Quote Originally Posted by nihil
The guy is talking crap IMO...
Probably. I don't know really - it kind of made sense - like, if the CPU is spending all of it's resources sending information to the GPU since it can handle such a load? I don't know. Makes my head hurt.

In my pea-brain, a more powerful GPU should only help, never hinder performance. But I didn't ever pay much attention in Data Structures class either - bored me to tears.

Quote Originally Posted by nihil
If I read your earlier posts correctly, the issue is about video resolution?
No. Did I say something about video resolution? I tried the game on every resolution available, it didn't seem to make any difference.

Quote Originally Posted by nihil
And none of that explains artifacts (diagonal lines) when in non-gaming situations?
No, it doesn't. That's clearly a hardware problem. (They were small, horizontal lines)

Quote Originally Posted by nihil
1. What does the game manufacturer suggest as H/W specs?
2. Has your stepdad updated the game software recently.........like so the H/W is now out of spec?
The minimum specs for FSX are very low, but there are no recommended specs on the MS site. From what I've gathered around the Intarwebz, the "recommended" specs for MS FSX are a 3GHz dual-core processor, at least 1Gb DDR2 memory and a 512 MB GPU or better.

I updated the game for him a while back, but I don't think it has affected the game graphics-wise.

Regardless, I'm sending the card back. It's either defective or it won't work on that system. The computer is like ten years old, so it's time for an upgrade. I have a Biostar G31-M7 TE still in the plastic. So I will probably use it with nice quad-core processor and 4GB RAM to upgrade their system. Then I can buy a PCIe graphics card and not have to worry about whether it will work or not. I just bought a Radeon HD 5770 1GB card for $100 for my computer, and I'm very happy with it.