Hello!While I am new to flight simulators, I can already tell that performance of the microsoft flight simulators is a popular issue. Thus far, I'm very disappointed with the performance of the simulator on my computer. I often deal with single digit frame rates and it becomes so choppy as I approach the ground during landing that it's not even fun.What's so shocking about my preformance issues is that the computer that I'm having the problems on would seem to be more than adequate to run the simulation. My computer is as follows:3.06 GHz Pentium IV512 MB RAM64MB nVidia GeForce 5200 graphics cardI know this is not "top of the line", but it seems like it should be more than enough.I should also mention that I "clean boot" the computer whenever I run the simulation so nothing is running in the background, and I set all of the graphics sliders to medium, and turn off anti-aliasing and smoothing.With this in mind, these performance issues seem absolutely shocking and rediculous to me! I don't understand! Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Also, are there any other diagnostics I can run on the simulation (other than framerate) to see how the computer is performing.Also, how will FS2004 run on my machine? Better or worse???

Hi there!To sum it up: You won't be able to get good frame rates with your setup without sacrificing some quality. Your major bottlenecks are your GPU and RAM.I would suggest tweaking around with the settings in FS and first limit the visibility settings and texture settings. FS9 is very CPU hungry, so you're on the safe side with your CPU, but you gotta upgrade your RAM. 512MB more RAM and you'll see good increase in performance. 512MB is nowadays not enough, even for WindowsXP standalone.I'd also go over to http://www.tweakhound.com and read all of the WindowsXP tweaking guide and then go through the WindowsXP Optimization Guide here on top the threads.Also, I'd suggest that you upgrade your GPU and RAM. For about $150, it'll do wonders, trust me. $50 of RAM, $100 on a GPU and you should be set for now.G'luck

Forget optimization and tweak guides, they can often end up causing more problems unless you know what you're doing, XP will unload most unused services anyway so leave things as they are.RAM is not too bad but, as said, it's the graphics card that is the problem. Specifically, it's a fairly slow card anyway and it's further crippled by only having 64MB of memory.

Even still, we are talking FS2002 performance where 1.4GHz Athlons with 512M RAM and 32M GeForce 3 cards punched out some pretty descent frame rates on that version. Somethings pretty amiss to be getting single digits with the rig stated, most likely a driver conflict IMO.Gary