I had a pleasant surprise the other evening whilst using FS9;-) . Having read somewhere recently that using 100% 3D clouds had very little impact on frame rates, I thought I would give it a try (I had been limiting 3D clouds to 30%, but wasn't happy with the 'cartoony' clouds further away from my aircraft). The surprise was that not only did the clouds look better, but my FPS actually improved! Now, I know that this may have been due to the particular situation that I was flying in at the time, but I'm sure I'm seeing the same improvement elsewhere. Thinking about it since, I believe the reason for this may be that I recently installed Bart Dylkiewicz's latest 3D clouds (res3dcloudtexv6.zip, available in the library), where the cloud bitmap has been reduced to only 6k. It seems that these may have finally enabled people like me with less than state-of-the-art PCs (mine is a P4 1.9, 512 meg ram, 64 meg FX5200 card) to run FS9 with 100% 3D clouds.Just wanted to share this, in case anyone else has the same result.Oh and...Thanks Bart!Boogie.

thank you,i'm glad that my efforts are appreciated.this means a lot to me.warm regards,Bart

Bart, Just wanted to add my thanks. I think your files have to be the most under-appreciated "tweak" around. With an 800 MHz system, trying to get adequate performance has been a real challenge with FS9. I never thought I could fly with real world weather and 3-D set to 100%. I stumbled on your files quite by accident. After months of tinkering, I finally got acceptable performance with 3-D set to 20%. But, I just had to have the Reality XP weather radar. When I read that 3-D clouds were critical to the add-on, I started digging for ways to up my 3-D clouds. I don't know why this hasn't been a more common topic. Bottom line, with your files, I upped 3-D clods to 100%, added the weather radar and the Arianne TCAS, and was able to maintain my mod'd AI at 25%(low, but hey, this is 800 MHz we're talking about), and I get smoother performance to boot. The clouds look fantastic!!! For anybody with a low-end system, Bart's clouds are a must have. In all my tweaking, I've realized that vid card settings vary by user (i.e. trial and error), but the real motherlode of performance comes down to weather and AI traffic. If you can get them lean and mean, you can fly on that out of date POS. Bart's clouds take care of the weather issue. Now if I can get some more AI planes in those 3-D clouds with me. Replace some PAI with Aardvark?? The tweaking never ends.... Thanks Bart!!! Let me buy you a virtual beer, my friend!!!:-beerchug