I have an AMD Duron, 900 MHZ processor, 632 MB of RAM, a Nvidia GeForce 2, 256 MB video Card, and updated drivers, but whether I have my display settings on low, or on high, my framrate never exceeds 10 FPS (I have the FPS setting at 32 in display). I have FS9. It only happens in FS9, call of duty, Battlefield, sim city 4, and Americas Army all work well with frames going upto to 60 per second. Can anyone tell my why this is happening, or what I can do to fix it?

FS9 is CPU intensive - ie: The bottleneck for you is the CPU - basically not good enough to do much more than it is doing now. Your first move should be a CPU upgrade.Setting to FPS to whatever only means that frame rate will not be exceeded ( If indeed the system is capable of doing so) It doesn't mean it will run at that speed. On my previous system ( K7S5A/xp2000/512MB DDRAM/Ti4200 ) the FPS was locked at 30 but on occasions would drop to the low teens in plasces such as KLAX, EGLL etc.Dave

Do you have any AI enabled?Any autogen enabled?Any shadows enabled?Are you running at a res higher than 800x600x32?Throw comparisons to other programs out the window--you simply can't compare any program's fps against FS9, other than perhaps FS2002. FS9 demands more from your system than any program out there--much of it is more than what you see in the eye candy.To get the best FS9 performance on what is a terribly underpowered system for the sim, you have to tweak each slider independently, vs setting the sim for low/med/high.I have a slower cpu, but a slightly better graphics card. Here's a rundown of my setup, and a screenshot of a fairly complex aircraft (Eaglesoft's Citation):~First, NOTHING gets loaded in my system tray other than the volume control. Before you can even start to tweak MSFS, you must terminate all non-essential tasks. That includes icons in the system tray for your graphics card, as an example.~Autogen is off on all but bush flights, and I also have renamed "default.xml" to get better autogen performance. This removes fast food stands from the autogen, etc... but is proven to improve performance. I do not use autogen around cities or congested airports.~I leave AI off on flights where eye candy and fps are important. But I can turn it on and still get 15-20 fps at most airports. Two reasons for that--I haven't increased density by any AI add-ons, and I replaced all the default air transport mdl files and textures with AI mdl files and textures.The rest of my settings and my specs follow.... If you can't get 25fps almost everywhere, there's a problem. Don't use airports like Meigs or LAX as a guide--they are richly detailed and really can lower fps. With systems like ours, life is a compromise--but in 99.999 pct of the MSFS world, 25 fps should be the norm for you....http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/80084.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/80085.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/80086.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/80087.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/80088.jpg

Nicely done, John... as usual for you. :-) Been a while, but I don't recall there ever being a GF2 256MB card. If the original poster does indeed have a GF2, then I would add that he run the screen res in sim at 800 x 600 x 16. The GF2 cards don't handle 32 bit very well in MSFS.Greg

just out of bored, brainless, utterly unhelpful curiosity: how did you manage to put together 632 MB of memory?

Thanks john. That helped alot. got it up to 28.6 FPS. Plus starting out in NYC didnt help me ealier. :-P. Oh, my card is a BFG GeForce 5200 with 256MB. The card I have is 10% stronger and has twice the memory of a normal Nvidia 5200. As for my memory, I have a stick of 512 and a stick of 128. but my system board has a built in video, and I couldnt remove the memory sharing, and the lowest setting in the BIOS was 8MB, so I have 640 MB physically, but only 632 that is usable by my system.

Ahhh, this explains alot. OK, then... the 5200 is alot different than the GF2! By all means the card should handle 32 bit screen resolution.You don't mention what MB you're using, but if it has an AGP slot (seperate video card) then it should automatically disable any onboard video once the video card is installed. You should also set your AGP Aperature size to 128 (this is a good place for you to start given your VC and system memory).Greg

>Ahhh, this explains alot. OK, then... the 5200 is alot>different than the GF2! By all means the card should handle>32 bit screen resolution.>>You don't mention what MB you're using, but if it has an AGP>slot (seperate video card) then it should automatically>disable any onboard video once the video card is installed. >You should also set your AGP Aperature size to 128 (this is a>good place for you to start given your VC and system memory).>>Greg>>Oh, the 5200 I have is the PCI version, my board is a SiS 730SE that came with onboard AGP. Its an old board and I had to disable the on-board video in the BIOS, butI plan on upgrading it anyways, as well as getting an Athlon 64 FX-53 once my loan refund comes. Love school :-D