Hardware recommendations

[congo]

The minimum spec I recommend is a 6600GT for FS9.

A 6600 is NOT a 6600GT.

There is a lot to understand about video cards. You just can't spout off a card number and expect to know it all.

So there is a good place to start, research the differences between those two cards and you should come to understand a lot more.

The 6600 GPU offers 45% less memory bandwidth and 40% less GPU power than a 6600GT. That suddenly makes the 6600 somewhat less appealing. But they are cheaper. You get what you pay for.

[cheesegrater]

I thought Gainward only made a 6600GT?

Gainward doesn't make slow cards. Even their 7300GT is fast. I don't know where I can buy their cards though, they are impossible to find.

http://www.hardwarezone.com/articles/vi ... cid=3&pg=8

[ctjoyce]

Never heard of that site, however its just a Gainward BIOS, so that means that you just buy a eVGA or whatever card, and flash the BIOS.

I still think that you should look at the 6800XT.

Cheers
Cameron

[congo]

Everyone makes the 6600GT.

What Gainward do with their Golden Sample range is use high quality components, allowing them to pre-overclock the cards or just leave that up to you.

The Golden Sample range have been consistently good overclockers for that reason.

Many manufacturers have taken heed of this and copied it, with varying degrees of success.

[awk2]

Well, I bought it, and it's better. Not the best, but my AGP slot is only 4x, so that's why I didn't pay for a GT. And it's only a P4 1,7Ghz (but not celeron), 768MB ram on 266 Mhz.
Now I can have 3d clouds full PAI traffic, Scenery complexity, texture size medium, so better than it was lagging on 3fps. By the way, could you recommend me witch settings to choose in the display dialog to achieve the best performance.

[Saitek]

How would FS run on an 9600XT? My old VGA cardd has 32mb memory! Too damn slow.

I have it and will get up to 40FPS with no clouds and good scenery settings. Put in the clouds and it starts to suck the system. Not the best of cards, but I actually bought it after striving with the FX5200 believe it or not and it was so much better.

[Delta_]

I went from a 32mb Radeon 7000 to a 128MB Radeon 9600xt (Fireblade edition).  The leap was massive! I run most settings maxed out (this is also helped by using 1GB of RAM).  I can run clouds at a good setting (not maxed) and get a min of 40fps in areas that are not dense with scenery, aircraft etc...