Well, I'm about done with low performance. I'm gtting close to putting a system together that will ban stutters and low FPS forever. Here are my performance goals:FPS never, ever, ever lower than 20, no matter what, while running:Ultimate Traffic, with AI set at 85%.Active Sky, 5 cloud layers.Radar Contact.Ultimate Terrain.Level-D 767, 2D cockpit.Stock airports only, no add-on scenery, but "sliders to the right."I've been talking to people and reading many threads on this board and I am confident that these are realistic goals with a cutting edge dual-core SLI high performance gaming system.But here's my question. Let's say I'm going to stick with FS9 for a while. Would my performance target be reasonable and much cheaper with an older single-core 64-bit CPU, one good PCIe graphics card, lots of RAM, and a single fast hard drive? Or is an FSX-capable machine required to get fantastic performance out of FS9?Thanks.---Will

Will - I don't think you can meet that performance target regardless of the hardware chosen. There will always be a case where the framerate drops below 20 no matter how hard we try to avoid it. But, if you change it to "FPS never, ever, ever lower that 20 95% of the time" I think you could pull it off. As far as the question goes, nobody knows what makes up an "FSX-capable machine". If you want a new machine for FS9 just go with the best available now. But if you want a machine for FSX I wouldn't do anything until FSX has been out for 30-60 days and folks have had a chance to see what the real hardware requirements are.DOug

Totally agree with Doug.Personally I will not spend a penny for a new PC that will be primarily for FSX until FSX and VISTA are both out and DX10 cards are widely available.My reasoning is that even though FSX will run on DX9 cards, a DX10 patch or update for the sim is almost a given and my guess, after reading alot on DX10, is that it will be worth it. Couple that with VISTA's ability to be tuned more for gaming than XP and you really are shooting yourself in the foot by buying now for FSX.Now, for FS9....sure. But getting rid of stutters isn't an option in my opinion. I've been trying to beat the beast for the past three years with no success. Remember SLI is great but most of FS9's work is done by the CPU, not the GPU. So you easily hit a bottle neck even with an ATi X1900XTX or an NVidia 7900GTX, in that even today's CPUs, as shocking as it sounds, aren't up to the task. You're best bet for purely FS9 performance is the fastest single-core CPU and build from there. But that