If you're looking for great FS2004 performance without $pending big buck$, check out "Video Card Comparison" by Steve Christensen (uploaded today in 'FS2004 Miscellaneous'). He found, rather by accident, that he didn't need a high-end system to get terrific frame rates in FS2002 or FS2004 with most settings maxed out. Best of all, he tells all! Hauptmann

Where can I find this post at? I tried a search and I can't seem to find it anywhere. Where is the FS2004 Miscellaneous forum at?flyking

Just look for Steve Christensen in the library.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"

>If you're looking for great FS2004 performance without>$pending big buck$, check out "Video Card Comparison" by Steve>Christensen (uploaded today in 'FS2004 Miscellaneous'). He>found, rather by accident, that he didn't need a high-end>system to get terrific frame rates in FS2002 or FS2004 with>most settings maxed out. Best of all, he tells all! Um, what am I missing here? It looks to me that he gets that good rating on the low-end system in 2004 by setting only one setting to maxed (Terrain Texture Size) most other settings at the midrange, and minimizing a bunch of others , at least the ones that matter eye-candy wise. (Most notably the the cloud settings, water effects, NO AA/AF, and at a tiny resolution, which makes the lack of AA all the worse.) The imposter clouds and one tree per square mile just don't do it for me, might as well just stay with FS2002 if you're going to run the minimum settings.FWIW, I'm running:Athlon XP 1800, not overclockedRadeon 9500 modded to 9700pro bus width and speed 768 megs PC2100, not over clockedMonitor 1: 1400X1050, 32 bit, 6X AA, 4X AFMonitor 2: 1280X960, 32 bit, just used for 2d panels and stuff.FS mods: Bluesphere ground textures and 1/2 size treesFSW 32 bit cloudsNO XML autogen (I don't need to see chicken restaurants from 30 miles away, thanks)Vector Autogen edited to remove lightpoles and highway signsFSGenesis 38 meter mesh at 90% complexityUltimate Traffic at 100% density (which I just now to changed to 50%, the controllers at SEATAC can't seem to sequence that many departures at once and you get a backlog of two dozen planes on the taxiway)120 mile sight distance, 60 mile cloud distance, 100% 3D cloudsTrilinear filteringALL other sliders maxed clean system, no spyware, somewhere around 18 processes runing after reboot. I do leave Norton AV running, but have it set not to to scan anything in my flightsim directory.I consistently get 30 FPS when on the ground at rural airports and the in air above 1500 AGL in any area (maybe 25 if I'm smack over the middle of a major downtown area.) On the runway at KSEA, with 100% UT traffic, and weather set to "fair weather" I get 15 FPS, which increases to around 20FPS after I'm at 200 feet of altitude, and past the terminal buildings.That 9500 card cost me $120 a year ago, (don't bother looking for a good deal on this card now, they actually went up in price after people figured out how to convert them to 9700 Pros) so a bit more than twice his card's price, but better than the 10x he spent on the 5950. That Quadro was a really spendy card 3 years ago, though, up in the $400 range IIRC. Had them in some workstations at my former employer. (The lazy "B") The rest of my system is pretty much the same spec as the example low-end system. (little faster memory, little slower CPU) I originaly built this system 2 years ago (just checked the receipt, it was 1/14/2002) and most of the hardware I chose had been out for around a year at that point, so I'm convinced that with only very minor tweaking (FSW Clouds, Bluesphere 50% trees, delete default.xml, and either completely disable or edit out some of the vector autogen) and a clean OS, FS2004 should provide more than reasonable performance on any system that is within 3 years of being state of the art, while running most settings maximized.Oh, and IMO the best deal going in video card land is the 9800 Pro, which took a drastic drop in price in the past few weeks. You can pick one up for around $200 including shipping, and they benchmark with a few % of the 9800XT at double the price. If you're on a buget, go the the 9600 pro or non-pro, for around $100. Stay away from anything calling itself "SE", SE stands for "SuX0rs Edition" here in video card land, and 256 meg cards are marketing hype that show nearly no performance advantage over 128 meg cards with current games. But I certainly wouldn't spend half the cost of a 9600 on an end-of-life card like a quadro2 (really nothing more than a geforce2 with better AA) , that's pennywise and pound foolish.Respectfully submitted,Dan

Thanks Dan, very informative Post. Greetings Jaap