Since a week I'm flying with a new videocard, NVIDIA Geforce FX5900 XT 128 MB. Framerates are nice between 15 an 25. First I was realy satisfied about that.Then suddenly, when changing form cockpitview to spotview the framerates decrease tot 5-7. Once pressing the alt-key makes the sim return to the normal framerates. Then after some minutes the same happens again. I have to press the alt-key once in 5-10 minutes (pressing the Alt-key stops the sim and then resumes it; it seems to me as an memory becomes full or something like that). My computer have 1 gb RAM and a P4 2.6 gHz processor.All the (commercial add-on) planes I'm flying seem to suffer to this problem. Wheater and scenery conditions don't seem to have influence. The effect appears at random, after more or less minutes playing.I wonder if someone recognizes this and what may cause this problem. Herman LeusmanNetherlands

Are you flying with autogen? Early on in the release of FS2004, it was discovered that autogen's extra features--fast food shacks, churches, etc.... were causing a memory drain which slowed down the performance of FS2004 over time. The solution was pretty simple--there's a file called "default.xml". Rename it to default.bak, and the memory "leak" should go away. Sadly, this removes the extra autogen features introduced in this release, but performance of the sim is greatly improved.-John

I was getting horrible performance with my roomates same exact video card but have found that upgrading the sb audigy drivers and getting the latest nvidia drivers have fixed it. Plus doing all the fs9.cfg tweaks found in this forum and elsewhere, including setting the texture bandwidth to 120So far the game now appears to run great using guru3rd drivers. each driver set seems to get better and better, I'm glad nvidia finally got their act together in terms of drivers for their "best" video card

Hi Alex and John,thanks for your reply en your interst. Putting of autogen doesn't influence my performance in a significant way. I've installed driver 53.03 (I think). Newer ones give me a warning that they may not be compatible with XP. I had a problem in the past to with this kind of "unauthorized" drivers: I got strange squares in my game.. But I tried the newest driver from Guru 3D (61.01 or so): performance became about 25% less! I've made already all the tweaks at CFG that are recommended here at AVSIM. I set my bios aperture at 400 (lower rates give me a blurry texture). Any more ideas? The problem is still there, especially after landing...Herman

HermanI'm not sure I can help with tweaks, but as an owner of a fx5200 I've had to try very hard to be happy with my video card.The hardware forum had a topic about drivers and at that stage the 61.12 beta drivers had come out. I have never tried beta drivers before, but after the positive feedback over on that forum I was brave enough to use (and ignore that unauthorized warning - just means it hasn't been tested by Microsoft? ).61.10 had memory problems I think. My 61.12 don't seem to have any particularly noticeable effect - but they do allow me at last to the checklist dialog which actually scrolls when I use the scroll bar - that doesn't sound like much but it had been driving me crazy since fs9 came out.Ben

Herman,Rename your fs9.cfg file to fs9.OLD. Restart FS2004, let it stabilize, and make the necessary changes under options. See if this corrects your problem. It may be that the fs9.cfg file still has your old graphics card listed vice the new card.Other things to try are to update your MOBO Controller Chip drivers, i.e., Intel, VIA, SiS, AMD, ALi, NForce. Reinstall directx9.0b, run the directx diagnostics, press Start, Run..., type dxdiag, OK. Let it stabilize, select the display tab, ensure DirectDraw, Direct3D, and AGP accelerations are enabled, run the DirectDraw and Direct3D test and note any problems.W. Sieffert