Craig,Fair enough. But what works means to one person differs from another. For me what works is... with Ultimate Traffic set atleast 50% and with Ultimate terrain and high resolution Mesh and photo sceneries and detailed addon airports.For me (and I am sure there are others like me) making the default Flight sim run is not "Working for me".Based on that context some of us post here with the reasons and concerns. Thats what this forum is for I would like to think.And when a new sim is in the corner.. A clinical diognosis and discussions about systems and performance are valid and I would consider very helpful posts.One can either ignore such posts or post pointing to the errors in others observations/conclusion. Not Ad hominem attacks or being sarcasting towards other posters.Is allManny

Hey Manny, Don't want to get in a pissin contest. We both want the same thing. It just seemed to me that the approach of "I can make this work" and when I do I'm gonna post my results was a nice change from the simple one liners like "frame rates are horrible" on my new core-duo with no qualifiers like the exact settings. If I sounded sarcastic I didn't mean it to come accross like that so I stand corrected. Craig

As others have said, I can only imagine how abysmal the fps will be around big cities like New York, LA, Chicago, Dallas etc...If we are getting 10-15 fps @ St. Maarten I would expect to see fps to the tune of 5-10 in large city areas with large airports. The demo would have been nice if it had included a major area to guage performance rather than a relatively sparce one.

I think the point being made from most of the posts above (and elsewhere)is that for the same settings on the same system, some are getting better fps and others worse.Hopefully there is an obvious explanation. I am rather woried that the release version will give me worse than Demo 1 or the beta for reasons I can't fathom.

Craig,Thanks for that. And I do not diagree with you there... helpful information is better than simply whining.;)Manny

Would someone be so kind as to check the link to this new download?I started downloading last night and it was creeping along at 6k but this morning it appears to be dead. I just need to know if it is my equipment or provider.ThanksMuchBob

Manny:You are one of the people that I am hoping will go thru the process I outlined. I have followed with great interest your progress on building and testing your new machine. I almost felt like I was in the room with you when you built it. You were very generous to download and run the benchmarks I requested.I suspect that possibly different FSX features work better on different machines, and with a little luck, maybe we'll have a bit of a headstart on where to set the sliders on the day of release.

Beerman:Maybe it won't make as much difference as you think. The three worst hits for me are the cars, boats and autogen. So if you scale those three back, perhaps it won't matter whether it is a large city or not. A pleasant surprise was that the airport vehicles and AI planes didn't seem to hut me much.

Guys I set the frame rate slider and I got 13 FPS at Juliana Airport.I set the slider to unlimited and my frames jumped to 21 !And setting autogen to none made my FPS jump to 40...setting it to sparse gives me about 21. That is a 50% decrease, which is too much of an impact.I still get FPS as low as 14 in some areas which for me is unflyable.So basically its the frame rate slider, and autogen which are having a HUGE impact on frames.

I used your template for a test run. AMD64 3500 evga GeForce 7900GT KO (91.47)drivers 1G Corsair DDR400 Final Settings:1280 X 1024 X 32 (default monitor setting)Target Frame Rate - UnlimitedGlobal Texture Resolution - Very HighAdvanced Animation - checkFilter - Anisotropic (Application controlled in Nvidia settings)AA - checkedAircraft: (Ultralite)3-D Virtual CockpitHigh Resolution 3-D checkedaircraft casts shadows on ground -checkedScenery:LOD-LargeMesh Complexity: 100Mesh Resolution - 1mTexture Resolution - 1 mWater Effects - high 1.xland detail - checkedScenery complexity - SparseAutogen Density - NormalGround Scenery Shadows - CheckedSpecial Effects Details-HighWeather:Cloud Draw - 100mThermal Visualization - noneDetailed Clouds - CheckedCloud Coverage Density - HighTraffic:Airline - 100%GA - 100%Airport Vehicles - MaxRoad- 0%Ships - 100%Leisure Boats - 0%With these settings I saw (from what I could see) a low of around18 at takeoff to a high anywhere from the 30's well up into the 60's.I will run another with different slider settings as soon as I get a chance. I have found out that the water quality setting has a significant impact on framerates. I also need to get FRAPS for a moredefinitive framerate monitor.Craig

Chris using ur settings I got 60FPS!That is a big jump!

Craig:If you run FRAPS, run the frame counter in FSX also....I never have seen the same readings. It sounds like your FPS was pretty good...any stutters?

Didn't see any stutters with those settings. I'm going to try the same settings and throw in gray and rainy and see what happens. Craig

I'm still disappointed - I have a more than decent system, and the program still feels buggy and slow (Conroe clocked at 3.0 gig, 2 gig of RAM, and 512MB X1900XT)2 questions:(1) If you use s to change view, what happens if you say press it 7 times in quick succession ? Do you get like I do, a sea of water, with objects in the water ? Then the textures start filling in slowly .. ?(2) Why do the planes look so "un-clean" compared to FS2004 ones ... the fancy reflections on the aircraft make them almost look like they are dithered into less colours - do you know the effect I mean ?I've still got it on pre-order, just not as impressed as I thought I'd be.Mark.

This should do it: http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...52868&mode=fullDoug