I'm upgrading my video card from a Geforce 3 TI 200 to an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro. Thinking about the 256MB one but I've heard the extra 128MB dosn't do much for FS9.My comp is a 2.5ghz with an ASUS P4PE mb, 1gb RAM and XP Home.I understand that FS9 is "cpu bound," but the better card will allow me to turn on AA and increase my ansiowhatever. Will I not get a framerate boost as well? I have my slider set to 20 frames max, but around congested airports with clouds I drop under 10 fps frequently. I'd be hugely disappointed if the sim looked better but wasn't faster, hehe. Thx!rgds,billg

If you are using AI, I don't know that you'll see a huge performance boost. But the better card may be able to improve fps by better managing your resolution, color depth (16 vs. 32), and texture loading/unloading. Although 256megs may seem unimportant for FS2004, they will come in handy sooner or later. If you're lucky, simmers who've followed the same upgrade path will come in with their own observations...-John

You won't even be able to recognize the sim. You'll think somebody slipped in a copy of FS2008. Go for it. Just make sure you get rid of all the nvidia drivers that fail to uninstall.

that sounds encouraging Bigshot. Just what I wanted to hear! :-)Does the 9800 Pro support dual monitors? It says on their website that it has dual integrated controllers but I'm not sure what that means. Just wondering....rgds,billg

You'll find two entries in the device manager after you install the card. Primary and Secondary. You can run two monitors off the card. I've never done that; but I'm sure there's someone around that can explain it better than me. I understand you use the analog and dvi hookups so you'll need an adaptor if you have two CRTs. One should come with the card. Good luck.

"ansiowhatever"LOL... I like that. Makes me feel like I'm not the only one who has trouble speaking (and writing) that.I agree with JohnCi... if you can afford the 256 Mb card, go for it. Simple rule about computers... you can never have too much memory.I don't believe you'll see a big jump in frame rates. But the image quality will shock you! You won't recognize the sim! Also, the 9800 Pro will allow you better flexibilty in setting up your graphics within Windows and the sim.Good luck,

Wow! What a difference! Don't quite have a handle on the effect of FPS yet, but I know it's a big difference, and I'm maxing out a lot of sliders and have aa and ansiowhatever on. Great colors. It is a different sim. Had to download the drivers from the ati site. There's prolly better out there somewhere. One problem I have is that from within the sim when I press the alt key to bring up the menu I get flickering to and from a black screen. Drivers might fix this though. And I had to rename my fs9.cfg so that FS would build a new one that had the ati driver in it. Other than that, and it's pretty minor, I'm a happy camper!regds,billg

I don't think the extra 128MB will boost performance at all in FS2004. It may in the current DX8.1 games with AA/AF turned on and 1200x1600 or higher resolutions. For the DX9 games, I don't know if you will gain much more performance, since the upcoming DX9 games may be coded to take advantage of the raw GPU power for pixel shader rendering rather than texture cache (on-board memory) capacity. I could be wrong, though.Here are some links to read about performance of 9800 Pro 256MB:http://www.hexus.net/content/reviews/revie...XJsX3BhZ2U9MQ==http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030604/index.htmlhttp://www.gamespy.com/hardware/june03/vid...ut/index7.shtmlhttp://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1863Cheers!David

OK People I would like some honest answers. I've just got a new system (see below) with an 256MB ATI Radeon 9200 card. Basically it sucks :-mad I've downloaded the latest drivers, contacted the PC manufacturer support line and still I'm getting the same problem. When running FS i'm getting streaking lines/dashes across the screen. I left it yesterday running in the background for a few minutes and when I came back the screen was full of dashes, horizontally, but in a pattern going diagonally down the screen - if you get what I mean. My old system had a GEForce card only 32MB, but never had a problem with it, but so far with this, i'm pulling my hair out, nothing stops it. Should I get a new card? WHATS the best for around

>Wow! What a difference! Don't quite have a handle on the>effect of FPS yet, but I know it's a big difference>Had to download the drivers from the ati site.I just got my Hercules 9800 Pro delivered to me this morning. I'm finding that so far I can't get any improved performance. I've only played with it for about an hour before I had to go to work and have found that the fps at heathrow airport with 100% PAI aircraft is still running at 9 - 12 fps.I upgraded from the MSI Ti-4200 64MB with 44.02 drivers. I checked and the drivers I'm using with the 9800pro are the Catalyst 3.2 drivers.I've removed antialiasing & anisowhatsit from both the system and fs2004 display settings and I've started with a new fs9.cfg file. No effect.Any suggestions? Surely I should get better display performance and quality. I'll try some more tweaking when I finish work and report back.My system:Athlon XP2100+MSI KT3 Ultra 2 Motherboard (4x AGP slot)Crucial 1024MB PC2700 DDR RAMHercules Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB - Catalyst 3.2 Drivers300W Power Supply UnitAnthony Dyer

Hey Alaister and Anthony,While I still run Nvidia myself, I don't think either of you are current on your video drivers. Check that out first.Tony

>While I still run Nvidia myself, I don't think either of you>are current on your video drivers. Check that out first.>TonyI went on to the hercules.com website and downloaded the catalyst 3.6 drivers. No noticeable improvement. However what I have seen is that the performance doesn't degrade all that badly when applying high Antialiasing and anisoduberywhatsit settings.After playing a bit more, there does seem to be some performance inprovement at heathrow compared with my old MSI card. I'm now getting 11-13 fps rather than 6-11fps though someone told me on an lder thread that he got much better performance when he upgraded from a Ti4200 to a 9700 Pro.I haven't tried tweaking the AGP aperture yet, I read an interesting thread about that. Also, fast writes are set to disable in BIOS but set to enable in Display Settings. Any further suggestions?Anthony Dyer

I doubt the problem is the card. More likely that the problem is with the driver. If you're using the latest driver, it could be that you never got a clean uninstall of previous drivers. There are utilities that can clean up after a driver uninstall. You might want to give that a try.Jim