Thanks again guys. Just did a flight with the suggested settings, but although better, still lots of stutters near the airports. Funny though, when I set my video card to AGP=4 and the Fast Write off, then did the reboot, it didn't hold those settings. However, to be honest I'd rather not play with anything that may cause instability issues. This is also a "working" computer :-). I'll check out that link you mentioned Bigshot. Much appreciated.Glenn

Today.. I went to compUSA and exchanged my Radeon 9800 Pro for a nVidea 5900 Ultra 256 MB Card.. and ... almost all my problems disappeared.When I pay $500 bucks for a card.. I don't want a sorry #### excuse as.. "Oh..the Driver for this is on the way... Just hold on..".Totally unacceptable.. Radeon Sucks.. IMO.

Ninety nine point nine percent of the problem when a very well respected and proven card doesn't work is the fault of the component that sits between the keyboard and the chair. Glad to hear your GForce is working for you. Hope you don't plan on playing any DX9 games.

What did you pay? $500. Holy cr*p!!! :-xxrotflmao :-xxrotflmao Paid $249 myself...

On a more serious note people, albeit slightly difficult after a couple of glasses of wine, Manny's posting and a wife that is somewhat amused/happy that I'm hammering out posts at Avsim after a two year break, I plodded on looking into the R9800 to R9800 PRO conversion by flashing the R9800 with the R9800 PRO BIOS discussion.Anyway, the conclusion I am arriving at is there potentially appears to be some form of mass hysteria convincing people that they can take a $249 card and make it into a $399 card just by upgrading the firmware. I don't think so. Just to convince myself I flashed my 9800 NP with the 9800 PRO BIOS and whilst it increased the default VPU/MEM clock speed from 324/290 to about 380/340, naturally resulting in a performance boost, there is no advantage in doing this as identical results can be achieved by simply using a utility to overclock your 9800 to the same speed without changing the bios.I actually found that my own personal home videos show up artifacts and problems due to excessive clock rate more readily than 3D apps such as FS2004. At the end of the day I was able to clock my 9800 at a maximum speed of 380/322MHz. Anything higher would result in very distinct artifacts in the video playback. The result was identical if not slightly worse with the 9800 PRO BIOS.So, I think I'll leave at that. If you want a PRO then pay the money. Having said that I am immensely happy with the 9800 NP for FS2004 and personally don't believe there will be so much of a performance boost at high res. 4xFSAA, 8xaniso, etc. by going to the PRO and definatley not by going to the 256MB version of the pro even with high end systems.Regards,Joe

Hi,almost all my problems disappeared.So you paid all that money when you could have waited for a patch to fix the same problems? Sound like sound logic to me :-lolIf the new card fixed ALL your problems I'd say good on you but, to sink that much money to still have issues!? "Oh..the Driver for this is on the way... Just hold on.."And you think nVidea is immune to this? The WinXP/200 driver archive shows that they released a new driver on average every month!If the card makes your simming experience better for you, that's what counts but, I wouldn't say that the Radeon sucks. It just didn't work for you.Mikehttp://www.members.shaw.ca/madamo/boeingsig.jpg

Please disregard my previous e-mail. After looking into things in more detail the NP to PRO bios upgrade has in fact worked very well for me. What was fooling me were my PAL encoded home videos that showed artifacts at the PRO clock speeds. I have now found out that these videos are the exception with everything else working perfectly. Some testing also showed that with the bios upgrade there is significantly more overclocking headroom available with the NP card than before the bios upgrade.I'm getting a bit tired of hammering out this thread and I'm sure the rest of you will be as well, so I'll leave it there. But conclusion is that flashing 9800 NP to PRO works and works very well provided you have a NP with appropriate Samsung 3.3ns or less memory modules.You'll be pleased to know that I'm getting some flying time in between tweaking my video card. :-)Regards,Joe