I'm thinking about installing Ultimate Traffic but I'm a little leary of it because I've heard it usually causes a huge hit in frame rates. I would appreciate some feedback on the experiences of others with this program.Thanks.

It will be a hit. How big depends on your traffic level percentage. The hit might or might not be worth it to you, it all depends on how bad you want your virtual skies to be filled with traffic.

It will create a FPS hit in major cities and high detailed airport scenery like Simflyers. I get 7-12 FPS in these areas with 100% traffic. All other areas in FS I get the full 20FPS (I lock FPS at 20). This is with a P4 2Ghz 1GB mem GeForce FX 5900 Ultra card. I also have USA Roads, and FS Genesis 38M mesh throughout the USA. Allot depends on your system specs, and your detailed settings I generally set mine to the right on all settings. Except Dynamic scenery, which I turn off. You can also increase FPS by turning off autogen, which to me isn't that important for airline flying. I usually only have it on when a fly GA aircraft. Also I don't know if you are aware, but there is a problem with the autogen system in FS2004 that affects performance. A work around for this is to rename the default.xml file in the autogen folder. You won't though get the extra autogen objects added in FS2004.

It's a fantastic easy as pie program. It'll save you weeks of downloading and creating your own AI schedules. You can even swap out UT planes for nicer lookin AI Aardvark and FSP planes if you so wish.Depending on your rig you may need to tone down the AI percentage in and around major airports and cities. I default mine at 40% at the major airports and boost it in flight to get that TCAS working! Even at 40% I still get a chok-a-block airport with good FPS and this is flying the PMDG 737. Your results will obviously vary. My machine has a P4 2.8 GHz, 512RAM, 128MB Video card.Best RegardsBoone,[email protected]"Flying a plane is no different from riding a bicycle. It's just a lot harder to put baseball cards in the spokes."

I don't really see a difference, maybe even a jump with UT because at 100% default ai traffic you are getting the default models being displayed. If you get aardvark and other frame rate friendly ai models running 60-85% ai traffic with ultimate traffic installed, you shouldn't see too much of a slowdown. You have to tweak your fs9.cfg file to find what settings work best for your computer, plus download replacement texture files to speed up flight sim as well. Plus download the great freeware ga-traffic program and you can limit the amount of ga traffic being displayed, and make the airplanes textures smaller, freeing up more frames that way as well to compensate for the unbelivably awesome UT program. Its just amazing plane watching at any big airport in the game now

Let me clarify what other users posted here:UT itself does not cause the performance hit, but the number of AI aircraft loaded into the system within a certain range of your aircraft. Because it offers much more parking spaces with included AFCAD2s and flight plans causing larger amounts of in-air and parked AI, that is where your performance hit comes in.So set your traffic slider accordingly and if you wish exclude GA (but it is nice to have them around at smaller airports especially non-US settings). You can also at compile time exclude a number of airlines or start empty and just include the ones you want if the hit is too hard.