well I just bought the G3, and the graphics are choppy as hell, I'm supposing it's my moms computer doing this....it's alright on the Photofields, but as soon as I go to the other set of fields it's really really really choppy, odviously it's the graphics card right??

Welcome to Great Planes G3! Thats why they had to put them photo fields in with the program, because unless you have a new alienware computer, the G3 is going to run like garbage if you try to use any of the features, unless you turn every single setting down to the minimum, and then you might as well just have found an old used G2 somewhere! Sorry to hear about your trouble with it, but it is a common problem for many that isn't running a High End computer system.

That's alright I guess....�'m sure it will run great on my computer back at school, but I'm home for the holidays so kind of stuck messing around with it here for now. BTW, how much would it cost to upgrade RAM and a video card.

Depends on what type of Ram, and how much you currently have, and how much you need. You might need ****m, or ddr, etc. You will need to find out! If runnings Windows XP, I would recommend at minimum 512mb of Ram. As far as video card, $80-$150 can buy you a descent basic 128mb ATI or Nvidia Gforce card, unless of course you buy a card with alot of extra features besides the actual video support, and then you could spend more. If your card has an open AGP slot, then get an AGP Video Card. If you are not sure if you have an AGP slot, then just get a PCI card, because more than likely you will have an open PCI slot. All these upgrades won't don't you much good though unless you are at minimun running a Pentium 3 or AMD comparible with at least 1 gig. A Pentium 4 or AMD comparible running 1.4- 3.0 gig would be ideal! Just some things to think about!

Try turning the shadows off if they are activated. This will help the FPS greatly.

I'm not sure where you came up with that. I have a 2 year old Dell laptop with a 32 Mb Ati Video card, P4 2.4 Ghz Processor, and 256 RAM. It runs G3 like a champ, I can have all settings to medium or higher and still have 40-50 FPS.

I don't doubt yours does fine, but I was giving some recommendations IMO to try to get the G3 comparible to G2 and within the 75 fps range, and still enjoy some of the features like the moving trees, smoke, etc. I do realize that there are people running the G3 on less of a system than I recommended, I was basically just saying I would not recomend somebody to go out and buy it unless they were at least running what I recommended even though smaller stuff may indeed run it ok. I just would not want to be the one to tell that there system would for sure run it good!

ckangaroo70, sorry I misunderstood you. I get it now what you are saying. I sure would not either want to recommend someone with bare minimums, just to not have it work. But what you are saying about the alienware is right. You almost gotta have one of those to unlock G3's full potential!