I found this article over at Tom's Hardware site and thought it does a pretty good job describing how todays video cards work. Most of it is pretty easy to read and understand. Toward the end of the article they tend to get a little too technical for the average person like me. Over all they have a lot of good information.http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20040603/index.htmlThere are also links at Tom's Hardware that test both Nvidia and ATI's newest bread of cards.Terry

It's a pretty good read.As far as Anisotropic is concerned - I'm all for optimizations as long as they don't impact the image quality noticably. 3D cards and computers in general do a lot of "cheating" - you don't see FS2004 emulating 100% the real-world physics, do you?The whole point of realtime 3D graphics is to "cheat" - If you do all the lighting, geometry, textures etc. of a typical FS2004 scene 100% accurately in a 3d rendering program, one frame could take minutes, even hours to render. In FS, we get tens of frames/second.Some cheating or optimization is always needed. It's better to be able to run Anisotropic filtering with some mipmap bands, angle optimizations or whatever, than to have to disable it alltogether for performance reasons. BTW, if you have setup FS correctly, you can easily see the angle optimization - you can see how texture sharpness is reduced slightly as you bank your aircraft to certain angles.I think that there should always be an option in the driver control panel to disable *all* such optimizations, so that if the users feels that there is power to spare, he/she can enable full filtering for the maximum image quality and for apples to apples comparisons in reviews (if one card is slower than the other without optimizations, but much faster with, which one would you choose, provided image quality is similar?).

Compared to the early versions of FS, we have come a long way. Does this mean we should stop improving the product? No way. Until Microsoft delivers a code/program that will allow all those environmental effects to be sent quickly to the video card, we will have choppy/blurry video no mater what card is installed.Terry