GKSeifert

Yahoooo! I just installed an FXF Radeon HD6870, replacing an HD5770. The power supply is quite capable. I expected about 1.4 times the frame rate. I actually got a good bit more than than. With the 5770 the fps would drop as low as 14 under some conditions (built up city areas and rolling the plane hard) and usually ran in the mid twenties. With the 6870 is never drops below the high 20s (mainly on the ground due to the close up ground textures), and usually runs around 40. This is with all the options set as high as they will go except shadow quality which I have set to low and scenery density which I have set to high rather than maximum. With the 5770 I had weather set to medium as well. All at 1920x1080. This particular card has dual fans on it which keeps it quite quiet and cool. After rebate (if I get it) it will have cost about $150. Sometimes it is good to stay a generation behind! Now if I can find a 3 ghz Quad Core Intel processor that will fit an LGA775 socket I may not have to go any farther for quite a while. Gord

I'm using a RealFlight (radio control flight simulator) Interlink Elite controller. It is physically very much like a full RC Controller. Just no actual transmitter electronics in it. Dual sticks. Throttle and rudder on the left stick and elevator and aileron on the right one. If you are used to flying radio control models this is VERY natural. Never did much like a normal joystick. It is pretty well supported by Flight. The only problem is that they treat the switches as buttons. The gear switch on the controller should be gear up with the switch flicked up and gear down with the switch flicked down. As it is now treated by Flight, flicking the switch up will either raise or lower the gear depending on where the gear is already (like pressing a button). Flicking the switch down does nothing. Gord

Thank you! Downloaded Fraps and find that I am not getting any where near the fps I expected, but also noted that it doesn't matter. Anything above about 20 (even less if just flying straight) is fine as long as there are no glitches. Time to think about upgrading again though. :-) Gord

Is there a FPS switch in Flight? I have not seen it anywhere. If not, how are you folks measuring your frames per second? Gord

If you have problems with stuttering and fluttering textures you might take a look at post #14 (by trevorbee) in the 'Terrible stuttering unless moving map is enabled' topic. The little tool mentioned there (D3D Antilag) made quite a difference in the video on my machine. No more fluttering textures and no more stuttering. I can now run comfortably with quality and textures set to high and sharpness set to maximum with VERY smooth results except for a bit of a low frame rate when swooping around very quickly. Gord

Thank you for that! I have a 3 ghz Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 machine with 4 gigs of memory and an ATI HD5770 video card. I had fairly smooth video until I turned up the settings a bit and then I was getting quite a bit of stuttering. I was also was seeing the fluttering textures, even at default settings. This little tool has made a world of difference. I see no texture problems now and I can set the 'sharpness' to maximum and see no video stuttering at all. *** The following comment only applies to the Triple Header package (from kegetys.net) which I mistakenly tried first. The Anti Lag package already has a config file that is copied into the Flight directory with the dll. Either package fixed my video! Be aware that you will need to start Flight as administrator the first time after putting d3d9.dll in the Flight directory so that it can write it's configuration file to that directory. At least I did in W7 64 bit. After that you do not need to use adminitrator mode. Thanks again! Gord

I went throught the same about a week ago. The problem is that you need to first install Flight through Steam so that it shows up in the Steam Library. Once Flight shows up in Steam you can then get the codes that you then use to download what you paid for. But you download it through Flight/Live. I believe that you can download and install Flight through Steam now to get those codes. It is a very messy implimentation. I don't like the idea of having to run Steam just to start Flight from now on. Microsoft is aware that the Steam implementation is not real pretty. I emailed MSFLIGHT, as someone just suggested above, a week back and just got a call from them this morning about my situation. They have no control over Steam. Steam buys it from MS and then sells it. MS has nothing to do with Steams implementation, but they are aware that I don't like it at least. I could not get an answer from Steam a week back so I purchased the Hawaii pack and the Maule through Flight/Live and got Steam off my system. I will never need it for anything else. I am hoping a Paypal dispute will get my money back from Steam. Good luck! Gord

The only mentions of gold ( at about :50 and 2:40 in ) were accompanied by the word 'plated', not solid.

Thanks for the tip on the texture folders Mark. I was seeing OOM hits quite predictably when flying from Chilliwack to the Vancouver area (or the other way around). It seemed tied to the amount of time more than anything else. I downloaded Process Explorer as suggested near the end of this thread and watched the working set of FS9. It very gradually, but very persistently, grew from the area of 400 megs, after loading, to about 1.7 gigs when it crashed. I looked for empty texture folders and found only about two in the Addon Scenery folder. I got rid of them and tried the same flight with the same aircraft and the same addons (not much, BCMesh9d from Holger Sandmann plus Abbotstford Airport and Southwestern BC Landclass both from Russel Dirks). No more OOM at all and for that matter it loaded in about 256 megs rather than near 400 and never went above around 400 at the very worst point. After returning to Chilliwack and letting it just sit there for a while FS9 could be seen returning the memory it had been using until it was back to where it was when I first started it. That just amazed me. If anyone is having this problem, START with the texture folders. You may save yourself weeks of wasted effort. BTW, I am running Windows 7 RC, 32bit. No complaints about it at all. I purchased the 64 bit version because of the fact that it would allow me to access all of the 4 Gigs of memory I put in this machine, but there are some things I want to run that won't run in 64 bit yet. And seeing this machine running with 2.6 gigs free while running FS9, REX and it's Weather engine and using an ATI 5770 (supposed to be 1 gig), I may just go buy the 32 bit version of Windows 7 and stick with it. I am seeing about 3.3 gigs available out of the four. Don't know how that works when the video card is 1 gig, but that is the way it is. Much better than the dire predictions I had heard would have made me expect. Gord