Question-Do you think MS knows how bad our blurries are

[Guest sfgiants]

I'm new to the forum but shouldn't we not have to tweak our cards for an application to perform.For myself, I have a Pentium 2.0, 768 RAM and a Ti 4600 card (Visiontek).Do you think MS could have fixed this with a patch?Tim

[Guest]

Just a personal opinion here, of course, but it seems to me that there are several larger issues much more problematic than blurries (which by the way vary enormously depending on systems, OS and a bunch of other factors not all objective). Come to mind: cloud simulation is poor and, if one listens to the experts, limited by the engine itself. Flight models, or at least several aspects of them, are far from being "as good as it gets". And a bunch of other important stuff. I'd gladly take blurries for any of the above. There are also lots of tweaks to minimize these blurries, which are somewhere in the archives...

[John_Cillis 2,406]

Since you're new to the forum, you don't know about the prohibition against patch discussions. They tend to turn into flame wars and trollfests....I think the short answer to your question is that Microsoft doesn't consider this an issue. Reports are that CFS3 has the same problem. I didn't mind tweaking my card to maximize FS2002's performance. I'm that addicted to the sim. When I fly now, I get an acceptable display, helped by the fact that I keep my settings realistic vs. the slower speed of my system. Why do faster systems have the same problem? My guess is most owners of the faster systems max everything. They max AI, which uses textures. They max autogen, which uses textures. They use complex aircraft with reflections and 20-30 megs of textures. Add to that the texture load from the default ground textures, and even a high end system is going to shuffle them away in favor of lower resolution mipmaps--and the blurries begin.When I first bought FS2002 about a year back, my Voodoo 3 just couldn't hold all I wanted it to in it's itty bitty 16 megs. Result: always blurred textures. When I upgraded to a GeF/2, it was a whole new world. But I still find I can blur my textures in a heartbeat if I max my settings, without lowering the fps lock. The fact that I hear of some users with 128 meg cards running into the issue, makes me think that there may be an upward limit to how many textures FS might allow in memory at one time.The best tips for minimizing the dynamic blurries (our forum label for the blurries that happen when moving through scenery at speed):-Lock the fps at a realistic level (I keep mine at 25, and lower it to 18 when I want to fly with AI and/or Autogen)-Avoid rapid view switching... FS loads the textures for what you "see" first...-Don't make the view too "Wide Angle" Many people were adjusting the zoom to around .75... It does give a better sensation of movement, but at the expense of requiring more textures to be displayed on the screen at one time. I keep mine at the default 1.00, and live with the slight distortion that causes.-Kill all apps other than FS2002. This includes scanning your system for spyware, which may not load through the normal registry and win.ini vectors.And for Static blurries (general texture sharpness), two simple rules for me have worked well:Lower the LOD to a negative value (I use -.5, others take it down even further)Enable Anisotropy to the max level your card can support.Yes--that's a lot of tweaking. But I still find it worth it, and the end result is a flyable sim, much more so than FS2000 ever was...-John