I dont like to say this but the PC you have built would just about run FS9 with decent results but for FSX that is a very medioca machine. The hardware to get teh best out of FSX isn't even out yet. Ideally though you will want a Dual Core CPU and 2gig of ram. Your graphics card is only mid-range too and will not cut the mustard with FSX. You will need a high end card for FSX.

All that said the system you have built should run FSX it just wont run it with all the bells and whistles. Your best bet is to get your system setup as optimised as possible and play with the settings until you get the best results for you. I will say the ground textures (once the detail is upped) are much better than FS9 so disabling autogen will gain you many FPS.

Also read through the forum for some of teh various tweaks that can be applied.

Just one thing: RTFM RTFF -> "Read the FAQ"
The FAQ sticky post on top of the FSX section will help you find a lot of special yet simple manipulations to do to your FSX to drastically improve its performance. To give you an idea, I have earned more than 15 FPS in average, and now, with a simple 6800 GT I fly 20 FPS almost everywhere.

However, 2 Gb are really better, 1 Gb only is limited, I have that and I have still a lot of disk accesses that cause a lot of micro stutters.

If you have any question about those manipulations (edition of the FSX.cfg, replacement textures etc...), first be sure that you read the FAQ correctly, then post your questions here, we'll be glad to help you

My system [an ancient one at that] can run FSX at 20 FPS.



In order to achieve such frames on my "old as ancient Rome" rig, I had to lowever every setting in FSX to the absolute minimum. The only sliders that I have ever touched were those that affect terrain mesh, which are set to all the way high minus the terrain texture resolution. The frames will die the moment I even touch either the scenery complexity or autogen sliders. Heck, I even had to set clouds to their simplest form.

I have to say though, the terrain mesh looks awsome even on such low settings.

These threads are becoming like an AAA meeting  !

Hi my name is Sam, I have owned FSX for 2 weeks now and I still have very weak FPS with all the tweakings I have done.
Can someone please help me?

Truth is Microsoft got us all (well not me because I got FSX as a gift, they got my brother  )! I knew I would have these issues that is why I didn't spend my own bucks and get it! It takes too long to load the main screen, it takes too long to load a flight. Then after all that waiting for the game to start up, you fly with lag! Not impressive Microsoft. I get a crappy 6-8 FPS rate with all the lowering of the settings. I am getting ready to drop all the sliders to 0 just to see what kind of frame rate I would get and tweak everything slowly up to see what differences I encounter.

At this point the sim seems to fly my Blackhawk helo well. Even though I was only getting 6-8 fps it was flying better then my planes. That is what I thought until I initiated a hard right bank and the sim stuttered in the turn I knew it was too good to be true.  very sad.

Pentium 4 3.2 ghz
1 gb memory
windows XP pro SP2
256mb ATI Radeon 9800XT
80 Gb hard Drive space

Silly Microsoft !  How dare they bring out a brand new, state of the art simulator that won't run perfectly on computers that were state of the art four years ago..  geez.... Whatever were they thinking 

I agree with you on that one Daube.

Sam you should be able to achieve better results than what you are with that system. I have the Pc in my sig and am holding between 15-40fps depending on where I am. The biggest killer on older systems appears to be the Autogen. Well it is on mine anyway.

When flying in built up areas or complex areas I turn it off, otherwise i leave it on sparse. I have also adjusted the amount of autogen trees and buildings shown via one of the tweaks. This is my only tweak though. I have not altered any of the textures in my sim. I have used all of the information posted up by Nick N to get my system running as optimised as possible, though I could do with a re-format soon.

I will take all those suggestions in context. Thanks for the suggestions. I recently killed everything on FSX (dropped all the sliders to 0) now I am getting 18-21 FPS but the sim doesn't look as great as it did with the sliders at Medium.

I am going to upgrade my pc a bit in a couple of months. I wanted to get a 512mb graphics card. But what is AGP because I think that is on my pc with my 1900x1200 resolution 24" widescreen Flat Panel  . Is that some kind of graphics adapter? I know I saw it somewhere on this pc but don't remember where i saw it. (I think it says that in my catalyst control panel as my graphics card is AGP supported).

I test flew my S-70 Blackhawk from FS9 and she  flew smoothly with 0 stuttering or lag! That is the way it is suppose to fly! ! Now when I get more time later this evening I will go to that FAQ section and try to read up and download what programs I need to tweak this Flight Sim on my rig.

Thanks for the suggestions guys
Sam

(The S-70 Blackhawk looks awesome in FSX - Now if I can only get the panel guages to work  )