Just a little bit more.....

[Guest GearUP747]

Ok... this can't be a unique problem...When flying into a large airport, with lots of custom scenery and AI traffic, my flightsimming experience changes into a senior-home slide show.I know I am pushing against and over the limits of my system with my demands (max autogen, max AI traffic, custom mesh, FE2004 and ASV6 clouds, flying with the Level-D 767 or PMDG744, and so on, and so on), but reducing my settings until I have an acceptable frame rate (= anywhere near fluid, so about 10+ fps) just erasses to much of all the beauty FS2004 + addons has to offer. (in my opinion) My systems specs are:- AMD Athlon 2700+ (my MB only supports up to 2800+), slightly overclocked at 2364 MHz.- 1Gb 333MHz DDR RAM- Leadtech GeForce4 Ti4400 128MB graphics card.- 250Gb Maxtor Diamond Plus 10. Best solution would probably be a new computer system, but apart from lacking sufficient funds and approval from the home financial economic comity (aka my wife), I prefer waiting a while until Windows Vista has been released and 64bit, dual core systems (AMD FX series.... drool....) have come to a descent price level (approx US$1000 for a complete system). Also... by that time we will know what we require to run FSX in a descent way. So... I am looking into possibilities to squeeze out some more fps at a relatively small cost.I tried all the tips and tricks of tweaking Windows XP and FS, so no more (relevant) gains in that department. I don't think increasing the amount of RAM's (currently at 1Gb) will help me any more, and with my current motherboard, a processor upgrade will only give me a less than 5% improvement on the processor power, which I believe will not translate into a noticeable increase in framerate.Which leaves me the graphics card...With a newer generation (but not newest) graphics cards becoming either affordable of readily available on the second-hand market, I am wondering if a graphics card update will help me out here in stretching my systems life for about a year. I have always had the impression that FS mostly relies on pure processor power rather than on the force the latest generations of graphics cards have to offer. So my main question is... Will the purchase of a, for instance Geforce 6600GT 256MB or a Radeon X800/X850 256MB (or any other you might think of) give me the improvement I'm looking for?Any ideas or thoughts you might have on this subject would be appreciated. Greetz, Frank:(

[Murmur 3,941]

>Ok... this can't be a unique problem...>When flying into a large airport, with lots of custom scenery>and AI traffic, my flightsimming experience changes into a>senior-home slide show.>I know I am pushing against and over the limits of my system>with my demands (max autogen, max AI traffic, custom mesh,>FE2004 and ASV6 clouds, flying with the Level-D 767 or>PMDG744, and so on, and so on), but reducing my settings until>I have an acceptable frame rate (= anywhere near fluid, so>about 10+ fps) just erasses to much of all the beauty FS2004 +>addons has to offer. (in my opinion)Funny, I consider anything below 30 FPS unacceptable :)Given the in-game settings you use, IMO the performances you get are in line with the characteristics of your configuration (mine is similar).The only advice I can give you is there are many settings that can be lowered to gain performance with barely noticeable loss of detail or eye-candy. Just try and see:.Video-card drivers: I don't know about nVidia, but with ATI drivers you can choose between hi-perf / perf / quality / hi-quality; perf gives better performance with little loss of detail;.With your card, you should set Anti Aliasing to max 2X and Anisotropic Filtering to max 4X; also, don't enable Anti Aliasing via FS9 settings, but only via video-card drivers settings;."Scenery Complexity" is the single setting that most impact performance around airports; set it as low as you can;."Ground Shadows" are nice to see, but it's a paramount FPS eater; disable it;."Mip Maps" need not to be set greater than 4 or 5;."Sight Distance" and "Cloud Draw Distance": two other major FPS eaters; set them to minimum, it's useless to have 100mi visibility if you have 5 FPS;.AI percentage can be lowered without reducing substantially AI traffic: do some experiments;.I don't know about Flight Environment, but Active Sky lets you choose different texture size for the clouds: lower resolutions in DXT format give a big boost in FPS and the quality loss is not much, except for the lowest resolution.As for your main question, yes I think aiming for a second-hand 6600GT or X800 is a good choice, it can give you substantial improvements, but don't expect to have ALL sliders to the max in that case, as well.Marco