John, I use Win2000 Pro and this was designed for IRQ sharing. I have read that IRQ sharing is a must in Win2K, but don't know for sure why or if it's even possible to NOT IRQ share. It's not like Win9x apparently. My Rad 9700 is sharing, and I have no stutters or any issues with FS.Noel

Noel,When I had a Radeon 9700 Pro I did a lot of reading about different ways to combat any issues with them. Two of the things that were mentioned wereEnsure its not sharing an IRQ with any other deviceEnsure that the power cable isn't sharing a HDD, CDR or Fans.If you share an IRQ with a physical device such as a soundcard, it easily fixed, move it into another slot.

John,The advice to ensure that the power cable isn't sharing a HDD, CDR or fans doesn't seem to really make any sense when you think about it. The +12V output from the power supply is a single output with multiple cables and molex connectors to be able to hook up all your peripherals, but these are all ultimately connected to the PSU's single +12V output. In other words any interference on +12V being caused by a given peripheral or the PSU itself would be present on all of the +12V terminal connectors.The graphics card itself has local supply filtering and a voltage regulator module that should take care of any unwanted noise and interference on the +12V supply. ATI themselves recommend splitting the +12V supply between the graphics card and the HDD, probably just because it is physically convenient to do so. In my case I am actually sharing a connection to my two rear extractions fans and I am not experiencing any problems that I am aware of.Hope this helps.Regards,Joe

Hey Joe,You're right mate :) I was just passing on what I'd read on other forums. What you wrote makes perfect sense :)

>Then for flightsim I had noticed that my FPS was less then>perfect I had a look at my FS9.CFG and found out that it still>had my GF2 listed in It I just deleted the .CFG file and then>I saw a improvement in FS9.Yes, that's what I did as well but that didn't help. Would a jump up from the Catalyst 3.6 to the 3.7 drivers help? I don't no, I think any incremental increase in drivers would probably only fix specific problems - maybe full screen flickering one day as an example. I doubt a big jump in the fps is what a driver update would manage.Anthony Dyer

Hello Folks,Well, what I needed was a direct comparison between my old and new graphics card so I reinstalled the old MSI Ti4200 and tested both fs2004 and the included game with the new graphics card - Rainbow Six.RESULTS - MSI Ti4200no antialiasing/aniso.. fs2004: 10-13fps at EGLLRainbow Six: 40-60fps on one of the training missions4x antialiasing/4x aniso...fs2004: 5-8fps at EGLLRainbow Six: 20-30fps on the same training mission***********************RESULTS - HERCULES RADEON 9800PRO2x antialiasing/2x aniso... (the lowest settings)fs2004: 10-13fps at EGLLRainbow Six: 45-60fps on same training mission as above4x antialiasing/4x aniso... (same settings as the Ti4200)fs2004: 10-13fps at EGLLRainbow Six: 45-60fps on same training missionCONCLUSIONThe new graphics card is doing it's job. Basically something else on the system (probably the motherboard/cpu) is holding the games back. Without any antialiasing the games on either graphics card run as well as each other. But destroying the jaggies with antialiasing puts these cards poles apart - the Ti4200 simply sinks, the 9800 Pro holds the fort.So, I think I can understand why the card isn't running faster than before - the bottleneck's elsewhere.Thanks for your input. I think next item on my list is a new motherboard. I think an 8x AGP slot and 400Mhz FSB would help a lot both now and in the future.

Yep id have a look at the motherboard and the RAM which is the problem in my case though with fs2004 set to defults and my radeon 9600 im averaging about 20fps.But that is with the defults that FS9 thinks work well on my system.. also i just have the vid card set to balanced with tureform enabled.

Anthony,I just read the post again and noticed your computer specs. I see you're only running an XP2100+ That in my opinion is the bottleneck of your system. Because you're running a slowish procesor you can't expect too many frames over what you had on the Ti4200. image quality and performance using FSAA and Ansio of course will be better, but thats about it.You'll find one you upgrade to a quicker speed CPU your frames will increase. Hope it works out for you :)I'm just waiting on my Radeon 9800 Pro to come.. hopefully it'll work without any issues.