Get the ATI Catalyst 7.10 drivers. FSX performance more than doubled for me! Its amazing. Please report your finding.My comp isAMD64 4000+1 GIG DDR 400ATI X850XT Platinum-Card setting are maxed out.-Autogen extremely dense (with the reduced xml files)-Scenery very dense-LOD medium-Texture res 2m-Mesh is maxed out with the high quality SRTM files-Water Low 2.X-All others mostly high with light-bloom OFF (light-bloom is the main fps killer in game)-Taffic is set quite low though

Don't get them if you have a radeon X600 Xt - the link at ATIdownloads the wrong drivers (for X300/X550) - ATI said I must not use these drivers for the X600 - but have not fixed the badlink. Tom

Agreed, they are excellent.

I haven't done any kind of "scientific" study but I do like these new drivers. They've reduced my blurries. Nice and smooth too. I'm not one to jump and change drivers each go around, but I did with these because of the reviews. I will concur that they are a nice improvement. Wonder what the Omega folks will do with them ;)

Well i had some pretty old omega drivers which i should have changed ages ago. It probably accounts for the large jump in my setup's dire performance.Dotsie.

I'm tempted to install these drivers but before I do can anyone confirm if they perform as well with an AGP X1950Pro 512Mb card please?I've been around long enough to know that getting big improvements with a new driver set is a pretty rare event.Thanks,

RayI can confirm that, at least on my stone-age :-) Socket 939/AGP system they work perfectly with a 1950Pro card. I can't remember when I last experienced such an improvement just from changing the Videocard drivers, do give them a try: If you set a system restore point before you start, just in case, what've you got to lose? If it all goes belly-up, just roll back to the old ones.BestGrahame (ex-pat Brit. in Germany :-) )

Hi Grahame,Thanks for the confirmation. I was going to set a restore point anyway but wanted to ensure they work for AGP as well as PCI-E.When you say 'improvement' do the frame rates increase as well as improved visuals or are the improvements purely eye candy as our cousins call it?Things are slightly more complicated because I'm running the Omega drivers which use a different Tray Tools utility so I'll need to ensure I remove all traces of those first.Dank!

RayI'd say that the average frame-rate increase is in the region of 40-50% (no, I'm not exagerating, and I've been flying FS a long time, I know the difference), with the FPS set to unlimited, but the real gain is that the whole experience is much smoother now, and the anoying micro-stutters when flying turns and looking out of the side window are gone. The textures also look better, and another annoying problem I had uptil now is now also gone: The corruption of vertical surfaces in the VC (like the centre windscreen pillar for example), when panning is now completly gone.For your information, I also had Omega drivers up until the change to the 7.10's (the 38330's, I also tried the 38360's too, not as good on my system, but your mileage may vary) ), and use ATI tray tools. After running 4xAA and 16xAF for years, I'm now running everything in Tray Tools set to "Application Preference", with Anti-aliasing and Aniosotropic Filtering selected in FSX, as I found this setting gave the best results on my system. Hope this helps, let us know how it turned out.BestGrahame (ex-pat Brit. in Germany)

Hi Grahame,Well, what a disappointment. I've changed AA and AF settings in both the CCC and FSX and despite this the frame rates stay stubbornly at similar values to those with my Omega drivers.My frame rate tests are all conducted on the ground with engines off and the pb set. I chose a fairly bland test for FSX - Rwy 23R at EGCC with a full forward view (no panels) and the frame rates hardly varied whether the AA/AF was controlled within FSX or externally via the CCC.For FS9 my standard test at Rwy 36 at Meigs also provided disappointing returns with frame rates slightly down on those with the Omega drivers.I can only deduce that my processor is preventing me from seeing the sort of performance increase reported by you and others. I'm staggered that you can get a 50% improvement whilst I see no inprovement at all.I will stay with these for a few days so I can check the scenery quality when airborne but unless there's a dramatic improvmement they are not going to be staying long on my system.Ah well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Definitely nothing gained for me :-(

Ray...I just noticed that you have only **ONE** GB of system RAM?I believe that your CPU is so distracted by requests from the system on its huge use of your SWAP FILE, that that is a major drain on your system performance across the board!Memory is so cheap right now, I'd say throw in another 2 to bring it up to 3 GB's and then see what happens. You don't have much room left with your O.S. resident programs, and then on top of that, your F.S.I have a P4 3.4, and with 3 GB's of RAM, my system really does fly..(if you'll excuse the pun...)

Mitch,I'm not convinced the lack of improvement is down to having only 1Gb of RAM. Looking at Dotsie's spec at the start of this thread he also has 1Gb RAM and yet he reported 'FSX performance more than doubled for me!'So based on that I should also be getting a substantial improvement but I'm not - either in FS9 or FSX. When I changed my 9800Pro for the X1950Pro my frame rates didn't increase either and that was blamed on FS being CPU-bound.I will check the status of my swap file in the next few days but I doubt it's being used extensively. I run EndItAll and no other software except FS runs on that PC. No panels are visible because all the navigation is handled on a separate PC so I just show a full-forward view.I also have the problem that all four RAM slots are filled so I'd have to junk existing memory. This PC is nearly four years old and in all honesty I don't think adding extra RAM is going to substantially increase perfomance. My CPU is the limiting factor. I'm convinced of it.I don't know how people test performance before and after any change and what the old and new numbers are. I always use the same test. Is that how you guys do it and is it a static or flying test?

RayAs someone else has remarked here, it could be that your lack of system ram is holding you back. I have 2Gb, and hardly ever see the HDD activity light flashing, which is always a good sign. I know that it made a big improvement back then as I upgraded to 2Gb, and that was with an old socket A mobo, with a 3000 Barton. As cheap as ram is at the moment, I'd try upgrading your system ram to 2Gb, idealy with two matched 1Gb sticks, and then you can run in dual-channel mode, which also brings a small increase. It certainly can't do any harm.As regards my claims of 40-50%, don't forget that that's not actually very much in actual frames: I went from an average of 16-20 up to 23-28, which ain't the world really. The main increase that it brought for me was the increase in smoothness and the improvement in the quality of the texture display. The increase in fps was a bonus if you like, as long as you don't turn the fps counter on, you can fly perfectly well with 16-20 fps, as long as it's smooth and without stutters.And although in the air I sometimes momentarily see frames in the 50's and 60's,(fps set at unlimited), I can still easily drag my system down into single figures if I want to with the right (wrong?) combination of detailed airports, auto-gen (an absolute fps killer on my relativly old system, I usually have it switched off because of the negative effect), and complex aircraft and scenery. Luckily I'm a GA and bush-flying fan, so I don't have to contend with problems like what does my PMDG 747 perform like sitting at the gate at KLAX etc. I usually avoid the big airports for this very reason, and the SF260 or PC6 etc that I usually fly look kinda silly at the gate of a major airport anyway :-)Hope you find a solution to your problem, I know how frustrating this hobby can be:-)BestGrahame

Ray..please trust me on this observation. When I bought my Dell Gen3 XPS, RAM was in the stratosphere. I ordered it with 2x512's.My swap file was running like a mad fool all the time. You truly have no RAM slack. Look at what XP takes up, then your anti-virus, spyware, etc...and then you load FS9/X and THAT is wanting to load up the whole kaboodle with textures that spill over from VID textures, etc.Believe me, when I ordered the two 1 GB sticks and slapped them in,...my hard drive from then on, has taken a holiday.I have the 2 1-GB sticks in my A channel, and the original 2 512's in my B channel.You asked about how our 'nearly' comparable machines differ in FS performance? I'd pin it on my 66 percent greater RAM capacity. FS loads up what it needs, and has it as resident for lightening fast recall/load and minimal CPU cycles....Like I said before, my system doesn't even breathe hard in delivering 30 constant FPS...There has to be a reason...and my 66 percent more resident RAM is a MAJOR difference between our systems.Mitch

Mitch,I have no doubt that your system is running more smoothly with less disc activity since adding the extra RAM but I'm having a real hard time trying to get into my head that FS9 frame rates are going to increase substantially by adding 2x1Gb DIMMS plus two existing DIMMS in the other slots making a total of around 2.5Gb, maybe 3.0Gb.Note that I said FS9, not FSX because that is still what I'm flying nearly all the time. Do you still have FS9 and are the improvements gained there too? Same question to Grahame.Over all the years I've had a computer running FS the two components that have affected frame rates are the CPU and the graphics card. RAM, providing you have a reasonable amount and 1Gb seems plenty, has very little effect.What has been discussed on these pages seems to go against everything I've been brought up on. Given 2Gb of PC3200 RAM is going to cost me around 85UKP (175USD) I would appreciate some guarantees that I'm going to see a minimum of 20% improvement in FS9 frame rates. I'm not bothered about FSX because I don't believe my P4 3.0 is capable of getting the most out of that version.You can probably see by my sig that I fly Boeings (and Concorde) at high altitude so eye candy at 500ft is not important to me. In fact flying FSX last night brought home how ugly the ground appears from FL250 compared to FS9 with UT, GE and FSGlobal.Given that I'll be staying with FS9 for some time yet am I likely to see substantial frame rate increase with more RAM or can only FSX benefit from it?Cheers,