Well I'm a bit bummed. I never tried this before I loaded the new ATI 3.8's on my 9800 so I dont know how it was before, but I decided to try and do some heavy cloud flying this evening. WHAT A FPS HIT! I'm talking LOW teens! I'm used to having it locked a 24FPS and it staying pretty much right there. Now I'm thinking this may hinder my ability to go out and do some real weather flying when its overcast out! If I pan my view to where there are no clouds in the view FPS go right back to the 20's.Im running an 800mhz fsb p4 3GHZ PC with a RADEON 9800. I'm wondering if the driver update did something? Maybe I should try a reinstall of MSFS2004? I'm using the EFAULT cloud settings.Is this could thing supposed to be this big of a HIT on FPS? Even with AA/AS off it gives a beating on FPS!

You know it is a real puzzle. I can go out and fly in quite complex areas one day at liquid smooth steady frames locked at 25, and the next day performance is very significantly lower, pretty much dependent on the clouds, even in the say area. But that's as far as it goes--it's impossible to assess exactly what clouds exact what toll on performance. I have found that when I get poor performance in certain situations I can change weather sources--like use FS Meteo instead of default FS real weather--and end up getting great performance again. Sheesh! Today I was flying around Seattle and got a perf hit down to around 16-18, then I switched from my default resolution of 1600 x 1200 2xAA 8xAF to 1792 x 1344 with no AA and 8xAF and I got great performance again. Man it looked good too. 24.5 FPS steady all over Seattle. That's damn good I think. I tell you one thing though--all these claims of performance you have to take with a grain of salt, especially when it comes to reports of actual FPS numbers. Sheesh you point the nose of your aircraft up and all of the sudden your FPS increases. Making true comparisons between different configurations is practically impossible IMO.Noel

Well I still plan on playing around with Active Sky. Now I wish I could have checked performance before these latest drivers. I see theres a leaked version out. Tweakers will be tweakers.. I guess I can try and take a look. It sure seems like it would look incredibly cool to fly through and around those clouds in high FPS! ;-)But you are right that I have noticed some situations where clouds do not have a real bad effect.

glsimpilot,Download this here and install them: http://library.avsim.net/sendfile.php?DLID=34657

Use Chris' clouds from FSW. They're in the library under FS2004. They look just as good and give you a nice framerate boost. I was having trouble with thunderstorms too. Not anymore.

Beat ya too it Bigshot, lol :-)

hehehe. When Chris first released those clouds, I remember reading a couple threads from ATI owners saying they didn't make any difference so I passed em' by. Just a couple weeks ago, I decided to give em' a try. Glad I did.

I think what help most for me was turning off the 32bit z-buffer (Standard is off in the 3.8 Omega driver release for the weaker graphics boards.) But I only have an ATI9000, I don't know if this will help with the "bigger" ATIs...Surprisingly, I haven't noticed that much of a difference visually. I remember in FS2002, when flying in 16 bit color/z-buffer, there was a lot of flickering going on.In FS9 I haven't noticed any of that yet (32bit color/16 bit z). Clouds shimmer through other clouds a bit more often, but this was a problem in 32bit too.

OK, I am going to give those clouds a try. Thanks for the tip!