Folks, I have a 1 ghz athlon cpu, 512 mb ram and a Nvidia 32 mb DDR. Needless to say the framerate in fs9 is pathetic (5-7 at EGLL, and 15 fps in airports with low traffic- all siders are very low.) I also run Ulitmate Traffic that needs atleast a 64 mb video card? Would it make a tangible difference if I upgraded to a 128 mb video card? If yes, how do I find if the video card is compatible with the system and how do I install it? Thanks much in advance. I will not be able to upgrade my computer for at least a year and am dying to get flying again.

I presume you are running WinXP. I think you would see better performance, i.e. smoother flying, with a better video card -- not necessarily much higher frame rates. Of course you'd get much more improvement with a CPU upgrade, but you indicated you would not be able to do that for a while. I just changed from an FX 5600 256 mg DDR RAM video card to an FX 5700 Ultra 128mg DDR2 RAM card. My FRs didn't change more than a fraction, but the smoothness of my sim flying improved, especially in dense airports with lots of eye candy, and the overall visual quality improved as well. I'm much happier with this card than with my previous one and I'm still using FS2K2 on Win98SE. I am of the firm opinion that the DDR2 RAM made the difference.Good luck on your search for a new card.-Lindy :-wave :-rotor

With Video cards, the more onboard RAM the better, although many experts feel 128 megs is a sufficient amount.However, in your case, I recomend looking into a RAID-0 set up to increase performance in MSFS. Promise makes a decent PCI add on card(http://www.promise.com/) and Hard Disk's are fairly cheap now a days also. I guarante that you will see a big increase in performance with this option.

i got an NVIDIA 5900, 256ram ultra under xp, i've had no problem and all the preferences are wide open, it smokes!!!