System Upgrade help

[smekke]

My sys now:

IIyama 19" HM903DT A monitor
MSI 865PE NEO 2
PIV 2,8c @ 3,44
1024 DDR Ram in DC
ATI 9600XT 128meg
SB Audigi
2x SATA 120 gig

And I am getting a very poor (less than 20 fps) when flying into the clouds with some add-ons installed like Ultimate Traffic, PMDG etc...

I was wondering if an upgrade to a ATI 9800Pro (Or another one) will raise my frames? Or do I better invest in a new AMD 64 bit system ?

[JSPuonti]

If the poor performance is because of AI traffic, a new vidcard won't help much (it might help some while flying near airports where you can actually SEE the AI planes, but that's rarely the case while you're airborne) - traffic taxes your CPU more than your vidcard. You can test this by turning all traffic off and flying through clouds. If it runs smoothly, then you need to find a balance between acceptable AI traffic quantity and overall performance.

If the poor performance is because of 3D clouds, a new vidcard *might* help you get better framerates. You can test this by turning 3D cloud percentage to zero and checking if your framerates go up.

Remember that there's no point in trying to run traffic, 3D clouds and whatnot at their maximum settings when / if your computer is not good enough for the task. You should first try to see if you can skimp on image quality or traffic to get acceptable performance before you spend money on an upgrade that might or might not get you higher framerates :)

There are plenty of posts on these boards where someone bought a new vidcard or a new CPU, expecting double their current framerate (so to speak), only to find out that they got much less of a performance boost than they hoped.

[smekke]

Thanx for the reply, I am gooing to test some things out then :)
Be back soon ;)