I use 1280 x 960 so I can't get a good idea of what the frame rate would be. Check it out.http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/03/18/nvi...view/page6.html

Where did they fly and what settings and add-ons did they use?

Knowing Toms Hardware as well as I do, and for a very long timeI would say the Nvidia card flew airports such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming and the ATI card flew LAX and NYC

Just goes to prove that its more about your CPU then GPU in FSX.

Not necessarily? This is essentially two 8800 cores and we all know how well SLI works with FS unless something has changed with later drivers? Still you need tons of scenery addons I suppose to really see a big benefit :)But anyway the drawback with this as for dual core video cards is the same with dual core CPUs... Some applications just don

>>>Knowing Toms Hardware as well as I do, and for a very long>time>>I would say the Nvidia card flew airports such as Jackson>Hole, Wyoming and the ATI card flew LAX and NYCNick,Could you please explain why Toms Hardware would manipulate the FSX benchmarks.Ulf B

As Phil said, with FSX its the size of the memory interface that matters.The Ultra and GTX are 384bit,the GX2 is 256bit, having 2x256 does not matter to FSX.Even the old 660MB GTS was 330bit and I'd bet it would beat or equal the GX2 too with FSX.

<>Actually he said three things matter...Overall memory size ( don

>>PS. I've just read this in the conclusion... The problem,>as is the case with the 3870 X2, is the relatively meager 512>MB of memory, which is incompatible with very high resolutions>and when antialiasing is activated. This suggests that>only half of the onboard memory is being utilised in FSX if>TomsHardware are to be believed. How could that be the case>that only one GPU was seen by some games but both in others?>Stranger and stranger.:-roll Each GPU have only 512MB memory and cannot utilize the memory of the other. Nothing strange about that.Ulf B

<>On the contrary there's something very wrong if a card is being sold on the assumption that all software can make use of both GPUs.Are you saying that FS will only ever see 512Mb of memory on twin-GPU cards with a combined memory of 1Gb? If that is the case then why do I have 1024 against TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD in FSX.CFG which would seem to suggest it can see 1024Mb of memory.It seems to me that if FSX can see 1024 of memory it can utilise it.

And just to add to my claim that the 3870X2 is a rival to the 8800 series have a read of their review. The link to the review won't work so search for 3870 on the main page. http://www.legitreviews.comWhilst it doesn't test FSX, in all the games that are tested nowhere does the 8800 Ultra beat it by anything like the margin shown at TomsHardware. They were using older nVidia drivers so maybe things will change then. But newer drivers will also be coming out for the 3870 too!I'll leave people to make up their own minds and just conclude with this quote from the review...At $449 the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card is by far the fastest single card solution from AMD. It competes with the higher end GeForce 8800 series cards that are finally starting to show signs of aging.

>On the contrary there's something very wrong if a card>is being sold on the assumption that all software can make use>of both GPUs.>Of course the driver and running the cards in SLI mode will make FSX render the graphics faster than a single card would. In normal SLI mode the two GPU divides the screen and render each part, but still each GPU only have 512MB.>Are you saying that FS will only ever see 512Mb of memory on>twin-GPU cards with a combined memory of 1Gb? If that is the>case then why do I have 1024 against TEXTURE_MAX_LOAD in>FSX.CFG which would seem to suggest it can see 1024Mb of>memory.>>It seems to me that if FSX can see 1024 of memory it can>utilise it.I really don't know how FS sees this card, but probably it sees it as a single graphics card and make no special use of SLI features. An expert might help you out on this one.The texture_max_load setting reflects the setting of the slider Global Texture Resolution Slider. 64=Very Low, 128=Low,...,1024=Very High. This setting doesn't reflect your graphics card memory. Not that strange at all.Ulf B

>And just to add to my claim that the 3870X2 is a rival to the>8800 series have a read of their review. The link to the>review won't work so search for 3870 on the main page.>http://www.legitreviews.com>>Whilst it doesn't test FSX, in all the games that are tested>nowhere does the 8800 Ultra beat it by anything like the>margin shown at TomsHardware. They were using older nVidia>drivers so maybe things will change then. But newer drivers>will also be coming out for the 3870 too!>>I'll leave people to make up their own minds and just conclude>with this quote from the review...>>At $449 the ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card is by far>the fastest single card solution from AMD. It competes with>the higher end GeForce 8800 series cards that are finally>starting to show signs of aging.That's true if you run the ATI card without any filtering. If you run that card with high AA and AF, it suffers from a great decrease in performance. This might change with better drivers. Who wanna run FSX with no AA and no AF? Not me.Ulf B

<>Where did I say the test was run without filtering? I tried some tests myself and adding AA of 4 and AF of 8 incurred no performance hit at all. If I increase them to 8 and 16 there is still no performance hit.

<>The 3870X2 is internally configured to produce a single card Crossfire version. I would imagine FS sees a single card rather than two but as you say, an expert would know.<>Ah right. I hadn't appreciated it was based on a preference in FSX.