About 6 months ago I swapped out my FS PC from an Intel P4 1.8 w/ 512MB RAM and a Geforce3 Ti card to a machine with the following specs:Athlon 64 3400+ on Asus K8N FSB 800MHz mobo1 GB 3200/400MHz DDR RAM80GB WD SATA HDGeforce FX 5700 Ultra o'cd to 520MHz core / 1.04GHz mem.Win XP ProNow here's the issue. There is *a little* performance improvement over my old machine. When I get bad weather at an airport or a lot of traffic the FPS crawls down to 6-7 :( Now the culprit here I suspect is the video card, but correct me if I'm wrong. Also my 3Dmark05 score is very low, BUT comparable to others with the same setup it's about right. Here is a list of things I've tried already:- virus/spyware cleanup - Defrag- Latest chipset drivers / Nvidia Forceware drivers (72.12).- Turn off unecessary services- Nvidia driver settings: Max performance 2X AA, no AFFS settings:-Using traffic from Project AI, set to 60%-AA unchecked, trilinear filtering, Render to texture checked, T&L checked, MIP map 4, HW rendered lights 2, Global texture size High, frame limit 24- Scenery/autogen comp. Very Dense, Extended textures checked- Weather: Sight Distance 120mi, cloud draw 60mi. 3D clouds 10% detailed clouds Max.Sorry for the long post, but I need to know what I am missing here.Best regards,Nick

Hi Nick; You might want to try the following; Extended Terrain Texture-UNcheck Sight distance..Set it as low as it goes..I think 40 mi Cloud draw..40 mi Render to Texture..UNcheck...if you can get by with it. If you have any DXT textures loaded, clouds ect, you won't be able to run with it off. The scenery loading dialog box will go to 77 percent and hang, orCTD. Use a realistic visibility limit in weather. Not unlimited. AI traffic is an absolute frame rate HOG at "busy" locations. You also don't mention whether you have 9.1 and SP2 installed, butI found they both helped me. I'm sure some of the real experts will jump in here as soon as theywake up:) Anyhow try these in the meantime they should give you someimprovement. DennyProfesional TouristGreetings from El Paso

Denny,Thank you for your response. It's good you mentioned 9.1...I had that in my old box but I think I forgot to load it in the new one. I wonder if that would make a difference. Also, yes I do run XP SP2.What amazes me is that my system loads XP in less than 20 seconds and according to relevant posts here I should be getting *REALLY* good perfomance, even with settings set to a higher level.Nick

you should be getting really good performance, but not with sliders almost full and bad weather. My system is top of the line and the FS9 engine just can't handle all the AI, clouds, and scenery all together. It just isn't possible with the horrible engine. Wait for FS10 and with that system you will see much better performance.

Hi Nick,You have a very fast system there but you are right - it is the video card. It is far behind in technology terms compared to the rest of your system. If you can't afford a new video card for now, the best thing to try is what is already suggested - reduced the cloud sight and draw distances as they do kill framerates a lot. Also, reducing AI traffic may make some difference though traffic I believe is more CPU-dependant although RENDERING the planes is probably video-card dependent.I also noticed something: Your TRILINEAR filtering and all other filtering settings in FS2004 settings should be DISABLED - trilinear filtering is the older technology and ANISOTROPIC FILTERING should be used instead from your NVidia video card setup screens. Should give better visual quality...Good Luck!John

John, thanks for the tip on the trilinear filtering. I'm already looking to get an ATI 9800XT video card and see if this helps performance a bit. Yesterday also I tried reducing resolution from 1600x1200 to 1280x968 and the difference was dramatic. Frame rates doubled and from 5-6 FPS in heavy clouds I was getting 10-11. In fair weather the 2D panel view gave me around 25-30 FPS and the 3D around 40-50. I didn't realize that screen resolution could hog resources this bad.Nick

You should consider passing on the 9800XT. Nice card, but certainly not worth the asking price. Instead look at something along the lines of at least an X800Pro or 6800GT.Greg

WHAT?? Disable trilinear??? Are you crazy? Sorry that is just wrong for a high end video card. It makes everything look blocky!

Well, I took the plunge and purchased an ATI X800 XL. Thanks everyone for your feedback and hopefully things will be much better and the Athlon 64 machine I built about 6 months ago will finally start showing its true colors.Nick