Upgrade your graphics card. You will likely need a HD4870/GTX260/GTX280 to come close to maxing it out. Possibly multiples of the above cards. I'll see if I can find some benches.

those games barely max out a mid range dual core CPU

those games are more GPU intensive and cpu intensive.

if you look at system requirements, you will notice that cpu requirements only change slightly over time while videocard requirements are on a endless warp speed skyrocket

Alright this is beginning to piss me off and is getting really frustrating. I borrowed my roommates 8800Gt and installed it to run SLI. So now I have a Q9550 with two 8800Gt's in SLI. So the first test I wanted to do was to run Flight Sim X. Ok you ready for this? NO fricken difference. My $319 Quad and an extra $150 8800GT total of $469 didn't do a darn thing for FSX. That game is really pissing me off. What does it take for that game to even run on high? What do the developers have? Bunch of bull!!!!!

Ok the good news. Crysis improved dramatically. With only one 8800GT I turn off Ailising(sp?) and have somewhat good frame rate. Now with two 8800Gt's WOW! Now I can put the ailising to 2x and it begins to run like I had only with one card. So with ailising off dramatic improvement. With it on 2x it back to the frame rate as when i had one if that makes since. So I would call that a 35 to 40% improvement. Not bad.

That Flight sim thing is still a bunch of bull.

Are there any patches for the FSX? Try patching, they may have made the code more economical.
Also, are your graphics drivers up to date?
Have you tried overclocking your GPU? It sounds like the game is GPU rather than CPU bound.

Guys apparently Flight sim is not a graphics intensive game either. The biggest increase in performance I have noticed is when I changed the RAM. I played the game with two 8800GT's in SLI with the 4GB Memory and still no difference from only with a single 8800Gt. That tells me the GPU doesn't matter much for that game.

Here's the reason. I did a benchmark with Crysis with 4GB RAM and one 8800GT. The best average frames were 14.06 and the worst average was 12.98. When i installed the second 8800GT in SLI with that same benchmark the best was 22.37 and the worst was 19.93. That is a major increase for crysis and we know that, that is a graphics card intensive game. With that same setup with the huge increase I tired Flight Sim and still no difference at ALL.

So when putting in my $319 Q9550 I was able to just slightly increase graphics by about 10%. I still wasn't happy with the lag, stuttering, and low frame rate. Then when I installed 2 more GB or memory. Hum... I was somewhat surprised. It gained in performance by another 15% on top of the earlier 10%. So with the new CPU and two more Gigs of RAM I increased performance by 25%. Not bad, but not what I was expecting at all. I thought I would be sailing through the air without a low frame anywhere in sight. Not even close. That 25% increase I still cant run on full graphics and it is still sluggish and stuttering constantly. Lame once again.

So I dont think a better GPU would do it. Like I said, not a lick of difference from one GPU to two in SLI. Thats just a hint that it probably wont get better with a better card. I dont know what it is then. I have supposedly a very good CPU, a good GPU setup in SLI, and 4GB ram. I can only dream of what the developers must be using to make this game run right

I am running FSX smoothly with maxed settings on 1680x1050. I have 4gbs ram, q6600 oced to 3.0ghz, and a gtx 260. What resolution are your playing on?

SLI only helps if you have a game that makes use of SLI, and even then SLI only offers a 20-30% performance boost at most

which means a laggy game may be 20-30% less laggy if the video card is a bottleneck

when I was building one of my friends a really cheap gaming pc, I went with a amd x2 5200+ (overclocked), 2GB memory and a nvidia GTX 280 (overclocked) , windows xp pro (tweaked for performance, 11 running processes at startup )

everything is low-midrange except the videocard, and he can max out crysis with no problem, and also run flight simulator x with no problem

I would have gone with higher end parts but he was on a very limited budget and wanted to spend as little as possible

while the graphis of fsx may not bee the best, due to the view distance and the number of items on the screen, it can lag a videocard pretty well

and it is not very optimized for performance either

PS if you want to try something cool, try this

get the grove demo from nvidia (designed to show off the power of a geforce 2), then have it render a crap load of trees, trust me, i will lag a GTX280

What frames are you getting in FSX?

Also, in your opinion which would be better the GTX 260, 280, or 9800GX2. I probably dont want to spend over $300 unless the results would really really be worth it in everything.

I dont want to be the bearer of bad news, but I did get the GTX 260 core 216 Black Edition, plus the Quad 9550, plus 4 GB Ram. I still cant play on maxed out. I still have to take away some of the eye candy for that game. I found that for the most part I can run with everything maxed if I dont have the glow effect on. Even then, I was getting about 27fps up and down.

I will soon be using the GTX 280 xxx edition which is pretty much one of the best cards on the market and will let you know how that runs it.

I still want to know what the programmers use to run it

So it looks to me that you have the Q9550? I have that one as well and from my experience you dont get much performance out of it unless you go above 3Ghz. I put mine up to 3.83 for quite some time with a noticable performance increase, but went back down to 3.4 stable right now and I am getting better frames then you are on most of your settings. I also have 4GB RAM in XP, and a GTX 260 core 216 Black Edition which was rated higher performance then the stock 280.

Everything Ultra High settings, Auto Gen buildings 3/4 the way up, no building shadows. Water FX MAXED, Cloud draw distance low, scenery complexity draw distance medium to low. Bloom on, sun flare on, and all other eye candy on. 29-32 FPS. Heavy scenery, 25fps.

Try lowering your draw distance. Its usually wasted resources anyways. Its better to live with beautiful surroundings and blurry far off distance.

Oh yeah, I cant wait to see what a Core i7 can do. This will be a good test, because I think the nVidia cards do better for this game, but you do have 9GB of RAM and an i7. So please give us a detailed layout of your results. What settings do you have it on (very detailed) etc.?

Heading home in a couple hours. Is there a certain city I should fly in? I always fly Alaska (where I live) which ran alright, maybe because there is nothing up here

I am very curious to see what the major bottleneck (cpu vs. gpu) is for this game. It does not look so good that it should kill systems. Would have to remove some RAM to see if that makes any difference, so probably won't go that far.

I will jack everything 100% and watch the slideshow just for results and then lower them until playable. Wish I had a beefier GPU to test for yall, but I don't

LA is a super heavy stress test because its soooooooo big and spread out for miles with so much scenery. Take off from LAX and fly into downtown.

check out my sig, i can max fsx 1680x1050, about 15fps, but u have a quad core so itll be better for you

sdf is right on the money.

I have also done quite a bit of research on Flight Simulator X, and have heard from the developers that it is EXTREMELY processor-bound for performance, which would also confirm why you have not had much luck with performance increases due to better graphics cards, etc. I had actually read from one of the developers that FSX was designed to scale to use up to 256 processors in the future. I'll have to see if I can find the clip in my archives where they pointed this out--unfortunately I don't have it in front of me at the moment.

The best thing that you could probably do to increase FSX performance at this point would be to try to overclock your CPU if possible, or get yourself a Core i7 system (which you probably really didn't want to hear at this point--sorry for the bad news). :-(

Here is another link to a FSX board in case they have any other ideas that may help you out--best of luck!

http://www.flightsimworld.com/foru [...] wforum=103

OK, did a little more searching and found the clip on YouTube from Phil Taylor, one of the developers at Microsoft Games. He does in fact say in this clip (starting at about 2:25) that the game was made to scale up to 256 cores, as the terrain engine itself uses 64 files alone. There was also more good news below the clip in the comments section, as it appears that people have found that FSX runs beautifully on Windows 7 beta, although I haven't tried this myself to see if this is true. This could possibly turn out to be your holy grail, and you should be able to download a copy of Windows 7 beta for free, so no more hardware upgrades to have to pay for! :-)

I also did some more searching yesterday, and found a free tool online called AlacrityPC! that many users have found helps them to run FSX quite well on their XP systems, even if they don't have the latest/greatest setup available. You can download it from here: http://download.cnet.com/AlacrityP [...] tag=button

Hope you are eventually able to get the performance you are looking for; let us all know if you were able to find any solutions that appear to be a magic bullet for you.

Well my friend I run FSX on max graphics with my simple system,I play this game a lots because I use as a part of my training,I am a pilot holding a private pilot license with instruments rating now I'm going to take the writing test next week for my multieng. rating and commercial license,so for my homework I got use a basic software like FSX as a flying simulator,flying IFR at all the time and ILS for appro. to the runway,well so I'm a pro using this software in my less money system,so copy ,I have a motherboard which everybody said that this mobo is real bad,but they are wrong I had have this mobo for about 1year and 5month and I can play any game with not problems,I can see a lot of boats in my home town port which is miami sea port in my FSX software,I add on cars and trucks in my software I even add on roads to my FSX soft. and the cars move so fast with no problems,well I'm using a XFX nFORCE 630i 7100 nVIDIA GEFORCE onboard graphic card with 512mb with 2gb DDR2 667mghz pc533 and a segabate bar. 250 gb hard drive a intel pentium dual core E2200 2.20 ghz a comp.case with 450w with 3 fan cooler,so I spent 285 dollars on this system and I don't need a junk video card to play FSX or FS9 or FEAR or company of hero or others games,and my computer don't get hot it always in cool temperature,my cpu have a factory intel fan which people said this fan is a junk but they are wrong,this factory fan from intel is good,so you don't have to spend a lot of money on junk and crap super complicated game system,like I said before I'm a pro all those super system and video card are junks all it is the same junk made in taiwan or usa or japan,the reason they got make money selling those junks,I used alienware a junk,voodooo whatever another junk,well my friend remember that everyday they make new junk to make you change your cool system for a new junk,so my friend bunasuerte