Hi,For everyone with an ATI X800 Pro card (and maybe other cards as well) I found out an amazing thing tonight!!When increasing the Anti-Aliasing from 2X -> 4X and the Anisotropic Filtering from 8X -> 16X both the actual FPS value and the overall smoothness in FS9 increased in a way I never seen before using any other tweaks to get the most out of the sim. I still have trouble beliving this myself, I truely find it amazing how increasing the graphical quality could actually increase the FPS and smoothness in the sim at the same time. And again, both the graphical quality increasement as well as the FPS and smoothness increasement are HUGE!!!Below you will find two screenshots, one showing the kind of FPS I get and that is with almost every setting in FS9 at max, Ultimate Traffic installed with 100% traffic intensity and as described above 4X AA and 16X AF. The other screenshot shows where I changed the AA and AF setting making this difference.Hopefully this will work just as good as it did for me for everyone else as well, here's a happy captain :-) :-)http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/92805.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/92806.jpg

hmm... I've always been custom setting the catalyst drivers. When I get my new card I'll try your settings.What resolution do you run?I run 1600x1200 on one monitor and 1024x768 on the second, and run FS in windowed mode, since I've not seen any performance increase running full screen.

Hi, I tried your suggestion, and my frames did go up, however my panel gets some blurry spots. Most noticable on the radio stack, see shots below. I only notice this when I set the card to a certain AA or AS. If change either one from application preference, I get the blurriness. Shot one and two are the blurry spotsShot three and four are non blurryI am running at 1024x768 anyone have any suggestions? http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/92820.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/92821.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/92822.jpghttp://forums.avsim.net/user_files/92823.jpg

Hi Timothy,I only run on one monitor using 1280x960 (heard that is the resolution recommended for the PMDG panel) and full screen mode.

Richard,this is a very interesting fingding. I will give it a try tonight.What drivers do you use?Wolfgangsys specsPentium 4/ 2.4 MhzAti Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB512 MB DDRWin XP Prohttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/ng_driver.jpg

Hi,Find it a bit hard to see the blurriness in the screenshots but one suggestion would be to...1. Make sure you use the latest Catalyst drivers (ver 6.14.10.6476)2. Be sure you have reinstalled the driver if you're running Win XP and have applied SP2. The recommendation after applying SP2 is to reinstall both the chipset, sound card and graphics drivers (and maybe also DirectX, haven't figured out exactly how to do this yet though).Also found out when installing all my drivers that the order in which you reinstall the drivers is very important! You should FIRST install the chipset drivers and THEN install the sound- and graphics drivers. This change was actually worth more than 1500 points!! in 3D Mark 2003 when I did some testing.

Hi,I'm using the latest Catalyst drivers (ver 6.14.10.6476). Also very important seems to be in which order you reinstall the drivers if installing SP2 to Win XP, see my post above.And yes, I'm still very amazed and can't wait to get home from work today and do some more testing and enjoy what feels like almost a totally new simulator both in graphical quality and speed/smoothness :-) For example, I usually fly using the 2D panel and before when accessing the different 2D views from within the cockpit (left, right, forward-right etc...) there was often a short delay before the graphics was rendered. Now the new views just pop up the very same microsecond I access the views and all the graphics even in dense areas are already there - truly amazing!!!Hope you'll find this change work equal as good for you!Cheers,

I observed a similar increase in framerate on my laptop (ACER 1356LCi with Radeon Mobility 9700) after increasing the quality settings to maximum values in the ATI Controlpanel.I run the simulator with most of the sliders at medium, but before that I could not reach more than 20 fps and this was never a stable value.Now I get 25 fps locked with full 3d clouds at a 60 miles cloud drwaing range, full traffic (by Project AI), which is quite a lot for my system configuration.Robert

Amazing how it can be true that you actually gain performance by increasing the quality but I guess it might be due to the fact that you let the hardware (ie your GFX card and the device drivers for it) handle the graphics rather than the program itself - in this case FS9 and that the HW and device drivers are doing this in a far more efficient way than any software...and especially FS9...:-/

Well, I guess this yields the same results, but on my Radeon I've discovered earlier that running 4x and 16x is the best possible solution.

Thanks for that tip! Will try this tonight.One more thing if you missed it in the other post, try to set your AGP aperture to 32Mb for a few more frames per second. That should also be good for 2-5 additional FPS in heavy polygon environments.The default is either 128Mb or 64Mb and this is changed in the BIOS setup.

I too noticed a huge FPS increase by enabling Anti-Aliasing in Radeon settings and switching it off in FS.My Anisotropic Filtering is set to 'Application Prefernce'. If I change this should I turn off filtering (Tri-Linear) in FS???

>your AGP aperture to 32Mb for a few more frames per second. >That should also be good for 2-5 additional FPS in heavyNot on every system. I tried all possible aperture settings and 64 MB gives me best performance. Michael J.WinXP-Home,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8, Radeon X800 Pro,WD 36GB Raptor,1 GB PC3200 http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

>My Anisotropic Filtering is set to 'Application Prefernce'. If>I change this should I turn off filtering (Tri-Linear) in>FS???No, leave tri-linear on in FS.Michael J.WinXP-Home,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8, Radeon X800 Pro,WD 36GB Raptor,1 GB PC3200

I set my 9800Pro to 4X/4X now because to me that does the best job of reducing the texture shimmering that ATI cards produce. I really wish they'd fix that - I'm considering buying a GF6800GT because of it.