Processor: Intel (R) Celeron (R) CPU 2.60 Ghz
Memory: 256 MB  RAM
Video Card: Intel 82845G/GL/GE/PE/GV Graphics Controller (64 MB)
Windows XP - Home
80 GB hard drive

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i've now  upgraded to 512 RAM  but i am seeing absolutely NO DIFFERANCE in frame rates .it plays the same as when i had 256 mb and i'm playing on the same low settings i was before too .i'm  STILL getting only about 5-10 fps over a big city.(sometimes lower)

i was wondering if maybe i got the wrong type of RAM or something?i didnt really know what kind to get, so i got  DDR 333. i'm guessing it's right though because  when i go to start/run/dxdiag , it DOES say that i have 512 now  but does that mean it's actually working?

i don't understand this. if i'm not seeing any improvement with frame rates after adding more memory, then whats the use?

I thought installing more RAM would decrease graphic loading times.

You definately need a new graphics card. You'll want to look at a Geforce FX5200 or above, or a Radeon 9600 or above. That's because these cards are compatible with the latest version of Microsoft's DirectX.

A quick way to tell if you have your memory installed correct is to run DXDIAG from the run command.
But as everyone has said that on board video needs to hit the trail. If your system does not have a AGP slot you can still use a PCI slot for a graphics card.
You might have to move a jumper on your mother board in order to disable the onboard graphics. I had to do this on a older system when I added a AGP video card. The system did not recgonize the card untill I moved the jumper than every thing worked ok.
But do not move anything untill you add the card and try it you will know if it is working or not. 8)

I see a lot of people here recommending a RAM upgrade to improve graphics performance.

You really shouldn't do that. Because it's leading people astray and wasting their money.

Brundlefly, you have an El Cheapo computer; that is.... it has a celeron CPU and a "all in one" motherboard with onboard graphics chip. If you have an AGP slot as earlier mentioned, you can add an AGP Graphics card, these are very expensive items if you want one that actually works well in FS9. You get what you pay for, and you didn't get a Pentium4 processor; therefore, your front side bus speed (the speed at which your mainboard shuffles all the data around) is slower than what it could be.

Iroquois, you shouldn't be recommending the FX5200 for FS9, it doesn't perform well enough and some poor sod will go out and buy one, wasting their money. Also, the latest or last 3 versions of directX has stuff all to do with graphics performance in FS9, except for a couple of minor frills.

Garymbuska recommends a PCI graphics card if you don't have an AGP slot for an addon AGP graphics card...
Well,..... don't waste your time or money there either... they are bad... real bad, and probably show no improvement over what you have now.

You need:

1. A decent AGP graphics card, minimum 128mb, but don't let the 128mb of ram on the card fool you, there are lots of junk cards with 128mb of ram on them. The "class" of the card is most important..
Here are some that work well in fs9:
GF4 TI4200, 4400, 4600,
Radeon 9600XT, 9800pro, 9800XT
GF FX 5700 ultra, FX5900XT, FX5900,pro and ultra
NVidia 6800, pro and GT
The new Radeon card (the name escapes me at the moment)

2. an AGP slot to put it in, (a new mainboard if you haven't got an AGP slot on your machine now, and the mainboard should be an 8x AGP speed compliant one or it's too old of a design)

3. new RAM to suit your new mainboard (now that you just wasted money on your recent purchase... assuming you bought ram only fast enough for the celeron.)

4. A decent CPU to fit into your shiny new rig.

5. possibly a larger power supply unit to fill the new power requirements.

Saying all that, if you have an AGP slot, buy a decent graphics card (you need extra power in graphics to overcome the other shortcomings of your system), and you should get reasonable performance on what you have now.

Good Luck.

You got that right Gixer.... well, at least you got 20 FPS lol, and that's with just about the latest gear! Sheesh!

Why on Earth do so many people think RAM makes a PC's video capabilities better?

It's Random Access Memory..... not Really Awesome Magic!

That's pretty amazing Selbio, considering the fact that the 9200 is about half the power that a TI4200 is.

The TI4200 handles AA at 2x reasonably well, but higher settings will drop it back, as will AF.

Overall, I'm surprised you didn't see an obvious advantage using the TI4200 though. As long as it works for you, I guess that's the main thing.

Buy a decent one and fit it yourself.

What is the rest of your rig like?  and when you say plays well how many FPS are you holding?

I havnt done a re-format for ages or cleaned out FS9.  Maybe once I done that it will all run peachy.  All I know is running res 1600x1200x32  4xAA  8xAF 100%AI and everything maxxed it makes my FPS drop to 18-20 at KSEA.  It still plays smooth though no jerkiness or anything. 

If you holding good FPS with that card at those AA an AF settings your extremely lucky, my Bro has a 9800pro on practicaly the same rig as me and cant hold anywhere hear the FPS I do with the same settings I have.

I dunno what my new g/card will do to fs fps wise i got it locked at 25 and thats where its gonna stay. As said as long as I have smoooooth game play I am happy 

I keep my PC de-fragged etc but my FS9 folder is very messy. I have installed and uninstalled so much stuff for it its untrue.  I think I will re-format soon that usually helps a lot.

Gixer,

I have an AMD XP BARTON 3000+
Asus A7V8-LA Mobo
512ddr pc 2700
160GB Hard Drive
Onboard Realtek AC'97
Windows XP Home tweaked with only 15 Processes running.

The game runs very smooth except when I'm flying idfg md-11 or pmdg 737NG around KSEA with AI @ 100%.

About that PSU is there a specific one I should get that doesn't have that annoying Aux server connector and has only a few molex connectors 4-6(6 max and no SATA connectors).

Gixer,

How did fs9 run on your rig before you overclocked?
Do you really think that If I ditched this ATI 9200 and get a much better video card I can get much better performance?

OOOOOOoooooer.  Just did the ultimate test.  PMDG 737-600 (Very detailed) at my Gatwick scenery (Extremely Detailed) Looks very pretty.  Weather set to fair skies.  75% AI  FPS drops down to 15 looking at the airport when taking off lol.  My poor CPU/mobo setup    I know thats whats doing it now! So how many pennies can I scrape together this month 

Gixer,

You planning on selling that Ti 4600?

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With that GF3, your only a few quid short of a machine for a guest to join you flying / fragging on, whilst keeping her who needs to be kept happy, happy!  Case, mouse, keyboard all available for buttons if you browse the computer fairs....

Your choice, but I would'nt sell it , doing the above is the reason I can now have 5 (!) machine LAN parties!  - the lowest spec machine being ideal for simple web browsing, MSN messenger etc.

Its taken me a few years to achieve this setup (2 p4's 1 p3 and a Celeron 700! ) but its worth it when PC literate friends turn up and I'm busy on my PC.

Paul.

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damn, i just found out that  i don't even have one  . i see where it says"AGP1" on the motherboard  but there's no actual slot there to fit anything into...can i get  one to put on there or do i need to get a new motherboard that already has one or what?

EDIT: sorry, i'm a dumbass when it comes to these things,i do not understand HALF of what you people are even talking about . lol 

Hmm, Fancy swapping that ti4600 for my FX5600?    ??? http://uk.asus.com/products/vga/v9560td/overview.htm

Very true, unless your getting confused with PCI Express.... either way, a new motherboard indeed would be the first place to start, invariably with an old system, I'd expect possibly more to be required i.e. RAM / CPU etc.

After reading the very helpful hints about maxing FS 9 soundds like a new card is a must........now have the Radeon 9200 with 762 Ram (Dell 8100) and think I will invest in the 9600XT.......any sugestions about who has the best price and if a other mfgr is better choice????

bump. ok i fixed the page stretch,guess the  link was too long so i just removed it.

I have an 9800 XT, with 2 gig of ram and i have no problems with my frame rates at all. Even over airports with a lot of traffic, my frame rates almost never drop under 20 FPS. Just see that you have the latest driver for your card installed correctly and the settings of your card set to work best with FS9 (different for every card), i got my settings from Splash and they work great for me. Good luck , happy flying

Ludo

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It looks like you have 768mb total system RAM.

But, 6mb is shared to your onboard video card.

You should be able to set your shared Ram amount up to 64mb in BIOS settings for better video performance with what you have now, but don't expect miracles, it will be better, but not great.

You really need to determine whether or not your PC has an AGP slot (I doubt it does!) before even considering a graphics upgrade.

Do you have an AGP slot?

You see, I'm not sure which Dell 8100 you have, The is a desktop version, a laptop and several in between, on top of that, Dell uses several mainboards in the same series a lot.

If you do have an AGP slot, Don't worry about too much power in a graphics card, there is no such problem, you need all you can get.

You are not stuck with the RADEON class of cards either.... ANY AGP Graphics card will do.

Currently, I have three suggestions in order of price and performance starting with the best... (there are other cards that will work of course)

NV6800 Gainward Golden Sample (or XFX brand)
Radeon 9800XT (some say 9800pro can be modded up)
NVidia FX5900XT

It's just that those cards also represent value for money, and there is a distinct Price and performance gap between them.

It depends.

You need to research what RAM is fitted to the card, it's the first important consideration. Not the amount of RAM, but the SPEED of the chips themselves.

Some budget manufacturers use el cheapo components on their cards, this may not make any difference, however, if the RAM fitted is a slower type, it makes a lot of difference. The RAM chips quality is based on it's timings specification, the faster the timings, (measured in nanoseconds ... ns) the better the chips and the faster the card will perform.

The nanoseconds (latency) should be as low as possible, the lower the number, the faster the RAM and therefore the card.

The difference RAM timings make is substantial, and a card with half the RAM, yet faster timings will outperform a card with more RAM and slower timings.

A cheap trick used by manufacturers is to stack on a heap of cheap RAM to fool the common man into believing he has something special.... so, when I hear people spouting off how much RAM they have on their video card, I know straight away they don't know what they are talking about...... if they did know, they would be quoting the RAM timing in nanoseconds instead.

If you look at the advertiser's specs at pricewatch.com you will often see the /ns specified, and it should be taken into account when purchasing or making price comparisons on video cards.

I hope that clears one or two things up for you.

It's this knowledge that has kept me from posting my PC spec in my Avatar, you see, it seems pointless to me to post a specification without a detailed configuration description as well. This will help to explain why 2 computers of apparent same specification will perform very differently in hardware alone, let alone software configuration.

While on the subject of configuration, You should also know that each video card has a "reference" specification. This spec is often modified within certain limits depending on the manufacturer of the hardware.

Certain architecture and components used will either make the card above or below spec. If the card is sufficiently above spec, the manufacturer may safely alter the GPU and RAM timings into an overclocked state without fear of stability or overstress problems.

Other manufacturers may experience stability problems and therefore underclock their cards to compensate.

There are just a few manufacturers who have a track record of producing consistently fast cards because they use the best components and strive to serve a niche market of enthusiasts. Gainward is one of those, XFX is making their mark, others have produced some very nice cards.

Video card selection for most is but a hit and miss affair, most advice is based on ignorance at best. There is actually a lot of research and current knowledge required to make a good purchase decision when you realise what is involved.

But, then comes along a product line like the NV6800 which just blows everything else away and it all becomes easy again........      

If that's you sitting in that Angel's Phantom, I'm jealous! 

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True to an extent, most graphics cards follow the manufacturers "reference" design, in other words, look at the layout of say an MSI card, compare it to a Gainward (Assuming they are both the same chipset, for example a 5900XT) you'll find the tracks on the pcb are more or less in the exact same position, chips in the same spot etc.

Hence, normally theres little differance between two 5900XT's from different company's indeed some are identical bar the name!

Comparing my Asus 9560 FX5600 to a Gainward FX5600, the two boards were very different and my Asus was about 600marks ahead on 3D Mark 2001SE - hardly a great margin of differance! -  a friend of mine has an un-branded FX5600, it looks the same as my Asus, they score identical benchmarks on my pc!!!

Brundlefly, theres another obvious bottleneck in your system - your processor - I upgraded an old Celeron 1.7ghz Sct 478 cpu for a 1.8 p4 you'd think an extra 100mhz would'nt make much differance and it did'nt, what did was the p4's 256k of L2 cache memory (current p4's now have 512k L2 cache RAM) compared to the Celeron's 128k L2 memory, the performance differance was amazing, and my 3D Mark 2001 score ,at the time, jumped from about 5000 to 8500 FS2002 was greatly improved.....

The same 1.8 p4 now runs FS9 very well with an Asus 9520 FX5200(!) and 512MB of PC2100 DDR ok its not as good as my own machine (specs below ) but for all those nay sayers who think an FX5200 can't cut it with FS9 my experiences with my #2 PC tell me different.

Ultimately, a £20 Geforce 4 MX will be an improvement over your current graphics set up, as ever its a case of how much money can you afford to spend? £40 will get you by with FS9 and an FX5200. Multiply that by 10 and you'll have a nice shiny Geforce 6800 Ultra - a card more than upto FS9 at whatever settings you like - trouble is, the rest of your system would'nt be enough to get the best from it 

Food for thought eh? 

Paul.