With the new Omega 2.5.90 drivers, driving a Radeon X800XT PCI-Express 256 MB video card,..I have FINALLY---reached the

Great to hear Mitch. I too have been waiting for a realistic flight environment for some time now as well. Unfortunately, I do not have a comparable setup, but plan to in about a year, which is about the same time the new version is out. With a new system and a new version of FS, I should be singing similar praises as well.

You will!God Bless! ;)Mitch R.

How about some nice big good-graphics screenshots with FPS counter? :-)

No Problem! I'll do that!Do you just use PRINT SCREEN? :)Mitch R.

Mitch,I am happy that you have found your holy grail. It would please me greatly if you could set your system up as I have detailed in the following post http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho..._id=3793&page=2 and let me know how many FPS you achieve in this (or as close as you can get) situation. If you can score even 15 FPS under such conditions (and I'm genuinely hoping that you can), I'll be calling Dell :)Gary

Gary, it is 6:15 am, and I am onto your request as soon as I type this out.. I'll get back to you right away!Gone.....Mitch R.

Gary, I just came back from your test and with EVERYTHING TOTALLY MAX'ED out on my driver setup, and as well as 8/8 on lights and mipmaps on the sliders in HARDWARE setup---- (and of course EVERYTHING at 100 percent on each slider offered in FS9) I am MOST happy to report to you a constant 35 FPS with 7 A.I planes in view at the gates and others in motion/taxi out to the active.In fact, It's funny that you mention KORD, because I had just landed, in from Toronto and had just finished a taxi to the gate! With heavy real-world downloaded cloud build-up, and with it of course in view, I averaged 55 FPS in flight. When I passed by the heavy cloud cover and up-shots, I went on average in this flight to around 70 FPS.I am going to lock the system down to 30 FPS today and play around with that setting. As I said, I have NEVER had such great performance from any system that I have owned until now.I won't be upgrading, any time soon, LOL!Oh...you said better than 15? Ok...you had better call Dell, ROTFLMBO!Cheers and happy system searching.....Mitch R.

Nice system, pretty similar to mine, but the major difference is the price.Mine is self-built, and I would reckon it is at least 1/2 the price of the Dell box.If you can be bothered it would certainly make finacial sense to build your own.I get at least 35fps in all areas, in the air can rise up to 100+ fps, but I prefer to have my fps locked down to 35.Dan.

Mitch,Just want to check on a few configuration/settings that you have there. Are you running Ultimate Traffic @ 100%? Do you have ground scenery shadows enabled? Clouds, etc at max range? AA and AF @ max?I probably sound sceptical, but one of the main points of the post that I referenced is that under such conditions, CPU seemed to be the main driver (video card settings had negligble effect). I can pull upwards of 200FPS at altitude, but there are definitely conditions that bog the whole show down. Now your 3.4E is top of the line from the Intel camp (excepting the EE), but I owned a P4 @ 2.7 before I jumped ship to the AMD camp, and I wasn't seeing anywhere near your FPS (even taking the scaling difference between the two CPUs into account) and my XP 3200+ was an improvement over what I had. We are talking over a 4X improvement in frame rates here (8 -> 35), suggesting that either something is very wrong with my system configuration or this new range of video cards (6800 / X800) clears a major bottleneck in the FS code architecture. I am not convinced that the P4 Prescott architecture offers that order of magnitude of a perfermance jump (except for room heating factor maybe ;))I'm open to any suggestions / comments.GaryPS. A comparitive screenshot would be good.

Gary,One of the biggest hits I have found is aircraft shadows.When they are displayed on your own plane, then its fine.But as soon as you try to display shadows on 100 AI planes it KILLS fps in a big way.Dan.

Everything is on, Gary. Reflections, Shadows, everything.In FS9, anything that can be clicked on, or adjusted to the 100 percent level, is on my setup.Same with the Omega Drivers. All set to the max in each setting.I just taxied from a KORD gate with four A.I's ahead of me to the active. I had my FPS not locked, and was in the 46 FPS range to the threshold. Just after take off from 09L towards the lake, I climbed to the mid 70's.Cloud cover was average.I'll post a screen shot with the FPS counter on when somebody gives me the steps to do one...lol. Until then, I'm S.O.L on the Screen Shot post.Cheers!Mitch

Are you using a third party aircraft? Activesky?

Hi,Mitch, my name is Tom. Congrats on your new system.I am in the midst of shopping for a new system myself and, after reading your post, gave the Dell website a good look. I looked at the XPS and Dimension 8400. The XPS is truly a fantastic setup - unfortunately, my pocketbook can only go for the 8400 Gamer Ready system. I planned on making some upgrades: 1GB Ram and the 128MB PCI Express x16 ATI Radeon X800 SE graphics card. I don't know a lot about the new graphics cards and wanted to know what you thought of this card.Thanks. Enjoy your new system.:-beerchug Tom

Hi,1. Turn on Frame rate counter with Shift-Z three times or so.2. Get the image you want on the screen.3. Press Alt- Print Screen4. Start a paint program (Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop).5. Choose Paste as New Image (Paste alone works too)6. Crop the image if desired. Now save the image as type JPG.7. In this forum, start writing your message.8. To attach the image, choose "Click here to choose your attachments"9. Click the JPEG Image File radio button.10. Click the Browse button, and find your JPG image.11. If you wish to embed the pic in your message, click that box.12. Click on Upload FileHope this helps,--Tom GibsonCal Classic Propliner Page: http://www.calclassic.comFreeflight Design Shop: http://www.freeflightdesign.comDrop by! ___x_x_(")_x_x___