Hello All:Picked up a new Dell P4, 3Gig, 2Gig ram, Radeon X600se hypermem with 256M running WinXp sp2. Monitor is 24" wide hires LCD. Running the monitor at 1900 x 1200.Just installed FS2004 and SP1. Frames are low (about 15) and program response moving around menus is very slow. FS seems to run OK - just SLOW.Wondering if it is a hyperthreading settings problem, or something related to the X600 card.I'd sure appreciate any hints. Otherwise, the system runs great. I've tried running "enditall", but not much change. FS settings are "moderate" with antialiasing turned "on" in the program.THANKS!

don't turn on AA in the program, download the latest drivers from ATI, and follow all the tweak threads in the hardware and tips and tricks section. your resolution is going to bring that video card to its knees as well.

Your not going to get any kind of performance from that graphics card at those resolutions.

I'd have to agree on the videocard - it's a major bottleneck for the rest of the system.My advice (if you can't upgrade the vidcard) would be to:* Keep the 1900x1200 resolution, OR use 1600x1200 with the "Scale image to panel size" option turned off (can be located under Display properties / Settings / Advanced / Displays / FPD on my system). This will leave black bands on the left and right side of your screen when you play FS2004 in full screen mode, but it'll save some processing power and won't affect your monitor's image quality because the LCD does not scale the image. Alternatively play in windowed mode.* Turn off anti-aliasing (in FS2004 and display properties) and anisotropic filtering (in display properties)* Turn every visual option in FS2004 to its lowest setting* See how the game runs with the FPS limiter on 20, 30 and unlimited* If you're seeing acceptable performance, start turning visual details up and observe their effect on your FPS on a more detailed airport (such as KSEA) with AI traffic.* You should lower your screen resolution ONLY if you're unable to find settings which both look acceptable and offer acceptable performance. This is, once again, because of the scaling artifacts you'll get when using non-native, scaled resolutions on an LCD display. Some LCDs might scale the image better than others, though, so it's worth trying to see if you can live with the artifacts.I've said it before so I'll say it again: if you can't run games at your LCD monitor's native resolution, you've gone for the wrong upgrades :)

I leave hyperthreading turned off. It seems to slow down fs. keith

THe big problem you have is your monitor. If you try to feed it native resolution from you graphics card, like if you had a DVI out on your Graphics card, it will have one heck of a time cranking out all those pixels. See if there are any scaling settings on the monitor, as mentioned above, and then just see what it looks like scaled down. I don't care for high resolution DLP or LCD monitors with FS9, for just this reason. It forces you into running the Sim at a very high resolution. Let's say you had a monitor that was 1280 x 1024 that would be 1.3 million pixels per picture. Your monitor is over 2 million pixels per picture. That's alot more work for your graphics card....

Thank you all for the good input!!Anyone have any idea why when I Click on one of the menu select tabs to change menus it can take 5-15 seconds before the game responds? This seems to happen regardless of where I'm at in the menu structure. Game load times are the same as previous system. The install went well - can't detect any corruption.

This same short pause (not more than a few seconds, though) used to happen on my system too. I fixed it by running FS2004 in windowed mode (it only happens in full screen mode with ATI cards, to my knowledge).

Thanks, I'll give it a try.Only with ATI cards . . . Hmmmmmmm?Fortunately, my screen is big enough to handle this.Thanks!

I would get the same slow response time with my X700Pro card using the Cat 5.8 Drivers. Installing the 5.9's did wonders for me.I think you may just have to try several different drivers to see what works best with your video card.Jim

Also, of course make sure all mainboard drivers are installed and make sure current DirectX is installed. I reinstalled my OS quite some time ago and forgot to install mainboard drivers (which affect AGP performance) and did not realize what I had neglected until I ran PCMark and discovered the issue there. FS perf was very poor, until I installed mobo drivers.Noel

LOL. 15fps for that resolution is not bad at all. Scale it down a notch and you'll be happy. Fact is that while the 24" are big, they're not suitable for gaming unless you turn down the resolution a notch. If you want a big screen, connect any TV or projector to your S-Video out.

you made me just reconsider the X850... Do you think the X850 or 6800 would be a better bet?