AT LAST! I have a smooth FS9 with GOOD graphics AND decent frame rates infairly complex scenery, and large airports. As I'm sure a lot of you have been thru all kinds of trials andtribulations with FS9 I would just like to tell you.... "YES Virginia, there is a Santa Claus". The reason I'm so darned happy about this is because I didn'thave to sell my firstborn in order to do it. ;-) I have, you see; whatin todays FS world is a mid, if not low range computer. By borrowing a LOT of brain power from any number of really GREAT folks here at AVSIM: I've been able to get a flyable Sim out of whatwas a total MESS. I would like to buy each and every one who is a regular contributor here a beer.... OK! two beers :-beerchug . My system is as follows: No name case; No name 350W PS; AMD 3200+ Barton no OC; 1024 Corsair Valu Ram; Saphire 9600XT Video Card; SB PCI 16 Sound card; (EL CHEAPO) Daewoo 19" Mon; Asus A7N8X-X Mobo; No name keyboard and mouse; Now the only addons I have are: FS AUTOSTART...Thanks Ken AEU6 Thanks Mr. Arrington..AND CREW:-lol Loved the pic...glad the"young'uns" git their "Looks" from their Mom tho...JUST KIDDING *:-* FSDzignz L049 "Connie" Absolutely WONDERFUL; Wings Of Power Aircraft set..Xmas Present, just GREAT. Real Air C172..Just Great..It actually sideslips. Some of Chris Willis's WONDERFUL clouds..Installing FSW2004 soon. Now I'm sure that a lot of the fellas with beaucoup addons areprolly saying...what's this FOOL so dam happy about? Well, to venture a guess I'd bet there are LOTS of the 20,000members here who would just like to get the DEFAULT stuff to work. So to the crux of the matter...What made the difference? 1. FS 9.1 patch. 2. SP2 3. Optimizing XP...Black Viper 4. 9600XT instead of FX 5200 5. Omega drivers 6. Reducing power lines and trees in autogen 7. Lowering AGP Aperture to 64MB 8. Finding out that whilst I played around with large AGP Aperture settings, ATI SMARTGART had cut my AGP setting to 4X. These are not in order, I would rank 6-7-8 as the most important. BUT; you say is that makes life GOOOOD? NOPE! I just GREEEEESED 2 landings, one with ** B29 @ KSTL GW104,000 Lb...one with FSDzings Connie @ KJEF 98,000 Lb:-badteeth Hope Ya'll had a GREAT day today...and a BETTER one tomorrow. DN

Yeah great! I'm gonna plan to upgrade my AMD to a 3200+ I thought I had a 2600 and instead I have a 2000 LOL So I think an upgrade would do wonders. I'm glad for you!Rob "Holland&Holland" de Vries http://www.emotipad.com/emoticons/Flying.gif"To go up, pull the stick back. To go down, pull the stick back harder"

My system is similar to yours: same video card, 1 gig of ram, SP2 and FS 9.1. Differences are I'm using the ATI drivers, not sure about the aperture settings. I used the Omega drivers for awhile and then tried to change to the most recent ATI drivers, just to see how they would do. Never could get the newest ATI drivers install to work, so I tried to go back to the Omega drivers, but now they won't install either. Finally went back to an older ATI driver and it would install. Not sure what I goofed up there.FS works pretty well on my machine, except for a stutter every couple minutes or so. I'll look into the things you mentioned that I haven't already done. Thanks for the info!KP

How does one reduce the trees and powerlines in the autogen? And what's the difference between doing that or just moving your slider within FS9 down a notch?

I found the original post regarding the power lines, by dillo, it istopic #215187. I could not find the info on reducing the tree file sizebut believe it consisted in reducing down from 512X512 to a lower number. I,m in Denver right now so I can't check my setup, but I'm sure thatsome of our "Scenery Savvy" guys can tell where to find the folders forthe trees. I searched for the original post but couldn't find it forthe life of me. Dropping the autogen slider will reduce ALL autogen whereas thesemods affect only the files in question. Hope you can use this to good advantage. Denny

Dropping the slider only reduces the amount of autogen that is present. What Denny is talking about is actually changing the size of the files from 512x512 to 256x256 which cuts the size of the file in half. Bart Dylkiewicz has made alot of resized textures which have helped me very much and I don't see any real difference in quality only performance. Do a search on his name in the file library and look at the different packages he has made I have installed them all and I am getting a very smooth sim now. This is an excerpt from his cloud textures that just about says it all "Texture was resized from 512X512 to 256X256, cutting filesize from 1,33MB to 85KB. Resized texture does NOT make clouds look smaller in size. After installing it I was able to run 3D clouds with maximum weather settings." Make sure you back up the originals and try them out one by one, if you don't like them then simply replace them with the originals.Good Luck.

Can you dump your FS9.cfg ?thanks