I tried turning off hardware sound acceleration in dxdiag. I have an Emu 1212m installed. Blackshark now gives me an average of about 19fps with 20fps set as my limit (it will go up to 22fps this way). I can get a lot higher peak framerates if I don't set a limit, but I also can get unplayable ones. This way it doesn't look great, but it works. I have scenes and textures on medium and haze still on in the options.lua. My 3850 has temporal AA, 4X AA, low adaptive, 2X AF, cat ai on standard, and v-sync. I didn't find turning haze off to improve things and made the terrain look to same-ish...not to mention my custom labels being useless for finding targets that way. I dig the green IFF beacons and the gray, faint enemy dots in the haze behind the helmet sight. The dots give way to the actual target visually when I'm close and the haze is less. Hardware acceleration for the soundcard helps a lot, though the brief sound loading freezes haven't gone away when a sound plays for the first time. I think this made the big difference. Pretty much everything except Battle can be flown now sufficiently. And even that one can be very carefully run if I wait for the ground to ground rockets to stop firing...just barely, but possible. The effects and smoke seem to be the worst culprits, now. I have not yet installed the patch, so I don't know if those can be tweaked down further. I just flew three missions very successfully with the GlovePIE trim system running. Yes the rotor sound plays even when it's paused, but I think I can live with that for the time being. I will say, the first time I turned accel off with no fps limit in the graphics.ini, I was totally amazed at how much fun it is to fly at 40-60fps. Very different, euphoric sensation...and easier. That was with nothing going on, though. Normally, I'm very very careful and not the least bit euphoric. Joyriding that turns to boredom is not an issue ;-)