Hello there,I'm looking for a bit of advice concerning a possible video card upgrade. I have a Dell Dimension 4700, with:- Pentium IV HT @ 3.4Ghz (800 FSB, 1 MB L2 Cache)- 1Gb RAM (Dual Channel, DDR, 400Mhz)- 2 x Maxtor 80Gb 7200RPM- ATI X800 SE 128MB DDR 425Mhz 350Mhz 8 pixel pipelinesWin XP Home SP2, FS 9.1, with a shitload of add-ons, like Active Sky, FDC, 100% Ultimate Traffic, lots of payware airports, the usual. Except for shadows and auto-gen, settings are pretty much all enabled/to the right. Looking good and the performance is pretty good too. At some airports, such at Simflyers CYYZ and ImagineSim KEWR, the frames go down, naturally, around 10 FPS. Somewhat acceptable, but especially around airports, I'd like a smoother simming experience.Now, of those hardware components, is the video card the "bottleneck"? Will I get a consirable improvement if I buy a new video card? I've recently found a new computer store nearby and its prices are very reasonable, for my taste anyway, so I was thinking about getting a new card.It's Dutch, but it should still make sense:http://info-tech.be/index.php3?page=3〈=dutch&cat=28I'm willing to spend

The video card you have should be fine - complex airports and high-AI-traffic areas are almost always bottlenecked by your CPU. Because you get good performance outside of heavy airports and air traffic areas, I would strongly wager that your video card isn't the culpret. If you lower your AA and AS settings in the video driver, do you get a significant degree of performance improvement? Chances are you wouldn't, and that further points to a CPU bottleneck. MSFS can burden a video card with the extra processing for AA and AS, but when it comes to pure polygons, I don't think MSFS cannot come close to overwhelming your X800. (sorry!) Even a mighty 3.4 isn't quite enough to handle a complex add-on airport AND lots of AI airplanes at high levels of detail. A new video card may improve some of the image quality, but I don't think it will give you any major performance improvements. Your best bet is probably to cut down on some ground detail levels and lower your AI traffic amount some. New processors that have the horsepower to handle all that detail at once are still quite expensive. Perhaps your addon airports have some customizations you can do to reduce the detail at those locations only? Also be sure that if you are running ActiveSky 6, that you drop back the cloud quality in the ActiveSky graphics setup area. Significant (CPU-based) performance improvements can be realized if you lower the cloud texture size. Even scattered puffy clouds can bring a system to it's knees if they use the high detail textures. On the hardware front, with DirectX 10 planned for the end of the year with the retail release of MS Vista, you may wish to save your money and purchase a DX10-capable card - this will significantly improve your FSX experience if you were to update to Windows Vista. My advice: It's probably not your card causing you the slowdowns, it's probably your processor. Due to DX10 releasing at the end of the year with Vista, don't buy a (high end) new card unless you absolutely have to - save for a next-gen one. Adjusting sliders and settings for better performance is a quick and free way of smoothing your experience, although understandably not the "ideal" method. Most addon airports still retain a high degree of detail when you step back a slider notch or two. Good luck!-Greg

I've got Active Sky set to use 256x256 DXT3 clouds. Changing them from 32 bits to DXT3 gave me enough of a boost to leave the other setting alone.I kinda saw your answer coming and deep down I knew that buying a new card was not likely to happen. This is the first FS I've actually bought add-ons for, so I said to myself, let's not dump FS9 the day FS10 comes out, like with previous versions. But there's probably enough in FS10 to not make me want to keep using FS9. So, it's probably a better idea to start saving for a new computer undoubtedly needed to run FS10 at respectable frame rates, instead of buying a new card for a small increase in performance. :D And as I said, I'm hardly dissatisfied, so I shouldn't be complaining anyway. ;)Thanks for the reply, quite informative. :)

A new video card may help.It seems that the X800SE is a stripped down version of the X800 series."ATI Technologies Delivers X800