Would it be worth it to upgrade my video card?

[tigisfat]

Right now I'm running an AMD 6000 dual core 3.0g CPU with 3g RAM and a 8600GTS. It's all on an HP with Vista. I run FSX okay, but I'm wondering how much of a difference it'd make to buy a new video card, like a 8800 series. Anybody have an idea?

[loki]

An 8800GT or 9800GT (effectively the same GPU), should give something of a boost over an 8600GTS. It will depend somewhat on the resolution you play at though. If it's 1680x1050 or above, you should get a noticeable performance increase. At lower resolutions, you may not benefit as much. You may also want to consider the Radeon 4830 and 4850 series as they are quite powerful for their price ranges.

I wouldn't be expecting miracles either way, however, as the processor is still going to be the main bottleneck.

[Asad Khawer]

I'd go for the 4850 instead - IMO ATI leads the way where GPUs are concerned, at least these days.

[tigisfat]

An 8800GT or 9800GT (effectively the same GPU), should give something of a boost over an 8600GTS. It will depend somewhat on the resolution you play at though. If it's 1680x1050 or above, you should get a noticeable performance increase. At lower resolutions, you may not benefit as much. You may also want to consider the Radeon 4830 and 4850 series as they are quite powerful for their price ranges.

I wouldn't be expecting miracles either way, however, as the processor is still going to be the main bottleneck.

Right now I run FSX at max resolution and see mid 20's on the FPS in most places. Seeing as I'm at max resolution, you're saying that I would definitely benefit from the 8800GT? If you had to guess, what would you say the FPS difference would be? I'm pretty much looking to help the areas where FSX cuts down into the low teens. Do you guys think a better video card would see increases of 5-10FPS?

[loki]

It's hard to say as your performance could be limited more by your CPU than the video card. A faster card may not increase performance much at all, but may let you turn up anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering and details in general.

One way to see which is the bottleneck is to run the sim at a lower resolution (what is your current resolution by the way? Max resolution is different for different size monitors) and see how it runs. If it runs better, then it's the video card. On the other hand, if there is little or no change, the CPU is holding you back and a new video card won't do much better.