I miss the traffic and the FPS-friendly autogen-scenery from FS9. On my recently upgraded system which is an Intel Core2Duo E6700 (2x2,6 GHz) with 2 GB RAM and a Radeon X1900XTX with 512 MB RAM, I get acceptably smooth frame rates with traffic and autogen off, but all other sliders to the right (but without anti-aliasing, at a screen resolution of 1680x1050). I think that all other features (except autogen and traffic) have only minor influence on my FPS. If I turn aircraft traffic on (by "on" I mean more than 50 - 100%), I get an irregular frame rate loss, that means, my frame rate irregularly decreases to 4 fps at some random times during flight for some seconds. When I use it with the settings from above, it is about 14 - 20 fps normally, test area is Monchengladbach, Germany (I don't want to know how it looks like, if I changed to KJFK...). To me, these effects are quite annoying, because I really like the air traffic in FS9. I do not think, that road traffic is a necessary feature, but air traffic is a feature that I do not like to miss from my simulation. When I was flying in FSX around Dusseldorf, Germany, I never saw a takeoff or landing of any AI aircraft with traffic set at around 15% (this is a value that is acceptable to my FPS). Therefore I don't regard this setting as "traffic on".Another "feature" in FSX is that every time, I look at a forest, my frame rate goes below 15 fps (from initially about 20 - 30), even if traffic is turned off. How can it be possible, that trees, even if I use the least autogen density, decrease my performance by 50%?I think, certain elements in FSX are programmed in a very weird, non-effective and unstable way, I also had bad experiences with the logbook feature, because it sometimes causes a crash the startup of FSX, so I have to delete the LOGBOOK.BIN.Generally, I prefer using FS9 + AddOns to FSX, because FS9 runs really well on my system providing a good traffic even on smaller or less known airports, whereby FSX seems to be a good opportunity for making some amazing screenshots, but in my opinion, a patch that increases stability and at least the usability of the traffic feature, is more than necessary to make it a usable simulation!In FSX, I get frame rates of ~15 FPS even on certainly high settings, but 15 FPS are not enough, if they regularly decrease by 50% during the simulation! These FPS losses do even make it difficult to adjust my head position in the VC, because FSX loses FPS when using this feature, resulting in stopping head rotation slightly later than planned.I think, FS9 is the best opportunity at the moment, unless you like having a 15 GB "Flight Simulator X Deluxe" that looks more like FS98 than FS9 (even on my system I cannot avoid this effect, if I want to use it as flight simulator, not as screenshot utility).

I missed the RealAir Marchetti SF260 until about an hour ago! :7 L.Adamson