With my Radeon 7000, CFS2 gets ultra-buggy with any drivers other than those from the CD installed. The gamma ups to a blinding level, and the water and ground textures turn to stripes. Ground goes yellow and white, Water is green and white.

One Tin was right. Having Vertical Synch On resolved the issue and gave me a smooth box spin in the DirectX 3D write test.

Sounds like people are passing on these drivers.

Hello Again dykesc,Well I'm glad you got it solved. I guess I was thinking backwards as to what the correct setting was. I turned my VSynch to 'Always On' and it resolved the issue here too.As to whether these are a good set of drivers or not? I dunno. There does seem to be some extra hard drive activity, such as when I first boot up into Windows, dykesc might be right about during flights, what I mostly noticed is there seems to be extra HD activity when I exit the sim. But, they are working and seem to work ok. No glaringly obvious issues that I've seen yet, I just wonder a bit about the extra HD activity though.Cheerio,Jim

BumpThe tweaked omega drivers based on 4.1 are now outComments on them with FS2004?

>I have a Radeon 9500 Pro, which may not be able to display>with fastwrites or or 8X AGP.It can (mine does)>But disabling those>features won't make much of a reduction in FPS.I agree. Everything I have read about fastwrite suggests it really provides no tangible benefit and is usually the cause of more headaches than perks. The same could be said of APG8x (although it is more stable than fastwrites, its just is more marketing than substance as far as real performance goes.)Could be a mainboard setting or something. But if everything else is working, better to spend your time flying than diddling with these settings :)

Just installed them. Much faster, I find. I'm locked on 20fps and didn't go below 15 even taxing to the runway with the addon scenery for the old Hong Kong airport. That used to kill my system, so never really used it. Switching from 2d to spot happens bang bang now, and I don't lose textures like I did before. However, the flashing screens are back when I bring up the menu, and they even do it now when I hit F9 for FS Navigator. Go figure...Anyway, everyone will get different reactions I guess, but for me I'll put up with the flashing menus for the extra performance.rgds,billg

Bill,Extra performance compared to the non-omega 4.1's? Or compared to your last Omega/ATI drivers?BEst,Joel

Joel, I had the Cat 3.9's installed then just upgraded to the Cat 4.1's. The performance increase is very noticable in my case. Much better clarity, faster switching between views, and much better fps. Almost like the last ones weren't installed right. This is the first time I've used the ATI utility to uninstall the old drivers--had always used Driver Cleaner 2. Maybe that's the difference, but who knows, hehe. Btw, might try the Omega's to see if I can maintain the quality and get rid of the flashing menu, but the difference overall is so much that I can live with the flashing.rgds,billg

I've installed the new 4.1's (from ATI) and agree there's a nice little performance boost. I was wondering if the Omega version is even better performance and/or quality wise....Best,Joel

Joel, your turn to go first. :-)rgds,billg

Well, I've installed the Omegas (2.5.14) and I can confirm the overall performance improvement AND no flashing menus.The previous Omega driver set were pretty good as well but I did notice a tendency for the screen to blank once or twice when exiting the sim. This happened with Orbiter as well when you exited from full screen to 'Launchpad' and also when exiting the sim from 'Launchpad'. All that has gone now :)This latest Omega set are providing significant improvements over the previous set and seem to be very stable - I've been chopping and changing between FS2k2, FS9, RealFlight G2 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein over the past 2-3 hours and all without incident or rebooting. (*)I can also confirm the DirectX spinning logo phenomenon is a Vertical Sync issue. I noted this some time back on changing to an LCD TFT flat panel. This monitor refreshes at 60Hz so it seemed pointless leaving vertical sync off as it was with my previous CRT monitor. I now have it 'Always on' in both Direct3D and OpenGL. From that point on the spinning logo has 'behaved' itself.Some people appear to be experiencing problems with the ATI 4.1s. Those that are might consider trying the Omegas instead.I don't know whether it is just coincidence but following installation of these drivers I noted the sim seemed somewhat smoother, so I tried experimenting by increasing the AGP aperture from 128 to 256MB and Anisotropic filtering in Direct3D from 8x to 16x and was pleasantly surprised to see no real negative impact on performance. At this time I am not certain whether I will stay with these settings - needs more experimentation over the next few days.MikeP4 2.4GHz (400FSB), 1Gig PC2100 DDR Crucial, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Omega 2.5.14), Hyundai ImageQuest Q17 17" Monitor (1280x1024x32), Gigabyte GA-8IRXP MoBo, Ultra-Quiet PSU 400W, WinXP Home (SP1), DirectX 9.0b, AGP Aperture = 256MB(*) Edit: You can now add IL2 FB to the list - great, and still no instabilities noted.

I've had the Omega 2.5.14's since they were released this weekend. Work fine for me in this sim and LOMAC (the only two games I've tried them with). Seem smoother to me (though FS9 was just fine with the previous version of Omeagas on my system). Can't say that I've noticed any great increase in speed, but I haven't been looking for that.I prefer the Omegas over the standard CATs only because the install is easier, and some of the additional tweaking tools bundled with them. Been running the Omegaized ATI drivers since I installed my 9700 Pro last May. Never had any problems.

I think I'm gonna give the Omegas a try this time, never used them before as I'd heard they were weighted more hevily toward image quality at the expense of some performance. Seems nobody here is complaining about that though.Best,Joel

Guys,I did give the Omegas a try and it wasn't a good experience- some strange freeze ups over two days of testing that I'd never experienced before. Did an install per Omega instructions over my ATI 4.1's, uninstalling the control panel first. ALl control panel settings and such were made the same as the 4.1 after the install.Anyone else have problems like this? I did a system restore to the 4.1's and now all seems to be well, should I try the Omega's again?