Simviation Forums

Whenever I start moving in any plane on the ground or in the air the game gets really choppy and unplayable.  I have put the settings all the way down and it doesn't do anything.  I have also tried updating drivers. Any ideas on what the problem is? My pc specs are:

Asus A7N8X-X
AMD Athlon 2800+
1GB of RAM
NVIDIA Geforce 5700 256MB RAM
80GB WD HD

I'm not that good with system's but your's looks pretty decent for running FS9

no idea where the problem lies, but i know what i would do ... i'd re-install
papa-metro usaf 1953-57

anyone have any ideas?

Heya bldr,

First off, Welcome to SimV!

With your system specs you should be running FS 2004 with max settings without a sweat.  The first question that I would ask is --> Was there ever a time that FS 2004 ran fine with max settings on your PC?  Or has it been this choppy since the original install?  

If the choppy graphics are a recent thing then perhaps you installed a scenery package that doesn't agree with your FS 2004 installation.  I would go into the settings menu and bring up the Add-On Scenery Library, uncheck all 3rd party add-ons, then restart the game.  If everything works fine then it's a process of elimination to determine which scenery add-on is causing the issue.

The next thing that I would do is to investigate the NVidia drivers themselves.  I've found out in my long experience that not all graphics drivers are equal, meaning that the latest driver update is not necessarily the best.  I always avoid those NVidia "Beta" drivers and those NVidia drivers that aren't WHQL Certified.  I have always used the NVidia 7.2.1.3 driver (05/07/2005) because it renders the best overall graphics.  You can find this driver on the www.guru3d.com webpage.  Try it and see if it works better.  

Another little trick is to turn off AntiAliasing in FS 2004 by going into Options --> Settings --> Display --> Hardware and unchecking the AntiAliasing box.  

Next click on your NVidia Control Panel (Found in the NVidia MC Tray Icon next to your XP timeclock).  Under Performance and Quality Settings Turn on AntiAliasing in the NVidia settings and use either the 2X, 2XQ, or 4X AntiAlias Settings.  Whichever gives you the best graphics with the best performance (I have my Nvidia 6800 set for 4X).  Again in the NVidia MC Tray under Performance and Quality Settings bring up Anisotropic Filtering and set it to

I had the same problem a few months ago. The game was running fine, then all of a sudden it was horribly choppy. This may sound silly, but this all happened after I downloaded Apple I-Tunes to my PC. Once I removed I-Tunes, FS9 worked well. I put it back onto my system with the same bad results in the game. So of course I sent I-Tunes to the recycle bin. I hardly believe that this is your problem, im running on the most basic of PC's, but just thought I'D throw that out there. ;-)

do you have anything running on background? such as anti-virus, MSN and the likes...

programs open in the tray (that box where the clock is on the start bar) can seriously take a massive toll on your FPS count.


be sure you don't have anything "heavy" hogging your CPU and RAM

the Moach

but this all happened after I downloaded Apple I-Tunes to my PC.

I have I tunes on my system and have never had a problem with FS2004
But maybe it was something else along with I tunes that was causing the problem