I've done everything I could think of and employed numerous suggestions from this forum, but if I intoduce clouds into my simmulation, my frame rates go from 30-40 to 11-16. I'm using the frame rate friendly clouds dicussed in this fourm. I've elimenated all non-essential running programs, unplugged my Force Feedback joystick, tinkered with the BIOS, and changed my video card settings a hundred times, updated drivers, etc. My video card is running AA and ASA. Most if not all of my FS sliders are middle or left of middle. Sound quality turned down, VC turned down. What am I missing. I'm not writting this post on a whim. I've spent the last two weeks reading posts in this forum and trying to put everyones advice to work. Please help. Thank you.SystemP4 2.4g512mg RAMGeforce 4 Ti 4600 w/ 128mb on cardWindows XP ProSB Audigy Live 5.1

Do you see this impact with a deck of cumulus, or are you layering several decks of clouds together and then measuring performance?A while back there was also discussion of how various types of AA influence cloud performance. I can't remember which, but I believe some AA levels will attempt to apply AA to the cloud textures, which really kills performance...I have a low end system, but generally with a 3-4 thousand foot deck of cumulus up to about 3/8th's, my fps still hover above the 20's unless I'm flying out of a dense scenery area like NYC... I use MSFS's internal AA, btw, and I don't try to force it through my Nvidia card...If you search the screenshots forum, my most recent Skymaster post shows a good example of my average cloud setup... I was peaking around 30fps in those shots, but that was just outside of KIAH and there ain't much there to challenge the sim....Edit: Here's a link to those shots:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...topic_id=112731

John, the types of clouds I use varies. But, pretty much across the board I get downgraded performance. And you can forget about using real weather through MSFS. If I download weather and it's a cloudy day at a given airport.....framerates are way low. I'll play around with the cumulus clouds as you suggested and see what I come up with. Thanks.

As long as its one or maybe two cloud layers I get great frames but once it starts getting over that I start to get a major hit. I keep all sliders to the right and wont fly low if the wx is bad. weather schemes work best but I prefer real weather.

I should mention that with Real Weather, I don't get the same type of performance. Real Weather really layers on the clouds--sometimes several decks of 3-d cloud layers. That doesn't always happen, but it happens enough that it brings my system to it's rather weak knees...Also, I leave dynamic weather off for the same reason... For peak cloud performance, full manual control is a must, as well as doing "more" with "less". I can get a rich sky in terms of cloud by combining a cumulus layer perhaps with a layer of stratus and a high cirrus deck. I do limit the cloud draw distance to 30nm, but otherwise my cloud display settings are 100pct.... The cloud draw distance is an important slider.... Taking it from 30 to 60 doesn't give you twice as many clouds.... It gives you four times the clouds when you account for the total area of clouds displayed! Even a draw distance from 30 to 40 gives you almost twice as many clouds.... So draw distance is another important factor to think about...Regards,John