Although FS9 performed fairly well on my mid-level system I was having some stuttering in certain areas that was puzzling me. I also had occasional FS9 lock-up problems that I couldn't figure out. I just discovered that FS9 runs much smoother with AGP fast writes enabled and the aperature set to 128. This also seemed to fix the random lock-up problems I was experiencing. Both of these are the defualt settings for my Gigabyte M/B but I changed them because of the overwhelming opinions on AGP aperature and fast write settings. Sometimes the suggested tweaks don't necessarily fit all. I am actually very pleased with the performance of FS9 on my system. I do not have all my sliders maxed out. I use the Ultra High scenery setting and have dawn/dusk, extended terrain, sun glare and shadows deselected and auto gen set to normal. I get a solid 20-22 FPS under all conditions and the scenery looks fine to me. I'm running an Athlon 1800+ with 512 meg of PC2700 ram and an ATI 9700 PRO card.

I too found that my FS2004 runs much better with "fast writes" on. Smoother also. When I re-enabled the AGP and set it to 128, my (sim)studderings became almost non-existant. I never had lockup problems though. I was also able to set the auto-gen up to the next to last setting.

I checked my bios and AGP was set to 128 by default for my ATI 9700. I've heard that, if you have enough RAM, setting it to 256 for a 128mb video card is actually optimal, anyone try this?Best,Joel

Where would I find the AGP setting on my GF4 MX 440 128mgMB

In the BIOS on system startupJoel

Yes I agree with the 256 aperature. Ive tried em all and 256 is optimal. Im using an ATI 9800 and have 1 gig of mem.BobG

Yep - as I posted in the original thread, aperture of 256 seems best for me, though I haven't tried 512MB!Cheers,Paulhttp://www.strontiumdog.plus.com/sbird.jpgOfficially licenced by British Airways plc for use of name and logo[p]AMD XP2800+ Barton, Gigabyte GA-7NNXP nForce2, 1Gig Crucial PC3200 DDR 400MHz, Gainward 128 MB GF4-4200, SB Audigy, 3 x WD Caviar SE[/p]