I have an old system used for FS9. Its a P4 2.26GHz with 1gb RAM and an NVidia Ti4200 64mb video card.I'm running windows xp quite lean and tweaked quite well. I thought about upgrading my graphics card since its the cheapest option in hopes to breath some life into FS9 for another few months.So I went and got an ATi X700 Pro AGP card with 256mb. I thought there's gotta be a difference that I'd see. Well to my shock it performs on par with my old Ti4200! How could that be?I followed instructions to the T. I uninstalled the NVidia drivers and then used a driver removal tool from guru3D to really make sure there are no traces of old drivers. I swapped the cards and loaded the latest Catalyst drivers from ATi (I think 6.2) and made sure I had the exact same settings in FS9. I deleted and regenerated the FS9 config file. And after all that, I'm getting the same frame rates and the same graphical stutters all over again.There's got to be something I'm missing or is it possible that the Ti4200 wasn't the bottleneck in my system after all?Anyone did a similar upgrade with similar results?

I have almost an identical system except a 9600 card and it works fine. You might try older drivers, since the latest aint always the greatest.Also, have you deleted all your temp files and defragged?

It depends on the settings you run. If you run low res and not much aa and aniso you won

What he said. If the performance measurement is just the framerate I, too, wouldn't think there would be much of a difference as the CPU is going to be the limiter.Doug

Thanks for the replies.I'm running FS9 with fairly high settings. At 1280by960 32bit and everything almost near max. I have AA and AF set to 4x (tried 2x and others).I tried the Omega drivers instead but no difference really. It just came as a surprise to me that my CPU was the bottle neck instead of the video card.Upgrading my CPU is not worth it right now for me as I would need to upgrade my RAM, motherboard and most likely my PSU. I plan a new system upgrade later on this year.Oh well, I think the card is going back as I really do not see any difference that its made over my almost-four year old Ti card I have.

I use a 2.4 processor and don't have a problem. It may be the resolution you are running, try 1024x768x32 and see if you notice a difference. That new video card should be fine

At those settings you really should see a clear difference even if the X700 isn

I wish I can see the difference.I didn't do a complete hard drive format but I did remove all traces of the NVidia drivers from everything including registries and used a Forceware removal tool from guru3D which works well. Also generated a new FS9.cfg file.As far as running at lower res, some of the payware aircraft I have just don't look good at 1024x768. Besides, I tried that res and those stutters during turns is whats killing me and nothing seems to get rid of them.I am surprised too that I cannot see a difference between the Ti and the X700 (they're about 3-4 years apart and the Vram alone should help, right?). It

I use FS for a variety of things, and depending on what I am doing I constantly change the Options settings in FS. You might try lowering everything to minimums then bringing up one slider or change at a time to see what affects it the worst. You could also download FRAPS, just to use the FPS meter and see exactly what frame rates you are getting.

I'm in the middle of doing just that. I've been tweaking endlessly for the past day or so and no joy yet. One thing that is starting to show as a difference between the cards is that the image quality is better with the X700.I just wish I can get rid of those graphical stutters on the terrain textures in 2D view especially in turns. Nothing I've done seems to affect them. I'm satisfied with the frame rate just those annoying stutters.

>I just wish I can get rid of those graphical stutters on the>terrain textures in 2D view especially in turns. Nothing I've>done seems to affect them. I'm satisfied with the frame rate>just those annoying stutters.This is the source of frustration for most of us, even those with higher end systems (I have Athlon 3500).Michael J.http://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/pmdg_744F.jpghttp://sales.hifisim.com/pub-download/asv6-banner-beta.jpg

Im not sure I follow, 'stutters' and and indication of a low FPS, do you have a FPS counter so you can see exactly what frame rate you are getting? If not, get the trial version of FRAPS, is has a FPS counter built in and is easy to use.

My frames aren't too low. They rarely dip below 20, hovering around 28-30 (locked at 30).The stutters, I'm beginning to think, are somewhat unrelated to frame rates. It seems some users get really high frames yet still get stutters while others have said they get low to average frame rates yet no stutters. I would really love to find out what causes these stutters.To define those stutters accurately and not to confuse with other forms of stutters in FS9; if you're flying in 2d cockpit view, do some turns even while taxiing on the ground, and look at the terrain textures and you can see constant stutters of varying degrees of severity and frequency. Of course if you don't see any, well then you're doing pretty well.I thought by getting a faster GPU with more video ram (256 vs. 64 in my case) I'd get rid of those stutters. Well maybe they're somehow caused by a slow CPU more so than a slow GPU.

Ok, heres a few things we recomend in our help room...that may be the source of you problem..Delete all temp files, including those that XP hides, I can give you a path if you don't know already.Run msconfig and go to Startup and uncheck any programs you don't need running...you can always start them manually when you need themClick the Services tab and uncheck any that arent necessary..you can do a 'Google' for each item to check themHit Ctrl+Alt+DEL ONCE, and go to Applications and processes and disable any that may be running and auto update in the background.Finally, do a complete defrag.These may or may not solve the problem but they will definatly improve your machines performance.

I will run through those again, thanks. Just curious, I find the temp files by running the command %temp% and have, under folder options, 'show all hidden files' ON. I then just delete all its contents. Are there any other temp files that you may be referring to?