I everybody :-)I have one small question to you guys. I own a Dell Dimension PC. round about 1 1/2 years old with an ATI9800xt card in it.I have 2 Gigs of ram but it seems the card is to old.What card for you buy to give FSX a boost ????Thanks a lot for your help !carsten

This is truly a hard one to answer, ONLY because we are on the verge of a new DX (10) release.FSX was designed to run with DX10 and VISTA.The first DX10 cards will be very, very, expensive, and as some say, will be wattage hogs!The second generation will most likely be what most of us will go for. Less power to run them, and more reasonably priced.If you can, I'd wait and put that money you want to spend into a second generation DX10 card.If you can't wait, then you can save some hard cash on a high-end DX9 (current crop) by waiting until the first DX10's come out. ATI is already 'quietly' discounting their DX9 mid to high-end cards so I imagine, they won't be stuck with them.DX10 promises to be a MAJOR upgrade to the DX franchise.Cheers!Mitch R.

Hi :)Don't buy a new graphics card yet ....... you may be disappointed! Wait until DirectX 10 is released and then look at your options :)

I have to agree with the above, i have an x1900xt 512mb and fsx runs like a three legged dog whatever settings i try (and tweaks)I would wait for very carefully done benchmarks before i bought anything.Having said that i feel the calling of a g80 (nvidia dx10 due on Nov 8th)However i would be very surprised (pleasantly) if it improved fsx at this time.

Another thing to consider is that if your computer is one and a half years old then then it is likely that you have an agp card. Any upgrade to a dx10 card in the future will also require an upgrade of the motherboard to accomodate the newer PCI Express slot. Untill last week I was also using the ATI9800XT but I decided to upgrade my card. I was limited to an agp card as well because I want to wait untill the second generation DX10 cards before I do a major system upgrade. In the end I got a good deal on a HIS ATI Radeon X1650 Pro ICEQ 512MB DDR2 TV-Out/DVI AGP card. I have since heard that the X1950 PRO has just been released in an AGP version. not sure what the price of that will be though. I got mine from overclockers.com. check out this link for some ideas.http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/ATI...hics_Cards.html

Thanks friends for your answers.I thought that waiting would be the best "solution".If i have to buy a new board to use dx10 i think i will have some probs. maybe those dell systems have their "own" boards and i can't replace the current one with a new no dell board !?This means i need to buy a new computer.... Shi...

Just to muddy the waters. The posters above are only partly right. FSX is designed for Vista, yes. But not DX10, DX9.0L which is also included with Vista.The development team have made it plain in these forums that they developed on DX9 for DX9, and by implication that means that the promisde DX10 compatibility will NOT come from installing an expensive DX10 card as soon as they are released, but from a patch that is to be issued to include DX10 compatibility. That also has been made plain by the ACES teamThere is no timescale on that patch, so to continue to enjoy FSX in the meantime you might actually want to consider an upgrade to carry you over.Allcott

>FSX was designed to run with DX10 and VISTA.I believe thats a myth. Its also not yet clear what if any performance improvement DX10 Hardware will bring.Read what Phil Taylor (PM for Graphics and Terrain in the Aces Studio)has to say about that:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...d=361379&page=1

I have a 9800Pro 128MB married to an Athlon XP2000 (and before that it was a ti4200). I can get a decent experience out of fsx with some well controlled and tame sliders, but I think a graphics card upgrade is a simple step I can take. I've little place to go with a socket A motherboard. If I replace that, the whole thing becomes much more drastic. I'd rather wait for 9-12 months to see how dual core and DX10 technology pan out for fsx and make a major hardware upgrade decision at that point.Most likely I'm looking at a 7600GT 256MB:- Uses less power than the 9800. 75W v. 51W- Has more memory. I've monitored my flying with the memstatus utility and I'm always somewhere between 128 and 256MB. I hope to get some kind of benefit from that.- Has a more powerful graphics processor. Other game benchmarks show an improvement over 9800. We'll have to see what difference that may make to fsx.I'm not going any higher than the 7600 because I think my CPU would be too much the limiting factor.Worst case is the card turns out to be off little benefit. Then perhaps I'll just sell it on ebay and I doubt I'd take much of a loss.

There are 2 issues here:1)what graphics card2)what I said about DX10.You have to decide if you are going to wait for DX10 or not. If the answer is not, the fastest DX9 card with the most memory ( 512m at least ) you can afford is going to give you the biggest bang for the buck. After that fastest CPU and fastest RAM you can get is also going to deliver a good bang/buck ratio. DDR 800 *is* going to give you a big advantage over DDR 400. So the motherboard chipset is a big factor in the performance question.As far as DX10, I said it was too early to tell and not that there is none. Certainly from the API side alone the design of DX10 is such that runtime costs are reduced. And the enhancements to existing features like instancing ( addition of texture arrays ) mean they are eminently more usable for FSX. How well the geometry shader and other brand-new features perform is the open question. Why does that matter? The artistic impression screenshot of Yosemite Lake shows waves and foam due to environmental effects ( weather ) and one way to generate that effect us to use the geometry shader to enhance or amplify the geometry in that local area. How performant the GS unit is determines how much amplification we can perform.So stay tuned for DX10 and dont immediately discount its benefits. As with most things there are going to be areas where it delivers strongly and areas where the benefit isnt as strong.

I just bought a 7600GT w/512 megs video memory for my AGP computer and I'm quite happy with it. However while using the MemStatus utility I find I've never needed over 220 Megs video memory so I would suggest a good AGP card with 256 Megs memory and save a few bucks.AMD 64 3000+ 1 gig memory7600GT w/512 megs

Who makes a 7600GT 512 MB? I thought only 7600GS is available with 512MB.

ACES wants to be safe and sure before they get doubly hit with complaints when DX10 comes into play. But go ahead and read Toms' hardware guide article on DSX10. The technology seems to be made for FSX! It fits FSX needs like a glove. Read on.http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/10/18/the_new_graphics/Read into some of the lines such as: "Processes that could take several full passes of the vertex and pixel shaders can now be accomplished by circumventing the vertex shader. The object can be recalled and altered in the geometry shader for the next frame." Or "The strongest points of Direct X 10 are the promises of lower overhead per object and the new rendering component called the geometry shader. What does all of this mean to the layman? In short, the system will be able to render objects faster and more efficiently. This is a good thing, as games will be able to incorporate this feature to give you more frames per second. That is, until the game developers incorporate more objects into a scene"ACES does not want to have their foot in their mouth until its truely tested. Thus they try to keep our expectation low. They were going to use this title to show case DX10. So why in the world would they not use above technologies mentioned in the article?

Problem is that he has an AGP port. He can't use DX10 cards

What card did you have before the 7600GT, and what difference did you feel it made to fsx?