Please help me become a dirty weather pilot. I have a Pentium4 2.2gHz with 512Mb memory running XP and using an NVidia GeForce 4 MX 420 with 64 Mb ram. Whenever I fly in weather that has some precipitation and a fair degree of cloud I reckon I must get rain in my electronics because the frame rate drops to around 4. I can reduce all sliders to their minimums turn off every fancy feature like mip mapping, anti aliasing etc. but it has absolutely no improvement on the frame rate. But if I clear all weather the frame rate will climb to my preset limit of 24 even with all sliders to the right and the fancy features turned back on. Is it my graphic card, is it me or is it the wrong type of rain. If you have any ideas I would be grateful to read them.Best Regards Pat

Hi,It is the graphics card... Your system is just fine everywhere else!-Damian[table border=0" cellspacing="30" cellpadding="0][tr][td align = "left"]Damian ClarkHiFi Simulation SoftwareDeveloper of ActiveSkyThe next-generation weather environment simulation for FS2002!http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky[/td][td]http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/images/wxrebeta.jpg][/td][/tr][/table://http://hifi.avsim.net/activesky/ima...][/tr][/table

Well, it's most likely because your video card is a huge bottleneck. An R9500Pro or Ti4200/4400 or perhaps a 4600 would be a lot better suited to your configuration. What type of RAM do you have? DDR or SDRAM?

I have to agree with the other guys,it's your graphic card.Anything with MX in the name is bad news for MSFS,a Ti or Radion card would be fine,but if you can still find a GF3Ti200 or Ti500 somewhere,they're also very good in FS,I still have my good old GF3Ti200,and get 20fps everywhere(locked at 20fps),FS is more CPU dependent once you've reached a certain level with the graphic card.Hope this helps,BestGrahame EDHLXP Pro SP1+DirectX 9.0Epox 8K9A Via KT400 333fsbAMD XP2200MSI GF3Ti200 128mb512mb DDRam Infinion PC2700WD 60gb 7200rpmChieftech case with Enermax PSUArctic and Pabst cooling

Thanks for the instant replies Damian,Greg and Grahame. You are all of the same opinion so three out of three has got to be right. My memory is SDRAM. Also thanks for the suggestions as to a replacement card because that would have been the next question.Regards Pat

You're welcome. SDRAM will choke the life out of a P4 (too bad I have it). If you can, upgrade to DDR (PC2700 would be a good choice). You'd probably have to get a new motherboard as well.