Hey all,I'm wondering if there are any other mac users out there that have XP configured in a way that provides steady decent performance- which to me is anything over 25fps. When I purchased XP, I assumed I had enough of a rig to squeeze all a lot of juice out of the sim but I'm finding a very delicate and unsavory balance between performance and acceptable visuals. Here is my situation:I'm running an early 2009 Mac Pro with 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Xeons, 32GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5870 (1024mb cram), and Apple 30" cinema display. I also have XP installed on a striped (raid 0) array of SSDs. I attempted to make use of the "set all rendering options for maximum speed" option and begin building up rendering settings from scratch. While I never exceeded 60fps, I noticed that about the time I started tooling with the number of objects, clouds and world detail distance, the performance began to degrade. There are also zero AI aircraft. I could not find a sensible balance that maintained anything between 25-30fps. It seemed like I could get either an average of 40fps with crap visuals, or the following, upon which I finally settled:With this, I get about 13-18fps with visibility set to about 10 miles and no cockpit showing which, to me, kind of sucks - especially since it degrades as time progresses. At this setting, I am pleased with the visuals though.I guess I'm just not sure what the bottleneck is-- and while FSX is not my primary choice of sim, I am dumbfounded that I get better performance out of that running in my Parallels Windows XP virtual machine. I'd be willing to submit that this machine just isn't up to the challenge - to which I'll put XP on the shelf and wait until I get a new one...but I just wanted to see what anyone else thought.Thanks,Mike

Your lovely mac screen is gorgeous. And very demanding, at that res, no wonder you have probs. Try it at a more reasonable 1920 by 1080.16X anis?! Try 1.Other than that your settings appear reasonable and that gpu was pretty good for a yr ago - but if you can swap, you'll see some benefits from upgrading I suspect.

I have a fairly similar set up to you only I am single Quad Core 2.66 with a hacked 6870 Radeon and 12GB Mem. I use the small Apple 20" at 1650x1080 and get very good results almost everywhere. One thing I noticed is that you are using extreme res textures, mine is one peg back from that and still looks great. I have x2 Alias and x16 Anis and clouds at 15%. Flying around the UK with real weather i.e. very cloudy and raining, using Jrollons CR200 it is as smooth as butter. I can't tell you the frame rate as I have switched this off, I found myself too worried about the FPS and not actually flying. As Simon says, it is probably the screen res that is holding you back.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm going to noodle with the resolution a bit and see what happens. I might try a few other combinations with the anisotropic filtering as well. I've always been a snob when it comes to using the monitor's native resolution so it's not my first choice :-).I'll report back the results.

Ok...I dropped the ansiotropic filtering down to 2x and the resolution to 1920x1200 (which is 75% of my native resolution). At this setting, the visuals look noticeably less crisp and all the scenery looks considerably more blurry at oblique angles but, the FPS is averaging about 20-25. Seems like this is the best I'm going to get without better equipment so I'll shut up and let everyone get on with their flying. :-) Thanks all.

Try to decrease the number of A.I controlled aircrafts to 1 or 2 max. For me, the impact on framerate was significant. I have a very similar setup (MacPro 2x3GHz Xeon - 12 Gb/ATI 5770/CinemaDisplay 30"). I also use the CloudMaxx add-on which help a lot too. I usually fly with 20-25 fps even with cloud overcast in populated area at full screen resolution.