Hi all,I want to upgrade my graphics card to one that will allow me to drive a 24" 1920*1200 display and that will give my P4 3.0 processor good support for FS9 and with occasional forays into FSX.I'm not prepared to spend huge amounts of money to get the current fastest processor and graphics card to run FSX because even those expensive products are not yet fast enough.I have invested in Ground Environment, Ultimate Terrain, FS Global and many airport scenery packages and I'm more than satisfied with FS9. However, it would be nice to have a system that will allow me to run FSX without me tearing my hair out at the poor frame rates the 9800Pro would provide.A new AGP graphics card has just come onto the market - the Radeon X1950 Pro 512Mb. This is reputed to be as fast as the 7800GS (actually an overclocked 7900GT) but that card is 80UKP more than the reasonably priced X1950. The AGP version of the X1950 is virtually identical in performance to its PCI-E sister.I'm very tempted to go for the X1950 as it would extend the life of my system for another 18-24 months by which time current hardware would be capable of running FSX with all sliders to the right.Changing from a 9800Pro 128Mb to the X1950 should bring significant frame rate improvements plus the ability to drive a 24" display. Anyone care to advise if those are correct assumptions please?Here's a review of the X1950...http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews/Sapphire%20X1950Pro%20AGP/index.phpThanks!

Ray:If you can wait 30-60 days why not hold off until the DX10 ATI cards come on the market and then choose between the ATI and NVIDIA offerings.It would seem if you are going to drop the money on a new card, you might as well futureproof it so that you can take advantage of DX10 if you desire. In the off chance that DX10 actually does something positive for FSX, you won't be left having to upgrade your GPU again.EDIT: If you are desperate to upgrade your card right now, the X1950XTX is as fast as you are going to get in DX9, but alas, it does absolutely nothing for FSX.

This relates to my question posted this evening.Do you think they are going to release DX10 AGP cards. From what I have been told in the past, most people think all DX10 cards will be PCI-E only.

Hi Mike,But will any of those DX10 cards be AGP? If so they could well come in at a premium. The beauty of the X1950 Pro is its performance and price and the fact that it's AGP.I hear what you're saying about future-proofing but this card is to extend the life of my P4 AGP-based system which I don't think is ready to be consigned to a second PC roll.I'm not prepared to pay 233UKP for the 7800GS. The X1950 Pro seemed like a sensible upgrade both in terms of performance and price.The X1950XTX is PCI-E based so that's a non-starter. I'm more concerned about FS9 performance so my guess is that whatever the performance the X1950Pro has in FSX it's bound to be a lot better than my 9800 Pro.Thanks.

Hi Jeff,There's still plenty of life left in AGP as that review shows. My P4 still has a lot of life left and I'm not happy at having to junk a decent system (graphics card excepted) just to move to a PCI-E system especially when the interface currently has no advantages over AGP in DX9.Of course it probably depends on how much data has to go through the card/mobo bus for DX10. AGP may not have enough bandwidth or whatever it's called.Cheers,

I tried a X1950 PCIE in my machine to see if it would work better than my X850XT PE AGP. No difference in FSX here. Save your money and wait a bit.

>I tried a X1950 PCIE in my machine to see if it would work>better than my X850XT PE AGP. No difference in FSX here. >Save your money and wait a bit.I'm more concerned about FS9 performance than FSX. The number of new AGP cards will be very few now. No current hardware - processor or graphics cards - are capable of maximising FSX performance. Probably why you never saw an improvement.Did it improve FS9 performance?

Did not try as it ran quite well with the old card.

Hi thereI too have a 9800 on agp, and use both fs9 and fsx. FS9 runs fairly ok, but would like to push it a bit more when using things like pmdg and uk200 egll scenery, so like you have been considering a faster AGP with more memory on it. I too cant see the point in buying a whole new system to go down the pcie road yet as the hardware around at the moment isnt worthy to run FSX at a decent rate. So if you do buy a better one, I would be interested to hear your views on the improvements you see in FS9 and also if you run it FSX.On another side, that you may be interested in as a 9800 user, messing around with FSX on both xp and Vista, I have found that i get a decent experience in FSK (FPS 30) when i push the sliders in the Card setup utiltity higher towards, MIP at full etc than i do when i reduce the sliders for what it should indicate as being perfomance. Which quite shocked me, it seems make the card work harder makes the FPS faster and better detail at same time. so FSK runs not too badly at the moment, with only autogen really being the killer, but as i use Horizons UK photo scenery I dont really miss it and their Autogen demo runs fine, although FPS drop slighty to around 25. On that note though I dont really see any hardware that i can buy to actually really make FSX that much better, DX10 cards are too new to bother with yet, and nothing supporting them to actually test if they got it right. So I will stick with what i got, see about a AGP improvement.One other tweak that seems to give me a perfomance boost is the 2gb readyboost USB stick. A very cheap improvement. Anyhow let me know how you get on, and if i can be any help with my settings for FSX if you go that way with your 9800 then give me a shout.RegardsJames Carr

Hi James,Well, there's good news and not so good news. Let's get the not-so-good news out of the way first...Frame rates have not increased at all in FS9. That really surprised me given the big increase in the graphics card spec. It shows FS9 is CPU-bound (we pretty much knew that anyway) and only a faster processor will push them up.Now the better news...The textures are redrawing much much faster compared to the 9800Pro. With all that memory that's to be expected. Since I bought Ultimate Terrain and Ground Environment I was pushing the 9800 Pro to the limit and quite often I would get blurries. This destroyed the illusion of realism.The X1950Pro 512Mb performs far better and the scenery over the Alps looks stunning. This is where having much more graphics memory pays dividends.I should also say at this point I didn't just buy this card to improve FS9 performance. I wanted to get a larger monitor (so higher resolutions require more memory) to notch up the realism. I'm going to borrow a friend's Dell 24" widescreen display and I'm hopeful that frame rates will hold up well at 1920*1200. Flying over the Alps I'm getting 70+ with virtually all sliders on max. I'll cap them to 30 when testing is finished and I'm sure that figure can be reached once out of built-up areas at 1920*1200.Now onto FSX...This is transformed! I only have the demo version until my copy arrives from Avsim but previously the 9800 really struggled to display properly textured hills and I gave up playing with the sliders. Using Tray Tools display utility the available texture memory dropped to zero and stayed there. Hence why the textures looked dreadful.With the new card I can have a lot of the sliders towards the right and still get frame rates in the 20's. The extra video memory makes a huge difference. I'll fly FSX just for the visuals but my 'serious' flying will still be on FS9.<>I've switched off AutoGen as it was a frame rate killer. Here are my display settings for Scenery...Level of Detail Radius: LargeMesh Comp:100Mesh Res:10mText Res: 1mWater Eff: Mid 2.xScenery Complex: Very DenseSpec Effects Det: High.Not very scientific but these settings are far higher than the 9800 and just as important, the scenery doesn't have any blurries.<>Is that replicating physical RAM? I have 1Gb PC3200 which seems sufficient but these are early days.All in all, a worthy upgrade. This will keep me happy for another 18 months until the processors and graphics cards are around to make FSX sing.Cheers,

X1950 AGP 512 or 7800GS AGP 512 - I can't find either of these anywhere. Any suggestions? I have looked at Newegg, Tiger Direct, Best Buy and Microcenter.

Ditto: I have also gone to ebay with no luck.Still wondering if the triplehead2go is worth all this.My present card ATI X858XT PE will drive any 24" monitor at half the price of having to buy another card , the triplehead2go and 3 new 19" monitors.WHAT TO DO!Best regardsAndrew

If you're going to upgrade your graphics card, make sure it is DX10 capable. Getting a card now that isn't will be regrettable in 6-12 months, when most PC software will be ran primarily by DX10.There's only one good card out now that is already DX10 compatible - nVidia's 8800 GTS/X series. The GTX card is extremely powerful. I don't know if anyone here reads PC Gamer magazine, but thier recent issue is primarily about all the new hardware that is out now. Nvidia's card was #1. Here's what they said about the card:"Inside a single GeForce 8800 GTX board is a GPU with a core clock of 575MHz and 768MB of extremely fast GDDR3 memory. The card uses 'unified' shaders. This means that, instead of utilizing 24 pixel shaders and 8 vertex shaders like the 7900 GTX, the 8800 divides the work among a pool of programmable shader units that can do either job based on the requirements of each game - a far more efficient way to grind out polys." - PC Gamer Vol. 14, No. 1, Jan. '07Anyways, I'm sure more hardware will follow suit very soon, but if you want a powerful card now that will be DX10 compatible and give you some mileage for a couple of years at least, I suggest the nVidia 8800 GTX card. Heck if you have the money, buy two of 'em! BTW, I just purchased a new computer from Alienware myself. Below are the specs, which does include nVidia's card (and Intel's new quad core processor!). I'll let you all know how FSX handles for me when I get it.Alienware Area-51

Hi Jeff,I'm in England so I can't help with retailers - sorry.Cheers,

Hi,<>But for me to do that I would have to buy a PCI-E card and that would mean a new mobo, RAM and processor and I already said I wasn't going to do that because the hardware is not fast enough to run FSX optimally and I'm happy with FS9.I'm very pleased with the X1950 especially after tetsing it on a Dell 24" monitor running at 1920*1200 where it delivered the same frame rates as 1280*1024. The blurries are a thing of the past and the views have never looked so good. There's plenty of life left in AGP despite what the press would have you believe.I would hope you get good performance out of FSX with that system. It must have cost the best part of 2000UKP (3500USD).Cheers,