Hi Gang:Yesterday I loaded FSX on my 3Gig Pentium system with 2Gig ram and ATI X1600XT video card driving a 24" wide screen flat panel LCD. I defragged before installation and shut down the anti-virus.1. The install went fine. I noticed that after the install the fragmention level went to 37% on a half-full 80 Gig SATA drive!!! Naturally, I defragged again using Diskeeper. Before starting FSX I ran "Enditall".2. I made 2 changes from the default installation settings; a) I lowered the resolution from the monitor native 1900 X 1200 to 1600 X 1000, and :( I moved the frame rates to "unlimited".I took a quick "free flight" in the 172 and had 25-34 fps when straight and level which dropped to 16-20 fps in a banked turn with some slight stutters during the turn.I have read several articles describing numerous tweaks that can be made. I'm wondering if YOUR EXTENSIVE EXPERIENCE can suggest 2 or 3 basic tweaks that would best serve me.Thanks to all for your help and guidance.

I am about a week ahead of you installing on a new E6400 with Ati 1600 serving a LG 19" FlatRon widecreen monitor.I am bit by bit pushing sliders up, and find that 3/4 is good and smooth. Still experimenting.I stopped the asitropic setting on ATI as the whole 'look' is too artificial for me. Nonetheless, I am having a great time with FsFx and AS6 and will get round to noting where my sliders are eventually!All in all its smooth and no frame rate hits to speak of, at major airports.

Try to lock your fps to say 35 fps, that should reduce or completely clear the few stutters that you have.Pierre

Thanks RonMac and Pierre:After reading many posts of highlighting significant difficulty, I was surprisingly pleased at the performance "out of the box". I'll certainly try your suggestions and report back. I'm hoping just a few adjustments are required, as I've read about dozens of ideas and couldn't sort through them all.Thanks, I'll get back with results. Wonder what others will suggest.

Ok, I fixed the frame rate at 30. I'm still getting the very brief stutters - even when the frame rate monitor shows 20-25 fps.Must be something else causing this.Thanks.

It may not be anything else causing it.You are locking at 30 fps, but you said in that situtation your were only getting 20-25 fps. Well, that means your cpu can't keep up. That means you will get stutters in that situation. If your cpu was keeping up, you would have gotten about 30 fps.If you have a 3.0 ghz Pentium, you will probably not have stutter-free flight at anything less than 20-25 lock. I have a faster cpu than you, and yet I lock at 25, and in the big city areas, this lock is too high. But for the rest of the FS-world, it's fine.Sure I can set my lock to 30 or 35 or unlimited. And I get 40-50-60 fps. But it has stutters in certain situations, such as the turns you described. I'd rather have 25 fps an no stutters, than 40 fps with stutters any day of the week.I would suggest you search on the term "BufferPools", and FIBER_FRAME, and of course TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT. And also search for the term Matt Fox as he has a very nice replacement AutogenDescriptions.spb file which helped my system a lot.The texture resizing tweaks didn't do much for my system. I think if you have 256 video ram or more, along with 2 gigs of system ram, you may not see much advantage in resizing the textures.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

Good point, Rhett.I'll fix the frames at 25 and do the "buffer pool" increase to, say, 2500000. I'll take it step at a time and report back.When I had frames locked at 30 it would only vary (with associated brief stutters) during a turn as new scenery and textures were loaded - otherwise stable when flying straight and level. FYI, my video card has 256Meg.Thanks for the guidance.

FYI I am presently running:FIBER_FRAME=0.33 (this is default)TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=100BufferPools=5000000But keep in mind that it is all very system-specific. Slower or faster cpu means you will have a different sweet spot.I found that BufferPools=10000000 was too much--got stutters.Also TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=400 gave me stutters in the VC panning.I was running as low as FIBER_FRAME=0.20 and the frames were fantastic, and the blurries were gone everywhere except in the big cities/airports, but not quite as gone as they are at 0.33.Since I wanted a config that I could use anywhere, I bumped it up to 0.25 and then 0.33.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

Well, Rhett, I made the configuration settings that you recommended - frames locked at 24 and pools at 2500000 to start.Frankly, I didn't notice any measurable improvement. In turns still some stutters and frames bounce (worst case) from 24 to 16 and rapidly recover to 24.I guess I'll live with what I got. Its certainly flyable.Thanks all for your help!!!

You are driving a bigger monitor (higher resolution) than I am. I think that might be hurting you a bit, but I'm sure the sim looks fantastic with that res. I only run 1024x768 most of the time, and as they say in the hills, "I don't know know better". In other words, I don't know what I'm missing with you guys running the super high resolutions.Did you modify the TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT setting? I think you should try 80 or 100 and see what you get. If it's too high, it can cause stuttering. But if it's too low, you can also get stuttering.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

Rhett:We may have found something here.Firstly, the high resolution is wonderful. I'm certain it is an issue, and I'll try lower resolutions and time progresses.Secondly, I had TEXTURE_BANDWIDTH_MULT=400 - PER YOUR ORIGINAL SUGGESTION. I lowered it to "80" and stutters are gone. With frames fixed at 24 I still get variations from 16-22 in a turn, but the stutters are gone!We're getting closer. Thanks for your input!Regards,