Hi all,I realize these hardware issues have been beaten to death, so I'll keep it short and specific:Current system:P4 D 3.2GHz1GB RAMRadeon 9800 Pro card w/ 128MBOf course, FSX performance is lackluster to say the least. Once I turn on the autogen, the frame rate dives.Would upgrading to 2GB of RAM and either a Radeon X1600Pro (512MB) or a GeForce 7800GS (256MB) give me significant improvements? Does spending the extra $$ on the 7800GS make sense?My goal is to be able to enable anisotropic filtering and turn autogen up to dense while getting framerates of 15-20 around "normal" scenery areas (I don't fly to many big airports). I like the mesh at 38m... I can pass on traffic and the other fancy stuff. Is this possible with an upgrade?I'd like my system to hold out for another year... then its time for quad-core and a nice DX10 card on Vista :)Thanks for looking!Paul

When I upgraded my Radeon 9800 Pro 128M to Palit nvidia 6600GT 256 DDR3 it gave ahuge improvment on my AGP system with Athlon 64 3200+.

Thats the path I'm going to follow - either a new 7600GS with 512meg, or a used 7800GS 512, if I can find one at a reasonable price. They still fetch big money on e-bay.There is no way I'm going to be an early installer of Windows Vista, DX10 or any hardware that supports it. Not with all the question marks hanging around at the moment. Yeah, if someone showed my that a 150-quid DX10 card doubled FSX performance I might take a punt, but even then I will still have to retain a dual-boot system, so will have to consider what DX10 cards do when NOT running under a DX10 environment!Allcott

I've had a hard time finding the 7800GS cards with 512... I think the only one out there is the Gainward "GS+ BLISS" card, which is only available in Europe as far as I know. And you're right about the big $$$!I wonder what is more effective... the faster clock on a 7800 with 256, or more memory in a 7600 with 512?Paul

I am getting 20 to 30 FPS with the following:3.00 Ghz Hyperthreading Processor- now clocking at 3.3 Ghz2 Gigs of RAMNVIDA 6200 256mb/AGP 8x video...I always got exceptional performance with FS9 and I am getting SOLID 20+ with FSX (see frame shot of 30.1 FPS-- NOT paused-- pausing causes FPS to jump... this was during flight during snow storm)Anisotropic filtering is ONAutogen is at DENSEMesh is 38 mTraffic is ALL ON (at defaults)Graphics: High, Aircraft: Medium High, Scenery: Ultra High (with water effects turnned down two notches from highest setting)Weather: Medium HighTraffic: Medium HighI havent seen data yet on the fast GPU vs More Video RAM-- that would be fun to test...but I personally believe (and have data showing) greater than 1 Gig of System ram is not enough and more than two is way too muchhttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/159156.jpg

Just what I needed to know mmcarden, thank you for the informative post and the great screenshot!Paul