Before FS2004, I was getting very definite stutters when new textures loaded, mostly around airports and aircraft. Since installing FS2004 they have vanished. I'll have to qualify that with the admission that several things were upgraded at once: went from Win ME to XP, new Omega ATI drivers, and DX9. So not sure it was all due to FS, but it sure is nice without them! R.I.P. FS2002.Todd

Most performance problems are due to having unrealistic expectations of what the combination of hardware and software in use can do.In your case, it was the lack of DirectX9 on your machine that did it.FS2004 makes heavy use of DirectX9 commands for hardware accelleration. If you use DirectX8 on your computer all those are instead handled by your CPU which will then have less time for other things potentially causing stuttering.New drivers might or might not have made a difference (depends on how well the old ones could do DX9 hardware functions).Glad to see you're set now. Don't give up 2002 yet, many addons still don't work in 2004 so there's a place for the old beast yet :)