CO & at KCOSAOPA #00956593, since 1987Background in Corporate, Airline, and General AviationB.S. Degree in MISGamming System Specs: (Built this one myself)AMD Athlon-64 3000+ Gigabyte K8NS nForce3-250 Chipset 8x AGP Main Board 1GB DDR400 PC3200 Memory 160GB 7200 rpm Hard Drive 16x DVD-ROM Audigy 2ZS Gammer Sound Card5.1 Channel Surround Sound Speakers256MB GeForce-5700 8X AGP Video Cotytech Gaming CaseCH Products Yoke, Rudder Pedals, Throttle QuadrantSaitek Cyborg Gold Joystic for Helo's & Stick equipped aircrafteDimensional Force Feedback HeadsetsSaitek Eclipse KeyboardWindows XP Pro SP2Home Network for using the Instructor StationFS9 Sliders maxed with other settings (except weather, kills the FPS) at their best quality positions.

do u get micostutters on your nvidia chipset?does asus mobos come with nvidia chipsets?

Hi, I have an Nforce3 Ultra based m/b. Asus does make NFORCE motherboards indeed. My experience with my 939 board (a Gigabyte) and a 6600GT has been very positive. Stutters do occasionaly happen but I am sure that they are related to the stress I place on the sim. I stay clear from AI traffic, I haven't even turned it on for testing, but a complex VC (read PMDG), in a complex airport at relatively bad weather is certainly playable, even when I go 4xAA, 8xAF.Finally,I think that one shouldn't really get too stressed over the brand of the motherboard, all of them seem to do their jobs reasonably well. What is really important to me is the chipset type. In addition I never install the board maker's drivers, I just go the chipset manufacturer's site and download the latest ones from there. In my case the same applies for the inbuilt Realtek sound chip. I just hate the Realtek driver interface and Nvidia's own performs flawlessly.Regards,

100% traffic + good looking clouds + VC = horrible FPSEven on my system I am lucky to get 20 FPS. But without much traffic it is much better. Anyway I am happy because it runs smooth, only slows down around big airports such as KLAX KJFK, etc