I would like to upgrade my current system to run FSX better. As is evident on the forums, the upgrades required for FSX are comparatively more complicated (ie expensive) than many of the upgrades in the past, required for the different versions of FS. My current system seems to handle FSX reasonably well when away from the major airports and cities, but at these locations, fps drop drastically to a slide show and blurries abound! My present system:AMD Athlon 64 3500+Gigabyte GA K8NS ULTRA-939 mobo ATI Radeon X800XL video card AGP 256 MB (Omega drivers)2GB Kingston PC3200DDR RAMMaxtor 80GB 7200rpm hard driveMaxtor 200GB 7200rpm hard driveCreative Sound Blaster Live! with latest driversNEC FE950+ crt monitorCHProducts PCI yoke and pedalsWindows XP Home edition with SP2DirectX 9.0©Cooler Master 600W power supply Five case fans

From my experience, and others I have read here, the more money you throw at FSX to tame it, the more you will be disappointed. If you are going to change motherboard and RAM, you may as well go for an Intel C2D because they easily hold the performance crown at the moment.My serious recommendation is that you do nothing in the first instance, tweak FSX as has been suggested in these forums and wait for MS to come out with a patch that puts double digits back into FPS in built up areas with reasonable graphics settings (AI and autogen should not have to be turned off to achieve this!) . As you have already suggested, a CPU upgrade is your best bet for your current rig, just don't expect more than a 25% boost from such an upgrade. Upgrading other components will yield you less of a performance boost.Gary

Hi Nigel, hope you're doing well. Frankly, if, I'ld opt for a 6600 Core2Duo based FlyTendo right now. OTOH, since you have a CRT, setting the resolution @ 1024x should allow you to take the GPU a fair way. Which res do you usually run? Did you install Ati's 6.10 drivers? Case you haven't, perhaps install the October DX release beforehand if you'ld like to give those drivers a go? IMHO, it's a select issue - or two? :-) - which is holding FSX back. My guess is something texture related. Personally, I'ld hold off and await developments in the next couple of weeks. Last but not least, November and December purchases include the Christmas premium. Hope this adds to thoughts, Nigel, kind regards Jaap Edit: Sorry, I didn't see Gary already posted. Second what Gary says, you should be able to do better. IMHO, regular 15+ framerates should be too far fetched. If you can adjust your settings so the GPU doesn't exceed ca 200MBs, FSX should remain relatively smooth with a 256MB card. As far as I'm concerned, FSX @ max 'Global texture quality' is a nightmare with 256MB cards in dense areas. GTQ is a very powerful slider. Together with AI... The small boats i.e. are killers. The bigs ones aren't because they aren't there! :-) Or hardly... FWIW, I have road traffic at 9 and the little boats @ 14%. MemStatus is a nifty little util to check what's going on. Let it run in the background during a regular session and check the numbers after completion. It will reveal your max RAM-consumption for GPU and system.

>>I am gravitating to just upgrading my CPU to an AMD 64 X2>4800+ ($400Can) which my mbo will handle, and living with my>256MB card, (maybe increase RAM to 4GB ($320Can)) until Vista>is well established and hardware is further developed to the>point where the full benefit of FSX can be realized; so my>major upgrade would be deferred about two years (but as an>early septuagenarian two years is a long time!).>I think if you got a 4800+, you would be disappointed if your goal is to maintain performance in big city areas in FSX.You'd actually be better off putting a 4000+, FX55 or FX57 in there, for a variety of reasons I will not debate nor go into here. But be warned that even those cpu's would not be hugely faster than what you have in there now. Just a little faster. Not worth it, if it were me.Really the problem of big cities killing performance is a problem that cannot be solved by hardware at the present time. So if you're looking to solve the big city problem, put that out of your mind, because it can't be solved by today's hardware.The closest you could come, would be to get a Core 2 Duo Extreme with an 8800 card, which is really a very expensive proposition right now. A more realistic (but still expensive) option is a Core2Duo E6600 cpu, but that would of course mean you would need a new motherboard, and new memory.I would, as you said, "live with" your present video card; I think if a cpu upgrade was in fact done, you could live with the vid card. I say this especially in light of DX10, which you might want to change video cards anyway in 6 months to 1 year, so why spend $$ on one now.The cheapest minimal upgrade you can do, would be one of the 3 AMD cpu's I mentioned above, but keep in mind 1) the Socket 939 4000+ and FX57 are rapidly becoming unavailable, and the FX55 is an older design, and 2) the big city problem will not be solved by these cpu's.I think #2, above is the main criteria you may want to consider. If you want to spend the money, and can still find one, a FX57 will be a slight speed increase for you, but it will still be insufficient with the big city problem.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Hi Gary, Jaap and RhettThx for those well thought out responses, all along the same lines of don

Hi Nigel,There were some performance increases with the latest ATI drivers. I personally wasn't able to see any but ...YMMV. There are some posts throughout the forums regarding upgrading your CPU/Motherboard/Video card. Basic consensus is that you'd be wasting your money at this juncture. I had an AMD64 3500+ and upgraded to an AMD X2 4800+ and see very little improvement. FS9 runs like mad with the new CPU but FSX sees hardly any increase. I added another gig of memory which can't hurt and does seem to help with texture loading. It seems to give a bit of breathing room to both sims.It's been stated that Intel has no plans to increase clock speeds in the near future and will only be adding additional cores. If this is in fact the case, we're not going to be able to get acceptable performance for some time. Of course, acceptable to some is unacceptable to others. I've resorted to turning off auto gen and find it's acceptable with the new FSX textures. I'm enjoying FSX. It'll really be enjoyable when the hardware catches up.Jim Karn

> It'll really be enjoyable when the hardware catches up.Or when FSX is patched to reflect current and future hardware trends. There are two ways to skin this cat!Gary

>>There are two ways to skin this cat!<< So true... @ Nigel, you're welcome. My pleasure and thanks for the details. Now you see/saw the numbers... :-) As far as I would dare to judge, one shouldn't 'fill' the display adapter beyond a certain threshold, or it will start to page (or whatever it does?). Maybe something like this coincides with your lowest framerates? Over here, slightly over 200MB max with a 256MB GPU will not show significant slowdowns over time. What's your 'Global texture quality' setting? If it's maxxed, one notch form the top should make GPU texture-loads decline sharply. If you can control your memory values, you should at least see less GPU-related dips. Apropos dual cores: As others mentioned, they have a limited benefit and they give you 120% instead of ~100. I've nevertheless fallen in love with 'em. Specially in a multitasking environment. I honestly wouldn't want to miss my cores anymore. :-) Hope this adds to thoughts, cheers and kind regards Jaap A very common name in Holland :-) I have 4 cousins called Jaap. That might sound bad, but with almost 60 cousins et cousines were still a minority! Quite funny nevertheless when we meet. "Ha, die Jaap. Hey Jaap!" Lots of japping! :-)

>>Or when FSX is patched to reflect current and future hardware>trends. /conjecturepostONI sure hope that happens, but I am not optimistic about that. I think major optimizations in a patch are not likely. Only minor ones.But even minor ones will be greatly helpful./conjecturepostOFFRhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Hi JaapMy Global texture does not work well if I drop down even one notch from its maximum, my aircraft liveries become blurred.I did find that if I dropped from trilinear to bilinear, my blurries around Vancouver were significantly less BUT when I flew from Gatwick to Manchester the blurries eventually became dreadfull and I couldn't even clear them with the scenery refresh command.Will keep plugging away!Nigel

Hi Nigel, that's odd. What kind of AC or textures? Do you mean AI-AC? What's your AGP-aperture set to? Kind regards Jaap

Hi JaapI have had the blurry texture trouble with a variety of aircraft including the default Airbus.I cannot find where I set the AGP aperture size in my BIOS - it is the Award BIOS, and I have looked for this before.Nigel

JaapJust found the Advanced Options for my BIOS (Ctrl/F1) and my AGP aperture is 32MB which I think is way too low - just going to do a search on the forum and see what I findNigel

Hi JaapWOWEE!! My blurries are gone - I changed my AGP aperture to 256MB and what a difference. Flew Gatwick to Manchester again and no blurries! I think this is such an important change I am going to post it on its own.Thx for your helpNigelMy System:AMD Athlon 64 3500+Gigabyte GA K8NS ULTRA-939 mobo ATI Radeon X800XL video card AGP 256MB (Omega drivers)2GB Kingston PC3200DDR RAMMaxtor 80GB 7200rpm hard driveMaxtor 200GB 7200rpm hard driveCreative Sound Blaster Live! with latest driversNEC FE950+ crt monitorCHProducts PCI yoke and pedalsWindows XP Home edition with SP2DirectX 9.0©Cooler Master 600W power supply Five case fans

Great news, Nigel, thanks. Very glad it workedl! :-) Now the only thing which will likely slow you down from time to time, are those maxxed out texture sizes (global texture quality). At max texture quality, high settings and in dense regions, FSX easily sends well over 300MB to the GPU. Just bare that in mind and perhaps continue to keep an eye on MemStatus from time to time? Besides, if this solved the update urges, great too! :-) 256MB cards can take users a fair end with FSX. OTOH, 128MB GPUs seems to be obsolete. Shoot if you have further questions! Kind regards Jaap