I just stumbled across this while running another application along with COF. COF was running in windowed mode and I unmaxed the window by clicking the box in the upper right corner of the title bar and grabbed the corner with the mouse cursor and reduced the window size.As the window became smaller the FPS went up. When the window was about the size of a 3x5 index card I was getting 50 FPS on the west side of Chicago with a GeForce2 MX400.I'm not trying to make light of the FPS problem as I have it more than most and I know this is just because the GPU has to do considerable less work, but it is kind of illustrative of what were up against here.Try it, it's kind of fun.

There's another way!Go into the display settings and turn every single slider all the way down!

My first sim was FS-II which I ran on a Commodore SX-64. For anyone who has ever seen one, the SX-64 was Commodore's version of a laptop. It had a carrying handle, and could be carried around much like a suitcase. It weighed a ton, so it really wasn't practical as a portable system. But it's main distinction was a little 5 inch screen. I've found another way to gain some fps. I've discovered the FS2004 seems to have degraded performance when the panel is displayed. I've since discovered that the displayed panel size seems to make a difference. I noticed that the Schweizer Panel, for instance, had almost no impact on the screen. I reworked another panel bmp, and upped performance about 6-7 fps out the front of the cockpit--from 26 fps to 33 fps at KMFR (with Autogen and Shadows off).Don't let Jeroen's answer bug you. It took months before FS2002 really matured--and it came from the collection of unique tips from users like you. Keep plugging away!-John

I also remember on the commodore 64 1st version of FS I was lucky to get 1-2 fps max-but was it worth it to get that wire view of the single John Hancook building in Chicago :-)http://mywebpages.comcast.net/geofa/pages/Geofdog2.jpg

This really is a simple matter as exhibited from the Reality XP Tweak guide here at avsim library.In the case of the panels, ALL the gauge bitmap handling code seems to be handled by the CPU, not the video card. This was true as well in FS2002. So the more gauges, especially ones with rotating bitmaps (EADIs for example) and with a lot of layers (many bitmaps overlayed over the others) the less performance you will get from the sim.Now, with the Reality XP Tweak guide, you can try to adjust your FS settings to lessen those which are primarly CPU dependant (to free up the CPU for the panel for example) while maximizing the ones GPU (video card) dependant. This may bot be the settings you would like (i.e. if you want more autogen but autogen does not fit your hardware per the guide), but this should help you get the most of your experience with the sim in terms of balancing the computations to your hardware components, for more FPS and better fluidity.Hope this helps!

I saw the tweak guide a few weeks or so ago. The panels didn't impact FS2002 to the degree that they do in FS2004. Why? In addition to the gauge updates, Microsoft changed the way the panels are handled by the video card.... They are now displayed using texture memory. Hence the difference in performance when tweaking the panel size. For instance, I scaled down my Microlight bmp in the above example from 800x600 to 800x270.... Just that one step increased performance by a good 20 pct (side views aren't involved, since the panel isn't displayed).Since I have a low end system, I normally fly with Autogen off, shadows off, no AI, and 800x600x32... Pretty much identical to my setup in FS2002 anyway, for the same reasons. I didn't need the RealityXP guide (good as it is) to tell me that I can't get great performance with those options enabled :)-John

JohnThe application that I was running along with FS9 was XP Performance Monitor. Not Task Manager, but Perfmon. There was no anti-virus running and I have every unnecessary service disabled.I had it monitor the FS9 process CPU% and the CPU memory usage.Memory simply was not an issue. FS9 took about 25%, not counting XP.I set all the sliders to the left, set clouds to simple, no AA, no MipMap, nothing. I have a 2GhZ PC and it ran at about 92% of CPU.I'm assumig that the other 8% was being used by XP and Perfmon. When I panned left or right it would temporarily go up to 98% or 100%.There were 12 FS9 threads active but this was without ATC or radio, just plain vanilla. I then put all the sliders at max and it was still at 92% with the same pan bump. It looks as if unless it is a very potent processor FS9 will take what it can get, regardless of the settings.I think the question may be how FS9 divvies up the time it has.

Where is the Reality XP Tweak Guide? I couldn't find it on this site.Thanks,