Well, like many other folks, I had 1 gb dual channel ram and constantly tinkered with the display settings. Trying to reach "virvana". I Now have 2 GB GEIL PC3200 ram and OH MY GOD! What a differance! My load times went to 3 - 4 minutes down to 20 - 45 seconds. When I flew thru Las Vegas, I cached the scenery and was flying at 20-25 FPS with no stutters. Autogen maxed. I have installed all the tweeks and such that ar available here. Suffice it to say that if you want more bang for the buck... RAM is the ticket. Think RAM! THINK RAM! System Specs:P5-GL-MX MBP4 3.0 GhzSB LiveATI Radeon X800 GTO (256) Overclocked to 550 Core / 525 Mem2 Gb Geil Dual Channel PC3200 RAM

I agree. I went from 1gig with stutters and constant disk access and even froze the system to 3 gigs on my new 6600 core2duo and the difference was amazing. No stutters at all even with full autogen over small cities. Larger cities like seattle and philly I have to still knock it down to normal or sparse as the frame rates die but still, no stutters.Ian.

>Well, like many other folks, I had 1 gb dual channel ram and>constantly tinkered with the display settings. Trying to reach>"virvana". I Now have 2 GB GEIL PC3200 ram and OH MY GOD! >What a differance!> My load times went to 3 - 4 minutes down to 20 - 45>seconds. When I flew thru Las Vegas, I cached the scenery and>was flying at 20-25 FPS with no stutters. Autogen maxed. I>have installed all the tweeks and such that ar available here.>Suffice it to say that if you want more bang for the buck...>RAM is the ticket. Think RAM! THINK RAM!>>> >System Specs:>P5-GL-MX MB>P4 3.0 Ghz>SB Live>ATI Radeon X800 GTO (256) Overclocked to 550 Core / 525 Mem>2 Gb Geil Dual Channel PC3200 RAMWhy would you "cache" the scenery? Its already "cached" on your HD.Or did you do some kind of min install so as to read from the DVDs?

Correct Ian... To say that I am amazed is an understatement. Gotta go fly now. heheSystem Specs:P4 3.0SB LiveATI Radeon X800 GTO (256)2 Gig DDR RAM

I cached the scenery to see what differance it would make. What I found out is that with large scenery areas like Las Vegas, the scenery doesn't "re-load" constantly plus it gets rid of the stutters. In normal areas like SeaTac etc, I leave it alone. ie: Use This Scenery Directly. TurnipSystem Specs:Motherboard = P5-GL-MXP4 3.0SB LiveATI Radeon X800 GTO (256) Overclocked to 550 Core / 525 Mem2 Gb Geil PC3200 Dual Channel RAM

I believe he means the scenery and autogen were cached onto system ram, not DVD's or hard disk. System ram is much faster than the hard disk so the more you have the better, especially for FSX. FSX I believe caches many the things you see in FSX such as the autogen and terrain files during the initial load and uses these on a constant basis. If you run out of available system ram it then draws of the hard disk to reload these object which may cause stutters and pausing. Something like that anyway.Ian.

Correct Ian. Not being sure how much FSX actually cached, I told it to cache everything so to speak. Only problem is that when in Seattle, if you run out of RAM, the buildings turn black. I just found that out a minute ago. TurnipSystem Specs:Motherboard = P5-GL-MXP4 3.0SB LiveATI Radeon X800 GTO (256) Overclocked to 550 Core / 525 Mem2 Gb Geil PC3200 Dual Channel RAM

Turnip,How did you tell MSFX to cache the scenery to main system memory?I have upgraded to 2GB system memory (set my hard drive page file size to 3GB), however, maximum system memory ever used by FX and the running system processes averages between 900MB to 1.3GB.That is leaving, on average, 1GB that is not being used. Ever, for anything as far as I can see.Every time I change views there is hard drive activity (page file delta goes from 50 to 1200). So, I assume it is getting the next view from the "slow" hard drive and not "fast" cached system memory.If scenery was cached (in memory) instead of paged (getting it from virtual memory off hard drive) things would happen a little faster.My video card (ATI x800 GT latest catalyst drivers) only has 128MB.An upgrade to 512MB could improve things a little.But even in FS9, I also see this apparent non-cached scenery hard drive access when I change views. And in FS9 I have 1.5GB of main system memory that is not used!It is like when you change views MSFS has to get a weather report, download it and then generate the scene to be displayed. Rather than having this 360 degree local screney already in memory and ready to be displayed.I sure would like to get more scenery into this usable free system memory.Best Regards,

Hi Vaughan, I set the INITIAL and MAXIMUM size of the page file to 4000. As I put in a new gig of ram, that brought me up to 2 gb. I then went into FSX and under the SCENERY LIBRARY I selected Las Vegas and edited that area. At the bottom of that page there is a selection to USE THIS SCENERY DIRECTLY or CACHE THIS SCENERY. I cahed it. I had read on other posts that if you do this page file entry in Windows, you can go 2 to 3 times that amount of ram you have. If you have 3 gigs, then that would mean that you could put 6000 on the page file. Unfortunately, when I tried to go over 4000, I exceeded the Win XP limit of 4000. So my point is, try it. Try to set the page file above 4000 and see what happens. Win XP has a 4 gig limit I believe but it never hurts to try. I know very little about all this but what I am doing is just experimentation. 8*) Do you overclock your x800??? If you need help doing that, let me know.TurnipSystem Specs:Motherboard = P5-GL-MXP4 3.0SB LiveATI Radeon X800 GTO (256) Overclocked to 550 Core / 525 Mem2 Gb Geil PC3200 Dual Channel RAM

What you have discribed is redudntant, you are not caching to system Ram, the page file is for extra headroom for times when you run out of Ram, then it gets swapped out to the "swap" file, the page file.When you tell FS to cache a scenery, you are telling it to right it to the HD in a seperate location as when you are using a "lt" install where much of the data still resides on a CD or DVD.If you get better perfomance (it wont help with FPS beyond fractions) as in cutting your loading times that is simply telling you that your originaly stored files are fragemented, and by caching them they are know reduntly residing in a "cleaner" place.Get a good defrager like O&O frag by "name" for your FS partition and see the difference.

Thx for the info Player.TurnipSystem Specs:Motherboard = P5-GL-MXP4 3.0SB LiveATI Radeon X800 GTO (256) Overclocked to 550 Core / 525 Mem2 Gb Geil PC3200 Dual Channel RAM

>>An upgrade to 512MB could improve things a little.<< A little? A lot! ;-) Depending on a couple of variables... Kind regards Jaap

>Well, like many other folks, I had 1 gb dual channel ram and>constantly tinkered with the display settings. Trying to reach>"virvana". I Now have 2 GB GEIL PC3200 ram and OH MY GOD! >What a differance!> My load times went to 3 - 4 minutes down to 20 - 45>seconds. When I flew thru Las Vegas, I cached the scenery and>was flying at 20-25 FPS with no stutters. Autogen maxed. I>have installed all the tweeks and such that ar available here.>Suffice it to say that if you want more bang for the buck...>RAM is the ticket. Think RAM! THINK RAM!>>> >System Specs:>P5-GL-MX MB>P4 3.0 Ghz>SB Live>ATI Radeon X800 GTO (256) Overclocked to 550 Core / 525 Mem>2 Gb Geil Dual Channel PC3200 RAMYep, my experience as well. Not only in the sim itself where I now can use autogen and just about everything else close to max. (except traffic mostly on default) but overall speed of the menus. Best example is when you're ending a flight and going back to the main screen with the music. With 1 gig it was painfully slow. With 2 gig a HUGE speed increase. Very happy I bumped up to 2 gig. Now I wonder if 3 makes any difference.P4 3.6 GHz HT 2 gig DDRII 533 MHz mem, ATI X800XT 256 mb PCIe video

>>>Now I wonder if 3 makes any difference.Not for me. 2GB seems to be the sweet spot. To confirm this, simply bring up the task manager and see what FSX and other processes are using.E6700 @ 3.2Ghz2 GB Corsair XMS @ DDR-960X1950 XTX

That's what I thought as well. I've checked the ram usage max I've seen was 1.5 gigs and 445 megs of video ram.