Now that I think of it, there was an explanation about sound studders on one of the ACES blogs. I don't have the link. Maybe someone else does?

Steve Lacey made mention of the subject in his Nov. 17 posting: http://www.steve-lacey.com/blogarchives/2005/11/ Also see his post on the "Blurries" from Nov. 2.Greg

That post is very informative. I am just about to get radar contact 4. The whole idea of sound shutter in FS9 makes me concerned.jason

I have a Dell Dimension 8100, 1.7ghz, 768 megs ram, Geforce FX5600 Ultra, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card. Not state of the art! In addition to using Ken Salter's FSAutoStart, and Black Viper's tweaks, check out this thread:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...d=425&mode=fullThis is one of the links for the PCI latency thread. It worked for me, but as always, your mileage may vary. Good Luck!

Two thoughts on this:First, make sure you have the disk indexing service stopped (can do this with FSAutoStart). If left on, every few minutes it does a bunch of disk thrashing in the background.The other thing is to manually set the PCI latency for the 6600GT board to 128, your Audigy to 64, and 32 for everything else. Seems that the nVidia drivers normally set the latency to 256 for the vid board, making it a PCI resource hog to exclusion of everything else. I use a freeware tool called LtcyCfg2 to set the latency. Not sure where to find it any more.I know this works well with my AGP 6800 Ultra. Not sure how PCI Express differs w/r/t PCI bus latency configuration.RegardsBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V L-300Santiago de Chile

Thank you for your input.I used that latency tool to check my system when I got it. Everything it pretty much set to zero or a very low setting (don't quite remember) as default. I know what you were talking about there though since I used to use that latency tool to adjust for my old AGP card.Good thought on the indexing service...I'll have to check how to stop it.Thanks!JasonEDIT...ok just checked by right clicking HD and go properties. It confirmed that I have unchecked "allowing index servicing..." for my drive C. So if that's how indexing is stopped then it's not what's causing my problem.

Better, probably, to go into Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Services, and check that indexing service is stopped or disabled. I recommend you stop the service in FSAutoStart before running FS9.Also, a good technique is to run task manager on top of FS9 with the CPU utilization visible...look for processes that spike CPU usage coincident with the stutters. I've tracked a couple problems that way.Also, not a bad idea to have a firewall that will flag a hidden process running on the PC trying to call out every few minutes...like a lot of DDoS bots do.Good luck!Bob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-V L-300Santiago de Chile

Hi Jason,You know I apologize for not seeing your post earlier. I had run into a similar issue not too long ago. I found two tools that helped me tremendously to figure out what was going on on my machine that would cause stutters. I have those same products installed in my FS9. And my machine is close to your setup, minus the 6600GT.Now when using these tools remember Windows has its own things going on in the background and the tools will show this activity, however I used them to track down utilities or programs that should not be running, or that were supposedly stopped.The tools? FileMon and RegMon from www.sysinternals.com. I was getting irritated after running 'EnditAll' confirming that all my unwanted programs were stopped but still got stutters. In using the Filemon utility, I found a MSN process was continuously running at exactly the point I got stutters, it was the MSN weather toolbar add-on for me. Went into my Task Manager, and there it was still running in my processes. Killed it and...stutters gone, or at least for the most part.Now I don't reccomend going into your system and hacking up any programs you see running, research those processes running and see if they can be readily killed without making the system unstable or unusable. This may not find a solution to your stutters, but may be of a small bit of use to you.[hr color=#000000][table border=0" width="98%" id="table1" height="4" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="2][td width=500]Jason CYOO - Formerly MYNN[br /]General Aviation Fan[br][/b]P4 3,2Ghz, 1GB Ram, FX5900 128MB, XP SP2.[br /][br /]

Jason,I also apologize for not responding early on in your thread. I am curious as to what happens when you fly with no clouds? Same issue?If not, read on....FS2004 will periodically draw 3-d clouds around the edge of the cloud draw radius as the aircraft moves forward in the 3-d world. This can cause a pronounced falloff in fps for a few seconds until the cycle is complete. Depending on your other settings, including cloud draw distance, you may or may not notice the issue.One way to see this is to set up a deck of 3-d clouds at the airport KMFR (Medford). Take off to the south and look right. As you cross the southern threshold of the runway, you should notice a dropoff in fps, then it will return to normal.This is normal behavior for the sim and goes unnoticed by most people unless you have add-ons or AI traffic that causes the baseline fps to be lower. You've already received good advice on checking for external factors (I use filemon and regmon myself, especially when installing new programs--they're two very useful tools). I wanted to add mention of this one internal chore FS2004 uses to keep the sky "pretty."-John

Hi John & Jason,Thank you guys very much for your indepth input. Jason I'll sure check out the ultilities you mentions and use them to determine if there is anything running at the same time that competes with the sim on system resources. Altough I doubt if I will really find anything since I tighten up the running processes with fsautostart a lot. I even stop explorer.exe...that may be stupid to do. :)John I think you are right because I think the more there are clouds, the more noticeably the periodic shutters happen. I use F1 FE2004 265bit DXT clouds and my cloud setting is 100% 3D cloud and max coverage and draw distance is 40 miles. I wouldn't be willing to lower those settings.According to what you said John I think that's just how FS works in terms of drawing clouds. Is there any suggestion you can make on improving the situation? Maybe going to a lower res. set of textures?...which means I'll probably have to ditch Flight Environment and use AS6 textures.Thank you.Jason Zhang

Hi again Jason,The cloud redraw cycle happens regardless of the textures. I've never noticed a change in performance during the cycle in spite of my using some low res textures, but I have a much slower system than yours. Your draw distance isn't that far off of mine (I use 30 miles), but the difference between a cloud draw distance of 30 and 40 miles more than doubles the area that clouds are drawn in and thus doubles the amount of clouds that have to be drawn.I've learned to live with the cycle and it's seldom I notice it today. In the flight levels, I don't often notice any drops in fps, being so far above the ground the fps relative to the ground movement below can fall pretty low before I catch any serious degradation. Since the whole process is over after just a few seconds, it makes it even harder to catch. Limiting the number of cloud layers you display and their thickness helps. Some weather add-ons allow this or you can manually adjust your weather, especially at your arrival and departure points, to optimize frames and performance at takeoff and landing.-John

Glad I could add a little to the discussion. Although I think John is much closer to the real issue you are seeing.[hr color=#000000][table border=0" width="98%" id="table1" height="4" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="2][td width=500]Jason CYOO - Formerly MYNN[br /]General Aviation Fan[br][/b]P4 3,2Ghz, 1GB Ram, FX5900 128MB, XP SP2.[br /][br /]

"but the difference between a cloud draw distance of 30 and 40 miles more than doubles the area that clouds are drawn in and thus doubles the amount of clouds that have to be drawn"Ha that's simple math...why didn't it occur to me before. I prefer 40 miles because I set max visibility to 40 miles in my ASV, so I thought the far edge of the cloud layers can blend into visibility...Maybe it's worth trying 30 miles and see what that does to the shutters. I think my max numbers of layers is set to 3 in ASV but I set my layer thickness high, maybe I should try lowering that. I also did a test flight without using ASV but the default "building storm" in FS9. I can't say for sure but I think the shuttering problem wasn't there on that particular flight. Do different weather engines draw cloud layers differently? Well by no means am I indicating that ASV is causing shutters. It's a great addon to FS. It was just an observation out of a single and short test flight.Thank you guys again for your continued attention.Jason