Hi GuysI reformatted my pc and took the oppertunity to clean up my FS9 and try out the new patch...I know I know - dumb idea. Everything was working fine, acceptable blurries, nice frames, no stutter and now... OUCH!!!Blurries are back with a vengance, the frames drop and increase erratically and now I have some dreaded stutters. Ok lets start where I reloaded XP. Clean install after format and then loaded Service Pack 2. No problem there. Then loaded the latest nForce platform drivers from Nvidia for the board. No problem there. Then loaded latest Catalyst drivers from Ati (4.11). No problem there either and 3DMark is rock solid where it's always been.Then loaded FS...and my heart sank. Loaded FS, then loaded patch then loaded the no cd thingy. Still ouch!I'm wondering if any of you have reloaded FS similar to me and know what settings to choose both in FS's display area and Ati's 3D tab in the pc display settings.Any help would be greatly appreciated.Regards,RobFAJS

Greetings Rob!What performed miracles for me in a similar situation, was reinstating my OLD (pre-patch) display.cfg (you'll find it in BACKUPS file).Might work for you too. Good luck!Jaap Verduijn.

i know its simple,but if the only variable you've changed is to xp2, then make sure it hasn't reset itself to take over everything. if so, reset xp to only the necessary processes. i'm pretty sure your problem is more complex, but sometime checking the basics saves time, i've been victim to the thinking complex when something's just unpluggged syndrome more than once.i found when i installed the xp2 service pack i had to turn off a bunch of unnecessary stuff all over again, but i'm not running the fastest system to begin with.good luck

Did you install the chipset drivers from Nvidia *first*, before installing any other drivers like Catalyst etc?You shouldn't get stutters or blurries with a system like that, patch or no patch. Blurries should dissapear if you pick 8x Anisotropic Filtering. If you get good framerate (like 30+) but it still stutters, try setting the max FPS limit to about 25.

Well, in my own experience the problem isn't complex at all. It is simply the FS patch that introduces a display.cfg file that in many cases is not the optimum one for a persons set-up. As I wrote earlier: get rid of the display.cfg that the FS patch placed on your machine, and use the one from your BACKUPS file instead, that is your original one before you installed the FS patch. Worked for me on several installs and re-installs. And it doesn't do anything to degrade the functionality of the FS patch.Jaap Verduijn.

Very unlikely it

hi rob, after a good week of going what you're going through i just now and i mean now as i write this, just got my machine back up and running like it used to. in a nut shell, a horror story! one thing that i'm sure you already know is to restart your machine after EACH change you make in the settings in fs9 AND your graphic card as well as any other changes you make anywhere else. restart after each change. one thing that helped me was to uninstall fs9 and the update then restart the computer. then defrag and restart. then install fs9 and restart again. defrag and restart. add update and restart. be sure all drivers are already installed before you begin this, if you decide to try it. alot of starting and restarting and defragging but it did help me. good luck!!! william

Thanks for the help guys.I know now that I'm in for the long haul on this one.Have tried most of what you guys say *barring uninstalling and doing this again* but I was a tad confused about installing the previous display settings from a backup. This was a clean install of Windows, followed by XP SP2, followed by the nvidia nforce2 drivers, followed by ATi ctalyst and then, once everything was running stable (tested with 3Dmark) I installed FS9 ans straight after that the patch. Would it still have created a backup display.cfg?Also - any recommended settings within Fs9 that might help? I tried going from 16X AA within Ati's control panel to 8x but it didnt make a difference...Thanks again for the help so far.Rob

rob, do u have direct x 9C installed? i know all that restarting stuff is a pain but it worked for me somehow. i bought a new 256 meg video card last week but didn't notice any difference in performance at all compared to my 128 meg card so i returned it and bought a stick of 512meg of ram. got a friend to install it and my old video card and i had BIG problems! stutters, ctds, lockups, everything. it got worse, everytime i went online to get new drivers my machine would ctd. then i couldn't get online at all. out of memory error. reformat and reinstall xp more than once and fs9. xp wouldn't install. called microsoft, everything. back to the store to get them to reinstall it. turned out to be the ram they sold me was bad. up and running now but with stutters. after defragging, restarting, reinstalling fs9, restarting, etc, it's finally running good. that seemed to do something right. good luck anyway. william

"(...) Would it still have created a backup display.cfg? (...)"Yes.Jaap Verduijn.