Well I installed it, didn't hurt anything...It *appeared* to help a little. By that I mean the scenery doesn't get blurrier and blurrier like it was. It isn't, however, fixed...Before installing that dx9 update if I flew straight at 180kts at 2000-3000 ft with 20mile vis and all my other settings in the external view, the terrain tiles would become blurrier and blurrier. With this, they can't quite keep up but don't get blurrier....aka I guess I can't use the 1m textures unless I'm really going slow... I bet I could maintain the 2m textures at 180 knots and the above settings.Also, it could very well be that I'm pushing things too high - I mean, I have autogen set at 1 tick below max....very dense I think - and I'm using the performance trees from TreesX for the sp1 patch.Hey, did your PC set that PerfBucket to 7 by default? Mine was at 5. I'm very curious if a new video card like yours would help...have to remember I'm running with a 6800XT PCIe - 256mb - it's actually one of their basic models...retail was like 130-150 at the time....So maybe that extra stuff you get comes from the GPU memory - would be my guess

Alright, I changed some settings in the cfg....kinda sorta helped, honestly I can't tell...I think I just need to tone down my settings and live with it.Ya know, past about 3000 ft, the ground textures (if clear hahah) are so awesome that you don't even need autogen...It's that 3000 and below I like to crank up the autogen..

As a side note-- this is *not* hardware related so I'm a bit confused why it got moved to hardware.

I just checked.After reinstalling FSX & SP1 a few hours I took a screenshot of the changed file dates in DXDIAG then installed the DX v9.0c (April Redist) And all the same files that changed dates before did so again. BUT all the version #'s are still exactly the same.Edit: spelling

I installed it on Windows XP SP2. It appears to add 3 files:D3DCOMPILER_33.DLLd3dx9_33.dlld3dx10_33.dll (!)The main DirectX version has been 9.0c forever.Not sure what that last one would do. My understanding is that for Direct3D, Microsoft provides multiple versions of the dll, and each game can specify which one it is designed for. Also, when the DirectX installer is included in the setup, it can check and make sure that that version has been installed. Looking at FSX, it appears on my system to use d3dx9_30.dll (I dug around using system internals "process explorer" where I saw this). I currently have d3dx9 versions from 24 to 33 all installed.My understanding is that this is the version FSX is looking for, and will ignore any newer versions (this solves the problem of new versions of a dll breaking older programs). I don't have SP1 installed, so don't know if that is looking for a different, more recent version of the d3d dll. If it does, I'm sure it's included in the SP1 setup, otherwise FSX wouldn't run after SP1 was applied and you would see this:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/172001.jpgOf course, windows being windows, anything you change on the system could have side effects and I wouldn't be surprised if it had some impact on things like stuttering, even if the files in the update themselves are not the reason for it.scott s..

>Hey, did your PC set that PerfBucket to 7 by default? Mine>was at 5. Mine was at 7 by default-- maybe that could be due to my 8800?>I'm very curious if a new video card like yours would help...>have to remember I'm running with a 6800XT PCIe - 256mb ->it's actually one of their basic models...retail was like>130-150 at the time....And now that I think about it more, it does seem possible. I assume to conserve memory on the card it would need to swap out high res textures for low res ones sooner on yours than mine. While I still don't think it would change the rate at which new ones were loaded, I think mine could probably maintain a larger area with high res textures.Still, if you were going to upgrade something, as far as FSX is concerned, I still would guess you would gain more with a better CPU.