Hi Noel

I bow to your superior knowledge. The 3D complexity is probably more important.

Unfortunately many of the folk who have these kinds of problems have the three -
five year old shared memory video cards...

Consider my business oriented notebook (1680x1050 resolution and a slow GPU)
great for fine text and flowcharts, lousy for gaming. - only answer is to reduce
display resolution. I know - time for that new HP.

I will have to check on Condor - the other soaring simulator I own is SFS4 PC -
that has the neat trick of allowing you to reduce the rendered resolution but
leave the screen at native resolution. Works by reducing the rendering workload
although the image does deteriorate.

One of the generalisations in economics is that expenditure rises to consume
income. My first PC had 128K of RAM and a 20MB hard drive and I ran an entire
business off that, but found the 8Kb Hercules CGA graphics too slow for any
games to be fun...
My current video setup on the gaming PC has 512MB of dedicated fast RAM, and we
are still complaining about the video speed.

Cheers
Bruce

noel.wade wrote:
Bruce -

Your advice is generally good; but those rules of thumb are changing
as graphics cards have evolved over the last few years.

Screen Resolution and Color Depth affect graphics performance mostly
when the graphics card doesn't have much memory (such as with cheaper
PCs that have "Integrated" graphics chips or "Shared memory").

Furthermore, most of today's LCD screens are actually designed to work
at 1 optimum resolution. Using lower resolutions will cause the
screen to look blurry or blocky (in Windows and other 2d applications,
not just during 3d rendering).

The geometric complexity of a scene (i.e. the number of three
dimensional shapes in view) is more critical to performance with
today's modern 3d graphics cards.

So the first thing to do is to try to lower the amount of trees and
objects being rendered. Also lowering the visibility (drawing
distance) or lowering the terrain or texture detail can help. "High
End" smoothing (such as anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering) can
also add a big slow-down and should be disabled if the computer isn't
performing well.

Most of these display/graphics options are visible from within the
Condor settings / configuration screens.

Take care,

--Noel
(Former computer-game developer) :-)