I recently upgraded my hardware to an Athlon XP 3000+ processor, so I was anxious to try out FS9 on my new setup. I was disappointed to find that it stutters like crazy. It consistently goes 19.8, 4.3, 19.8, 4.3.I decided to change things up. I set my AGP aperture to 128 (which is also the memory size on my GeForce 4 card) and I deleted the FS9. cfg and let it create a new one, using the dafult FS9 settings minus full screen mode. I was pleased to find that ALL stutters were completely gone. When I came back later to do another flight, restarting FS, the stutters had returned!! I'm back to square 1. I know talking about stutters is beating a dead horse, but since I also bought a new faster hard drive, I had to reinstall everything. I forget about some of the tweaks people had performed to alleviate the stutters.-Tim

Try turning your ai traffic to zero, and autogen to zero. You should get silky smooth flight. Then start turning them back up and find where the stutters start. If you have a product like ultimate traffic you will find it adds greatly to the problem.At least on my system ai traffic is the number 1 hit followed by autogen. If I turn them both off (athlon 2100+) I get silky smooth xplane like flight. I think no matter your system-these two factors can tax any computer made today. You should be able to find a nice balance by experimenting.

I agree with Geof's post... Without AI and Autogen, I get very smooth flight, especially with Chris's high performance clouds... I have a slow sub 1MHZ system, and I do nearly all of my flying in COF now and am quite pleased.As for AI, I replaced all the default FS2004 airliners with airliners from ProjectAI.... Framerates with AI are outstanding now, but as Geof said, there can be a pronounced stutter in the proximity of AI. I hadn't flown with AI much prior to swapping the defaults with PAI, so I was quite surprised to see the stutter.... Autogen with the XML tweak applied offers very little stutter on my system, but I prefer to fly with it off except when bush flying.... -John

Hi Tim.Stutters are not inherent in FS9.You need to find out what system processes or what hardware/drivers are causing the rythmic stuttering."ctrl-alt-delete" will bring up your task manager on WindowsXP. Right now, I have 19 processes ( including iexplore.exe and taskmgr.exe ).That's about all you want to have, and some systems can have less.After you have your software/hardware environment under control, then you can tweak FS9 to get the level of quality/performance you want.Dick

>Hi Tim.>>Stutters are not inherent in FS9.>>You need to find out what system processes or what>hardware/drivers are causing the rythmic stuttering.>>"ctrl-alt-delete" will bring up your task manager on>WindowsXP. Right now, I have 19 processes ( including>iexplore.exe and taskmgr.exe ).Would you possibly post what processes that you have running -- I have about 27 when I run FS2004 after a clean boot.Thanks Barry

Two links should help you to manage your processes in XP:http://www.blackviper.com/WinXP/servicecfg.htm (this guy is speciallized in tuning your rig for games...very good!)www.amsn.ro (Fast Defrag 2.0: a tool that can free and optimize RAM (Random Access Memory) and the swap-file usage. It features with a powerful engine and uses low system resources and management of processes. Succes!Rob "Holland&Holland" de Vries http://www.emotipad.com/emoticons/Flying.gif"To go up, pull the stick back. To go down, pull the stick back harder"

Tim,A couple other things to check for, and this has helped me a lot....Make sure you have the latest nforce2 drivers for your motherboard if you have nforce chips on it and the most recent video driver for your new video card.Also, I use EndItAll as a resource killer before starting the flightsim. This will help apply system resources to the flightsim and not background applications.I assume you are using WinXP or 2000???Get the latest drivers here for video:http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_53.03or here for the entire nforce2 WinXP set;http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_winxp_3.13Don

Rob, I just tweaked my xp home system using the blackviper site as a guide. I had thought about tweaking the OS before but thought any improvement would be marginal. What a difference! I was getting 10 or 12 fps at cyvr until I got out of site of the buildings and ai aircraft, but I didn't go under 20 after tweaking. Thx much!rgds,billg