> About a month or so ago I replaced my old AT X800XT (256MB) with an ATI X1900XTX (512MB) and experienced a 35% increase in frames.(and other posts like it...)Keep in mind that you are not only upgrading your video memory capabilities, but also the GPU's performance abilities as well.While a performance benefit is a performance benefit no matter how you slice it, I think it's worth noting that it's possible that not all of your improvements can be pinned on the back of more video memory.Anyone remember the days of the old silicon graphics video cards that had extra VRAM sockets on them?!-Greg

Did you have a look at the autogen buildings? After doing all the user tweaks I can get an average 20 FPS while bushflying but the large cities still eat up my framerate.Might this be caused by the reflection they build into the sky scrapers and other buildings and if so could it be removed?It won't do me a lot of good though as I have to return my copy today or I won't get my money back. I will be lurking in the FS-X forum to see the progress made with the usertweaks. Mayybe we can make it run accepable in the end.

Try out geforce 7950 gx2 with 1 gb ddr3 memory and over clock it. You wont be disappointed!

What is the FR when you are flying in city area and what are your settings? I am planning to upgrade too.

wow. What do you do for living? So in other words, extra memory on video card helps with loading times but not frame rates. right?

Thats a single card SLI type solution. Already been told that SLI doesn't do anything for FSX.

I am really surprised and confused when folks say that water in FSX has a hit on their FPS.For me, I don't believe it makes much/any difference where the slider is. Si I have left it at to the extreme right. Hmmm.... Dang I can't get to my machine now. I need to double check this again.Are there anyone out there for whom the water sliders doesn't make much difference? Manny

Yes that's pretty much right on. Extra video memory will help with stutters more than anything, as the textures needed for new areas of a scene coming into view (ie: in a turn, or high speed flight) will have a greater chance of already being in VRAM, and won't need to be fetched from your main memory, or worse, the hard drive. More video memory won't give you any great fps boost though, unless you make the jump from say a 128mb card to a 512 or larger, it'll mostly just make the sim smoother. Your GPU and CPU have the final say on framerate, whichever happens to be the bottleneck. Still, given the size of the all the textures as they come out of the box in FSX (huge), it doesn't really matter how much vram you have, FSX will use it all up. A 1GB videocard might stand a chance of having everything needed in vram, but I doubt even a 512mb card could handle it all really. Stutters can show up whenever it needs to drop a texture out of vram and load a new replacement. The speed of your main memory, and bus will also have an effect on how bad that stutter will be, as will the size of the texture swap in question. But those are just texture stutters, there are lots of other areas of the sim that can cause them.You asked what I do. Well, I'm a photographer now. Got out of game development last year, quite happily. Reasonable hours, get to work outside a lot, no bosses, have time for a life (and FS), and actually get to sleep! haha. Do have some empathy for the poor folks at Aces though. For the last four months, I can absolutely guarantee you that 90% of them were living on M&Ms and Redbull, sleeping on the floor at work, and probably saw their families fewer than a handful of times. At the moment I hope they're all on vacation in warm places trying to forget the drain they've just been through. Ah the memories. ;)