I'm running AEU7. I have a Pent 4 3.0 ghz. I have some studder but I blame part of that on an increased pan rate. I also have active camera and use auto start. I wasn't happy with the fly by mode because I had major studders. I got a clue from someone to turn down my sound card acceleration. It was set to full acceleration, so I turned it down to standard acceleration and the major studders disappeared in the fly by mode. I don't really know what sound card acceleration does but there isn't much difference to me. Try it. I do know I can run max water effects now with the Golden Eagles squadron effects files. I couldn't before with full sound card acceleration without major major studders.

Funny that this thread came back up, I installed AE7 a few weeks ago for the first time and due to the majorly increased texture sizes and formats, had severe stutters and pauses. I then took most of the major airport building textures, resized them and changed the formats and no more stutters and the appearance is greatly improved. Even though it's not what Chris wanted, I'm thankful for the new looks!Regards, MichaelKDFWhttp://www.calvirair.com/mcpics/mcdcvabanner.jpgCalVirAir International

Hey buddy, how've you been? It's nice you see you're still cranken' them out! And I thought you left us for good. It goes to show that once you get into simming, you're in it for life :)

Something important I just learned on my system, maybe addresses the long pauses seen by some contributors to this thread. I too have cut down texture sizes, but still experienced 10 sec random pauses.This has driven me nuts for the past 4 months or so, and was not limited to being at an airport, so it wasn't AEU7. I discovered earlier that a 128MB card may experience texture update issues causing blurry resolution, and I fixed this with a 256MB video card. But even with that I still saw long pauses that I couldn't eliminate.I have a GeForce 6800 Ultra video card, 256MB (from MSI), and the mainboard is an MSI Neo2 Platinum running an Athlon64-FX53 with 4GB memory. A big system, shouldn't have pauses for almost anything. But I discovered there's a lot about this topic on the MSI forum, and after trying new drivers and BIOS and FS texture sizes without result, I found that turning OFF AGP Fast Write (using the BIOS interface at boot) eliminates the pauses. There is no obvious performance effect, other than elimination of the pauses. (Disclaimers: Of course this may not be the case for other system configs or manufacturers, and if you're not comfortable with your BIOS for heaven's sake please ignore this.)I post here because there may be several causes of large pauses. So this is something you might try if all the texture tweaks don't eliminate the pauses, and if the pauses you see are for many seconds. Sorry if this seems like a hardware post, it's about the BIOS which is software, tho, and seemed maybe relevant to the problem attributed to textures...Regards -- Dick Bixler