Microsoft’s required hardware to run the sim is a 450 Mhz Pentium system with 128 MB of system RAM and an 8 MB accelerated 3D video card. The truth is, you probably could get the program to load on such a system but it would be far from usable. If you really want to run this sim with reasonable performance you’ll need, at a minimum, a 1 Ghz system with 256 MB of system RAM and a relatively recent 64 MB video card. If you have to choose between a faster CPU or a faster video card, optimize for the CPU. MSFS 2004 needs all the number crunching power it can get. Also, if you really want to be good to yourself, double the RAM to 512 MB. You won't be sorry you did.

If your system is not up to these requirements then you probably won’t be very happy with the program. The faster your hardware is the harder you'll be able to push the simulation towards the maximum it can provide. Fast hardware also gives you some breathing room for power hungry 3rd party add-ons like highly detailed airports, aircraft and high-resolution scenery. At this point in time there's no such thing as too much power as far as this program is concerned.

The first thing you’ll need to do is make sure that you have plenty of disk space. You’ll need 1.8 GB of free space for the basic installation however, if you plan on adding 3^rd party aircraft, scenery and utilities you’ll need a lot more. Most users end up expanding from between 2 to 5 gigabytes so it's a good idea to allow for this from the beginning.

If you possibly can, repartition your hard drive so that you have a single partition that's used for nothing other then MSFS, planes, scenery ect. 20 MB will give you plenty of room for add-on aircraft and mesh scenery. Take a look at the size of your present MSFS2002 installation and use that as a guide. The reason for doing this is to reduce stuttering. In areas of dense auto-gen the program goes to the HD a lot and that can cause stuttering if the load gets too high. Giving MSFS it's own partition will allow you to easily keep it perfectly defragged and that will go a long way towards getting and maintaining smooth performance.

Once the software is up and running it's time to start tweaking for best performance. To get started, take the default setup with the 172 at KSEA as your starting point. This is one of the toughest areas for frame rates so if you tune for smooth performance there, you’ll have it just about everywhere else.

Make sure your field of view at all angles is set to 1.0X and then go to Options-Settings-Display and click on the hardware tab. Make sure that your video card is properly recognized under Device Name. To the left you'll see a list of all the resolution and color depth combinations that are available for your video card. The best choice here will vary somewhat depending on the size of your monitor and the power of your hardware. Most users will find 1024x768x32 to be a good compromise. Go higher if you have a high end video card, fast CPU and large monitor (17+). While you're still in the Hardware section, note the check boxes on the right. In most cases "Render to Texture" and "Transform and Lighting" should both be checked. Do make sure that anti- aliasing is not checked. That is only a reasonable option if you're running a very high end video card. In any case, leave it off for now. "Hardware Rendered Lights" should be set to 6. Set "Mip Mapping Quality to 5 and "Global Max Texture Size" to Medium. Set the frame rate slider to maximum.

Before you go any further into actual testing you'll need to work around a bug in the Auto-Gen system. In addition to the regular Auto-Gen that we had in MSFS 2002, Microsoft added two more auto-gen types. This makes for great looking cityscapes but unfortunately there's a problem with the system not clearing objects out of memory once they are no long visible. This will cause a degradation in performance as you fly the pattern in urban areas. Until MS comes up with a patch the best way to minimize the impact of this is to turn off the XML based Auto-Gen objects. This won't effect the appearance of the automatic landscape very much but will help performance considerably. To disable simply go into your MSFS Autogen folder and rename the default.xml file to default.xml.bak 

Now we move on to the meat of the matter, the scenery settings tab. This is were most of the action is for balancing visual detail with smooth performance and good frame rates. Here's a rundown of the starting settings:

Special effects detail - medium

Terrain mesh complexity - 60

Terrain texture size - high

Terrian detail - land only

Water effects - none

Scenery complexity - normal

Autogen density - normal

Add-on dynamic scenery box - unchecked

Ground scenery shadows box - checked

Sun glare box - checked

Lens flair box - unchecked

Now move to the the Weather settings display tab.

Set global weather quality to "medium low."

Sight distance - 60 miles

Cloud draw distance - 40 miles

3D cloud percentage - 20%

Detailed clouds radio button - checked

Cloud coverage density - low

Before we start looking at frame rates we'll need to make a few more settings. Go to "Options-settings-ATC" and uncheck all 3 boxes. Then go to World-weather and select "User defined weather." Click on Customize and set clouds to "few, precipitation to "none", visibility to "20 miles" and wind speed to "none." You'll need to reset this every time you start MSFS while testing. You might also want to go to "World-date and time" and set time to "day" in case the sim has set you up in the middle of the night.

Ok, now we're ready to find your base frame rate. Return to the cockpit and press shift+Z twice. That will bring up a frame rate display in the upper left hand corner of your screen. Watch the numbers for a while and try and determine what the average rate is. If the rate is less then 20 then you'll want to go back to the scenery settings and reduce the levels of the following settings:

Terrain mesh complexity

Auto-gen density

Scenery complexity

If you're on really low end hardware you might have to turn off detailed clouds and perhaps reduce your screen resolution to 800x600.

These are the biggest frame rate hogs so reduce them until you see frame rates of at least 20. If you're getting rates over 30 you can start to increase these settings until you max them out or until your frame rate drops below 30. The last step in turning the sweet spot is to go back to your hardware tab and set your target frame rate to a value that's a few frames per second lower then the average value you observed. When you return to the cockpit the frame rate display should be almost constant and will indicate the locked speed in FPS. Go ahead and fly the pattern and keep an eye on the frame rate display. If it spends a lot of time below the locked value or if you experience a lot of stuttering, reduce it by a few fps and try again. After one or two rounds you'll find the optimum setting. If you have to you can go all the way down to 20 FPS and still have a smooth looking display. Anything lower then 18 fps is going to start looking choppy and will also cut into the maximum gauge refresh rate. If that's the best you can do you can cut back further on the settings listed above. That will get you running but it also indicates that it's probably time to consider upgrading your hardware.

The final locked rate and settings that you used to achieve it should now become your standard setup for running MSFS2002. When your hardware or requirements change, simply re-run the test and you'll be good to go.