I am presently using the demo that has the ultra lite. I get fairly decent frame rates with my present system. (Pent IV 3.2) Will I get about the same performance with the full retail version. I am hoping I can get by untill I build a new system when DX 10 and Vista come out.Thanks Chuck

From my reading of the posts here in the past couple of weeks I think most of us have found that the retail version is a little worse on framerates than was Demo2. In my case the reduction was about 25%. In any event, the FPS won't be any better in the retail version and I would assume that there will be some drop as compared to the demo.DougEdited 'cause I can't spel

I did a direct comparison between Demo 2 and the retail, using four scenarios at the demo scenery area.Two scenarios were faster and two slower. The averaged result was that the retail was 1% faster, though of course that's well within the margin of error. Most likely there's no significant change in the retail as far as frame rates are concerned.However, there is a big BUT! The demo scenery is pretty sparse and is mostly water. Most scenery areas will therefore give significantly lower frame rates and the figure of 25% lower (in the other post) is probably a good guide. I've applied several tweaks and adjusted the sliders. If I stay away from cities and large airports frame rates are perfectly usable (15 to 20) and the scenery can be truly spectacular, light years ahead of FS9. With a 3.2 Pentium (similar to mine) you should get similar results. But I do have 2 Gb of RAM and that probably helps a lot. Whatever else you do, be sure to set the texture resolution to 1 meter (maximum). The ground textures are simply stunning and they remain sharp even when skimming the ground.Overall, and despite the frame rate issues, I think FSX is superb. I hope you have a similar experience!Best regards, Chris

Chris Thank You for your detailed explanation. It is greatly appreciatedChuck

Indeed Chris. My 25% reduction was based on flying over primarily land terrain, not water. And I agree, FSX has done a superb job with the ground textures. It's a VFR delight.Doug

Hi there Chris I would like to add one more suggestion in addition to having 2Gigs of ram and that's to have a "clean" hard drive due to the number and size of all those ground textures that have to be sent across the bus to ones video card. A clean non fragged hard drive is very important. In Fact if you can afford one get something like a Raptor drive and install FSx on it, that will cut down even more on the loading times for all the above files. Dan Martin

Have you also tested the demo with the Caribbean landing mission? If you can get decent FPS on that, consider getting FSX for the missions alone for now which are alot of fun. I've used several of the helpful tweaks listed on the forum as well as have autogen set to sparse and find the missions look nice and run well (fps generally 16-20, often stays at 20). No going back to FS9 for me now, but I intend to upgrade in early 2007 to a PC with Vista/Directx10.CraigP3.0, 1Gb Ram, X800 256MB