Just as an observation, and I know that many have commented before, but I thought it worth sharing. Playing around with the Demo still (FSX for Xmas!): with the shader settings set to level 2.0 via RivaTuner, the following are indicative fps that I was getting (with frames limited to 25):water set to mid x2 - 11.5 - 12.5 (reflections present)water set to low x2 - 19.0 - 20.0 (no reflections but still nice)water set to high x1 - approx 25 (however water yuk - worse than FS9)Other settings were fairly high, including Autogen on Dense/Very Dense, having applied some of the texture resizing tweaks. Other tweaks I don't think work on the demo.Guess summary is that, with my AMD 2.4 Mhz Athlon, FX5900XT card (128 mb ram), 2GB Ram system, the shader algorithms handling the water reflections at anything other than low x2, seem to have a marked effect on fps.So, if you can bear with it set to Low 2x, until affording a better graphics card / DX10, then you should see improvement.I hope the Deluxe full product performs at the same level.We shall see !Cheers,Stuart

I see similar performance with Water set to 'Low - 2.0'. However I also get very acceptable perf (to me at least) when using 'Medium - 2.0' for the water setting.One thing that helped me, and would probably help you also, would be to upgrade the Nvidia FX5900 card you have (I had the same card too) to the relatively decently performing 6800GS card with either 128MB or 256MB. They are available with AGP interfaces.I paid maybe $120 for mine a few months back, I am sure they have come down in price, and it will add just the right amount of performance, at least until I rebuild my PC.[hr width=100%" size=1 color="black]http://forefrontgrp.com/MyLogo2.JPGJason | General Aviation Fan

Jason,Thanks for the heads up on your fps etc. and the suggestion re the card. However, I think I shall hang on until next year and perhaps upgrade to a DX10 card, rather than spend out now on a slightly better card. Remains to be seen though what performance I get with the full FSX product come Xmas - I might change my mind. Still hopefully MS will be releasing a patch early in the new year, at least from what I have seen from the various blogs - so that may improve things - we can but hope !Cheers,Stuart

Interesting results. You know, I really don't like the 2.xxx water. Overall, I like the 1.x high water setting. The only advantage of the 2.xx water is that it looks good up close. But in the air I prefer the 1.x high water by far.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian