"Merrill P. L. Worthington" wrote in message
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[...]
The native resolution of the first LCD monitor was 1280x1024, the second
is 1400x1050. FS2004 ran OK at that resolution with the motherboard
video chipset (nVidia GeForce 6150) at 1280x1024.

Are you suggesting that the problem should be addressed by a separate
video card with a better chipset?

Thank you for the clarification.

Yes, it's possible (though not certain) that a graphic card upgrade will
help or eliminate the problem. You did increase the display resolution on
the video card to match the monitor, I assume, which reduces frame rate and
would cause momentary reductions in frame rate to be more noticeable.

The increase in resolution was slight though, while it sounds from your post
as though the change in performance was more dramatic, so I do wonder if at
the same time the pixel depth was changed as well (for example, from 16 to
32 bits per pixel). Or even some other graphical settings in MSFS (higher
quality, for example).

All that said, there are no guarantees. The rest of the system *seems* fast
enough, but if you have a bottleneck somewhere other than the video adapter
itself, putting a new one in might not help, or might not help enough to
eliminate the problem you're seeing.

IMHO, the first thing to do is go back to the previous resolution you were
doing and make absolutely certain that the problem is tied to the
resolution. But as long as you've determined that for sure, I'd say
upgrading the video would be worth a try (hopefully you have a motherboard
with a PCIx slot, so you can use one of the most recent cards). *Most* of
the time, if a problem is tied directly to the resolution being used, the
video card *is* the bottleneck, and upgrading *will* help.

One could write a whole book on all the various issues that actually exist,
but the above generalizations apply most of the time. This newsgroup is
really beyond the scope of anything more in-depth anyway.

Pete