I've been flying FSX Deluxe for almost a week now and after an initial sticker (read frame) shock, I've been able to adapt fairly well and am getting happier with what I'm seeing. For example, I've now been able to put Mesh Resolution and Texture Resolution full right (water low 2.x) along with the other settings I've detailed in the threads the last week and get nice fps at KSEA. Autogen still off though in the city. Interesting, I did some bush flying around Funter Bay Alaska with full autogen and full water effects with a very nice 15 fps except when I approached PANRS and the town there. Nevertheless it was beautiful.Ok, I wanted to say some good things about FSX. Here's the bad. What in the heck is it with Light Bloom? It is a HUGE frame sucker. Whenever turned on it gives a significant hit to frames. I've simply left it off. Is there not some optimization needed, can be implemented, whatever, to this? This may be one of those things dependent on video card capabilities but I don't know.Any help would be appreciated here.P4 3.6 GHZ HT, 1 gig ram, ATI X800XT 256 mb PCIe video card

Apparently, bloom requires another rendering pass to accomplish, hence the significant frame rate hit. Note that bloom isn't enabled even when setting the highest global setting of "ultra high", indicating that we should be considering this a future video card feature rather than something we should expect to run out of the box with current graphics hardware.Gary

Ok thanks for that Gary. I can certainly sacrifice it at this point just to keep some of the other features at a workable level (such as water effects).

sigh. isn't your system considered fairly high end?

I don't think so. I am building a high end system as we speak. Here are the parts I have gotten so far.CPU: Core 2 duo E6600. BFG GForce 7900gtxI plan to over clock the E6600 to high 3 ghz (possibly 4 ghz) with water cooling. I can build this system for around $1000 us.

Your system is =very= high end when compared to my Toshiba 17" Laptop and Desktop which I just purchased a year ago. Certainly will not upgrading either for a couple of years.

>I don't think so. I am building a high end system as we>speak. Here are the parts I have gotten so far.>>CPU: Core 2 duo E6600. >BFG GForce 7900gtx>>I plan to over clock the E6600 to high 3 ghz (possibly 4 ghz)>with water cooling. I can build this system for around $1000>us.Given the lack of dual core support, I am not certain a dual-core is better than a 3.5 single core (which, by the way, had hyper-threading too).

Len, at the AVSIM conference, Adam said that Light Bloom required the scene to be rendered THREE TIMES! Hence, the major FPS hit.Brian S.