I now have a AGP MB with a powercolor ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128M.Is there a AGP card that is significantly more powerfull than what I already have. I'm mainly thinking about FS. Or is such an investment without any sense?

First thing you want to do is check your power supply wattage. Make sure your power supply can handle a new card. Many of the new cards have pretty high power requirements. Depending on where you got the PC, you might be able to find it on the specs. Once you have that down, a video card upgrade will probably not give you tons more FPS. What it will do is allow you to run higher levels of AA and AF with little or no FPS hit. Although a new card certainly will help, it is never as big a jump as people expect. Check out this benchmark article. It doesn't have all the cards though. http://www.tomshardware.com/2004/10/04/vga..._iv/page11.htmlI owned a 9800 for a long time, and it is still a good card. Although there are newer cards which are much faster now. I finally upgraded to an ATI 800 XL. I was happy with the results, although I didn't run any specific benchmarks.

Sure there are more powerful cards than the 9800 that are in the AGP sytle. Are you planning to switch the card or were you just asking? If you want to know the 6800 and 7800 series of the Nvidia series are much more powerful than the 9800 and on the ATI side I would assume the X19xx or X18xx series are more powerful, but I am not that familar with the ATI brand of cards so someone here will correct me if I am wrong about the ATI cards.thanksPaul

For the most part, the 800 series and newer are a big jump from the 9800. You should check the benchmarks as much as possible. Sometimes the new cards aren't a big enough jump to justify the price. The thing to keep in mind is that fs2004 is still processor dependant, and a video card upgrade is not always as big a jump as people hope. Just look at the thread "what a disappointment" on the front page. fs2004 is very different from your typical first person shooter games, where spending a bunch of cash on a new video card will equate to a huge performance increase.

>First thing you want to do is check your power supply>wattage. Make sure your power supply can handle a new card. I have a Q Tec 550 W PSU.>Once you have that down, a video card upgrade will probably>not give you tons more FPS. What it will do is allow you to>run higher levels of AA and AF with little or no FPS hit. >Although a new card certainly will help, it is never as big a>jump as people expect. >It was a big jump for me when I went from NVIDIA MX440 to Radeon 9800 Pro.>I owned a 9800 for a long time, and it is still a good card. >Although there are newer cards which are much faster now. I>finally upgraded to an ATI 800 XL. I was happy with the>results, although I didn't run any specific benchmarks.So ATI 800 XL is such a significantly better card?

Why not consider the new 7800GS? I think it's AGP isn't it? I just ordered teh 7800GT PCI-e to replace my 6600GT. I expect to seem some significant improvement.Jason

>I now have a AGP MB with a powercolor ATI Radeon 9800 Pro>128M.>Is there a AGP card that is significantly more powerfull than>what I already have. I'm mainly thinking about FS. Or is such>an investment without any sense?It is my experience that you will not see significant improvement moving up from a 9800 pro for use in Flight Simulator. I went from a 9800 Pro to a 850XT Platinum, and saw basically no impact in FS9. I believe that FS9 won't use the features of newer cards, and we will have to wait to FSX to more fully utilize current graphics technology.If it is mainly FS that you are interested in, it might be worthwhile waiting for November (when FSX should be released). You might also want to hang off until you can replace your current system with a PCI-E system to really maximize your benefit.

That is entirely depending on what CPU you have. If you have a fast enough CPU (I would suppose something like Athlon XP3500+ or above) you will see a significant diference with the X850XT or Platinum. If you have a slower CPU the card will run in neutral.Alex

I agree. I have tried both the NVidia 6800 and ATI X800 card and they only perform marginally better in FS than the 9800 Pro that I used to have. And that's on CPUs anywhere from Athlon 1.4GHz, Pentium 4 2.4GHz, Athlon 64 3700+ and Pentium M 2.26GHz. Now in other games, the performance difference is like night and day, but that's not what we're here talking about.Gary