I ordered an ATI Radeon 800XT Pro Video Card from Dell 1 week ago today (Monday). I got word it will ship on the 26th or sooner. I absolutely can't wait. It's a 256MG card and I'll be replacing an ATI 9800 Pro128. Can I expect a big difference in frames or fluidity?Tell me.

>I ordered an ATI Radeon 800XT Pro Video Card It is either "Pro" or "XT" but not both ... ;-)Michael J.http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

It will definitely make an improvment in many games, sometimes doubling frame rates. Unfortunately, the improvment will not be as great in FS9 as it is truly the CPU that makes the difference in this sim. I went from a Radeon 9700 pro 128 to an X800 pro 256, overclocked to 530/530 without a hiccup. My CPU is AMD xp3000. Not as great of a jump as I had hoped for, but I can run FS9 at 6x Anti Aliasing and 16x Ansiotropic Filtering. In other words, a visual feast, no jaggies! Everything is very smooth, even in bad weather with Ultimate Traffic, Active Sky 2004, Megascenery and FS Hot Seat FX running. Older Simflyers sceneries still bring it to its knees however. I need a faster CPU. Usually get 15-35 FPS most of the time with almost everything maxed.Plus your 800xt has 16 pipes, so it will be faster than my card. Have fun.

Hi there. I've had my X800PRo for about 2 weeks now. Having always used NVIDIA this is my first experince with ATI and so far so good. As for performance, again it also depends on your other hardware cpu,ram etc. On my set up the first thing I noticed is that those clouds don't bring down my FPS like it used to on my FX5900 and yes it's very smooth. You still need to tweak FS to get the best image quality as I find the first time I fired up FS the ground blur and shimmering were terrible. Play with the AA & AF settings in the control panel and make sure to get the latest driver from ATI. I don't take to much notice with regards framerates as long as it's smooth with a nice sharp image and that is what I'm getting with this particular card. Good luck.

I currently have a Radeon 9700 Pro and I'm actually quite happy with it but for new games like Doom3 it may not be enough. I'll soon upgrade but I think it's a good idea to wait for the benchmark results of the final Half-Life2 as well as for updated OpenGL drivers from ATI. Right now, the Geforce cards are a little faster in Doom3 but it seems ATI is a bit faster in the HL2 betas. Also, ATIs OpenGL drivers are not the best so there's a lot of potential improvement to be gained there. Even if you don't like those two games, it's still important how they perform because the 3d-engines will be licensed and used for many other games in the coming years.

I Upgraded to a 5950 Ultra and have seen little or no imporvment in FS2004. I have a quite good CPU 2800+ and FS is running on a striped Dual 120GB Hardisk. Running FS on a striped hardisk is where I have seen the most improvment, but I think the Guy who said the CPU is king is quite right.

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NjExLDY=Kurt M

Notice the "Min FPS" in that benchmark? This is the minimum FPS recorded during the test run and really the only important one for this type of game, especially considering many lock the maximum FPS of FS9 to around 20-30. There may still be some gain from using a high-end videocard with FS9 because the performance of 3d clouds is dependant on videocard performance however.