30fps is excellent.  But, your bottleneck seems to be that MX video card - performs like a GF3. 

What framerates do you get when you are at 800X600 with no FSAA?  That is usually your CPU's bottleneck.  Any lowering from there is typically your video card.

Scott.

30 is generally tops with no clouds and clear weather.  If there are any clouds it drops to between 15-20. and what is FSAA?

I hate bragging as well, honest, but recently I bought myself a better pc with an AMD 2700+ (2.17ghz) Radeon 9200 graphics card and 1gig of RAM. I tested it out in a thunderstorm with 12 other aircraft in the sky and it gave me good consistent framerates above  the mid 30's at 1024 res (32 bit) and all the image quality ratings set at 5. Obviously clear skies are even better. Screen res does make a big difference, I can get away with higher resolutions for free flight but I tend to keep it at 1024 for combat. Also, reducing the colour depth to 16 bit gives me an extra 3 or 4 frames per second, and you hardly notice the difference in the visuals. So i guess I cant really complain. Saying that...even with those specs I do get the occassional jerks, usually during high G maneouvers If i'm close to the ground, but it isnt that bad, I can live with it. For two years I got by playing CFS2 on a Celeron 700 and Geforce 2, so the difference is phenomenal. I always use the 25 fps rule of thumb for frame rates. Since most TV's in the world today put out at around 25 fps, I reckon that if you can at least get that, then your not doing too badly.

i just got Sheps tweaks.  Made some improvement, but if  i start shooting a bandit at close range the framerate drops to below 10.  CFS3 has always done this when I was getting shot at,  but has never done this before.