What do I need more of?

[AnotherSillyAlias]

I have a relatively recent PC, 2.8 gHz 500 Mb and so on. The graphics card is OK for pretty much everything but I have Flight Simulator (FS2004) and it often runs slowly and the graphics take time to update when changing views.

What sort of things could I do, (e.g. better graphics card), to improve the situation?

[Ducky]

500 megs of ram? go to a gig and see if that helps. Ram is fairly cheap.

[rustypouch]

You can always use more cowbell.

[Ducky]

You can always use more cowbell.


I've got a fever, and the only cure is...

[AnotherSillyAlias]

You can always use more cowbell.

Possibly your computer is powered by bovine products however mine is a little more advanced in that it uses steam and rubber.

[logical muse]

Does FS2004 have settings for the graphics? Can you change resolution? Can you change the level of the effects? If you can set it to lower levels, that'll help pinpoint the problem.

Also, do a google to see what other people are saying. There are forums where people discuss issues like this.

Finally, moo.

[thrombus29]

Ram, and Defrag your hard drive.

[El Greco]

IThe graphics card is OK for pretty much everything

What's the chipset of the gc ?

[Ripley Twenty-Nine]

What's the chipset of the gc ?
Yeah, I was thinking graphics card too. 2.8GHz with 512MB of RAM should be fine for running pretty much any game at a decent speed. At that point, the graphics card is most likely the bottleneck.

..But as thrombus29 mentioned, if the Hard Drive is highly fragmented, then the most powerful machine out there will have trouble keeping up. Defragging is your quickest (and cheapest!) option.

[AnotherSillyAlias]

Thanks for the replies guys.

(Hey, I'm a poet!)

Hmm.. yes, anyway, drive is defragged so I think what I need here is some sort of high end graphic card. I may even whack some more RAM into the thing just for good measure.