Thinking I would have to upgrade hardware to run FS9, I was initially pleasantly surprised that COF ran pretty good "out of the box" on my

Steve,Same here. I did the tweakign as talked about by Geof and crew, and I too got gorrible stutters. I'm running a P4 2.4 with 1 Gig of Ram and a GeForce 5200. I reverted the settings back and sure enough...nice and fluid...SP

Steve, I agree 100% that these new drivers are doing to much and older GeForce 4's are having trouble trying to work as hard as the driver is telling them, I am amazed with thses 30.82's I don't think I will change for a long time now.

I was pleasantly surprised when I loaded FS9 this weekend...After reading all the posts about problems, I almost didn't buy it..but finally couldn't resist..left the box sealed for 4 dyas while reading many stories about problems...and with systems much much newer and more powerful than mine....Well, I installed it...ran with sliders about half...it was great !!! Kept pushing the sliders and adding stuff until all was maxed...believe it or not, very fluid, no stutters, frame rates usually around 20...about 10-12 in high density areas such as LAX....sometimes brief lower frame rate...but it flies fluidly..no stutters.I'm very happy...I have not done any tweaks to anythingxp1800+512 meg ramGF3Ti500 64meg videoWin XPNvidia 43.45 xp drivers

Hi Steve. Good post. You observations about the sound are interesting. I'm close to coming up with my final config settings and I'm pretty happy with the performance - to the point where if it didn't improve further then I still wouldn't feel I needed to complain. I did try medium (as opposed to high) quality sound a couple of times, and audibly I did notice a difference. The high quality sound was excellent, but the medium was still OK. I'm not sure if medium helps the performance on my setup yet, and this is one of the list of minor issues I will be looking at over the next week.