I meant adding 3rd party aircraft to fly - I brought foward the collection of Project AI and Aardvark AI aircraft I had built up in FS2002 into FS9 and they work fairly well - a bit of a problem with the Aardvark B732's, which picked up a tendency to taxi with their tails on the ground and nosewheels in the air, but I've fixed that.In fact I have so many AI aircraft & flightplans that I have the ATC percentage turned down to about 15% because of the limit imposed by the gates available at the airports.Despite that, I can run several of the new aircraft which have come out for FS9 at reasonable frame rates i.e. the MD-11 and the B757 (although the textures are still slow to load initially).The Posky A330 is hopeless for me and I've given up on it.But the first 2 panels (the B737 and the MD-11)are killers, particularly the former. And neither have FMC's!And it's not a question of turning all the sliders down: that doesn't make a noticeable difference to the framerates for the internal 2D panel views.So back to the original problem: if I can get reasonable external view framerates for quite sophisticated 3rd party planes with the Weather and Scenery at the higher end, what can I do if anything to speed up the panels?

Hi,<>It did ocur to me that having discussed the merits or otherwise of these 3rd party panels I hadn't actually answered your question. I think your options are very limited. The PMDG737 does have an option to alter the rate at which the gauge info is refreshed. Check if the panels you're using have that option. Failing that I think you're scuppered. This is why Project Magenta is such a good package. It moves all the gauge processing to another computer freeing up the flying PCs processor to concentrate on scenery processing.Sorry I couldn't give you the magic formula :-(Cheers,

The merits of the panels aren't in question, particularly the Precison Panels B737 looks great and worked almost straight out of the box!Maybe I do need to upgrade my computer when I can, but I may try some extra memory anyway.Thanks for trying to help, even if the problem is insoluble short of 2 computers!

If it's any consolation I generally upgrade my flying PC every two years and will be upgrading my Athlon 2000XP next spring when I can double my processing power. FS is at the cutting edge of system requirements and if you want to have most of the option near or at maximum getting a new PC six months or so after FS comes out will generally give you that option.Happy hunting!