Hello All,I have what is being considered a low end of PC.1.2ghz Athlon384 MB RAM60 GB harddriveGeforce FX5200 128 MBI just upgraded the video card yesterday to the fx5200 from a geforce2 gts. I'd really like to see what the new video card will do for me while playing fs9, but I have no clue what to set the sliders at. Right now I have them all on the defaults, been flying that way since I installed it and haven't had any problems. I have no additional add-ons. I'd like to improve the graphics with the new video card. Can anyone with a similar setup give me some hints or advice on how to get some good effects with my current system? I won't be upgrading anything else until next summer unless one of the parts goes bad first.Thank you for your help.

Are you saying you put a new card in and are seeing no difference in graphics or performance?Andrew

Do a search on this forum for "JohnCi". His system isn't quite as powerful as yours, but he has the sim dialed in quite nicely. A number of his posts have tips on how he does it.Good luck,Greg

I thought MSFS was primarily CPU dependent?Scott.

Yes, in simple terms thats pretty much what I'm saying. Please note that I have all the settings set to a default from the geforce2 card. After some research tonight I did discover antialiasing settings and anisotropic filtering. Still trying to figure out what each does.

Thank you. I did a search for "JohnCi" and came up with what seemed like a gazillion posts. I will try to narrow the search to be a bit more specific with his name and my problem. Again, thank you.

>Hello All,>>I have what is being considered a low end of PC.>>1.2ghz Athlon>384 MB RAM>60 GB harddrive>Geforce FX5200 128 MB>>I just upgraded the video card yesterday to the fx5200 from a>geforce2 gts. I'd really like to see what the new video card>will do for me while playing fs9, but I have no clue what to>set the sliders atAre you sure it's running at the proper AGP speed, etc? I also am running a gainward FX-5200 card, and I had that problem at first. At first I thought it was running pretty well, but when I looked in direct X diagnostics, I noticed I had no texture acceleration. This didn't seem right to me. Well the problem was my chipset drivers were not loaded right. "I just built this system". I had loaded the drivers, but they were evidentaly overwritten when I reinstalled windows. "SE".So my AGP was running at the low 2X speed. I also had a yellow flag in device driver about my "PCI Universal Management Bus" driver. Anyway, after reinstalling my intel chipset drivers, I had my normal 8X AGP running. I'm running a P4 2.4 prescott and 512 ram. Before I ran anywhere from 7-8 to maybe 20 or so fps. Quite flyable, but not as good as I'd like. After getting the chipset drivers corrected? Almost tripled my frame rate. Nearly wet myself...Now I average from a low of maybe 10 and up to sometimes 60-70 at high alt cruise. Only the worst loaded large airports, or ultra dense clouds drop me below 10, and it's still pretty smooth. I average 20 fps overall probably. But often much more. So check direct X and see if all looks right. BTW, I recommend not using the nvidia sliders for AA etc...Leave it at the default. I tried messing with those, and it made mine worse. In my case, I found it better to let FS2004 handle that. But may vary to user...BTW, I'm running scenery and autogen maxed out. Clouds all 3d, and sliders about 1/2 way. I use usually 1078x768. Anyway, make sure you are really getting what it's supposed to do. It's quite possible it's being crippled. Many rate the fx-5200 as pretty low end, but myself, I found it not so bad for the price once it was running right. But I do have more cpu power you have...My system may be making up for it a bit. BTW, I do have the video "performance" clock sliders all the way up..."280-350" Default is less...But I don't know if yours has that.. May be a gainward thing...MKP.S. You might try the hardware forum. They may end up moving this thread there...

My advice is: experiment. The easiest things to play with are the sliders (accessible while you're flying from Options | Display). Start moving sliders over to the right. Best to do one slider at a time so you can isolate the changes. Fly around for an hour (or a week) and see if you like it. If you don't, move the slider back to the left. If in doubt, you can always go back to the defaults.When I first got FS9, I was very conservative: sliders to the left or in the middle. I knew that my video card was substandard, and I just wanted to fly. Then I got some RAM and started moving things over to the right. A new world started to open up underneath me. Small cities now began to look like small cities! Now I have autogen and scenery all the way to the right. Sure, I could get better framerates if I backed off some. But I like what I see, and I'm willing to sacrifice some smoothness.One more piece of advice: give the higher settings a chance. Your initial impulse may be to go back to what you had before, because you were comfortable with it. With the higher settings, you're bound to notice some things that aren't quite as smooth as they were on the lower settings. Give it some time, though: after an hour, you might not notice the minor slowdowns, and you might really like what you see out your window.

@NM5KI just checked device manager and all hardware is installed properly. Also checked the bios and its set for 4x agp as thats the max my motherboard will support. I don't have any slowdowns or anything, just want to improve my user experience with it.@dswoThats great advice. I will give that a try tonight. I always forget about the menus while flying because they are hidden. Usually I keep going into settings and adjusting that way.