Hello,I have the following systemDell Pentium4 2.4GHz512 MB RamWindows XP ProNVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 64 MBFS9I was wondering whether an upgrade of the video card to one with 128MB or higher would help this system or would this be a waste of money?Also, any special cards there that are 'reliable', meaning, do not need a totally experienced computer guru to fiddle around with drivers etc to get a good performance?Any help is greatly appreciated.Regards

I've got the same system as you do, but with a ATI Radeon 9700TX. I'm very happy with the performance I'm getting with the latest ATI drivers. I can't compare to what you are getting because I've never used a 64 MB TI4200, but if you want to specify a situation for frame rate comparison, I can do that for you.

I think it's well worth the investment. I recently changed from a 64MB Ti4200 to a 128MB 9800 Pro on a similar system (P4 2.2 running at 2.508, 512MB RAM, WinXP Pro, and FS9) and couldn't be happier. Peak framerates haven't changed much but average framerates are up over 50%. The big advantage of the 9800 Pro over the 4200, though, is that nothing slows it down much (hence the increase in the average FPS). Even with FSAA set at 6X and AF set at 16X (which is where I run them all the time) the framerates drop very little compared to the lower settings. There are no feature advantages with the newer cards (FS9 doesn't use any of the DX9 graphics options) but the speed increase is significant as the FS9 eye-candy (clouds, water, etc) make much better use of the graphics card capabilities than do prior versions. Installation is a snap. Just uninstall the old drivers and install the new ones. Set the FSAA and AF options in the control panel and you're done. No tweaking required.Doug

Thanks to both of you for the replies.I have looked into the problems that I have. The following happens. The simulator stutters when I move the cursor. And also, I might have frame rates in the 30's when looking straight ahead. But when I press NumLock and 4 to look left, the frame rate drops to 4-6 and the sim stutters. It seems strange to me, that when looking ahead and seeing the cockpit with all the gauges and numbers that the frame rate is higher than when looking to the side, not changing anything else.Regards and thanks for the helpBeat

I'll chime in, also in favor. I had a Ti 4200 and upgraded to a Radeon 9700 Pro. Real increase in frames and smoothness, most noticeably in clouds and with complicated, busy airports. I have a 2.6 gig processor and am overall, happy with my performance.