I recently purchased a 6800GT, and I've been putting it through its paces on MS9. I've discovered a few things about impr0ving performance and visual quality, and hope that I can save someone else some tweaking time. I would imagine that these settings might be beneficial to any of the 6800 cards (600 Ultra, 6800GT and 6800).Caveat: As with all things, your mileage may vary.First of all, it would seem that with max sliders and max details in all situtations -- that a solid, continuous fps is theoretically impossible. The performance on my machine can still get bogged down when flying close to clouds in very heavy weather. For this reason, some compromises are necessary (at least for me) to enjoy consistently smooth performance.That said, the 6800 cards are great and I can typically fly at more than 60fps cross-country If I put the fps slider on unlimited, with peaks over 100 fps.To arrive at these suggestions, I have performed some tests with my plane on the ground in Anchorage with a heavy layer of clouds. I used FRAPS to find the average fps. Although MS9 seems to redraw clouds rather randomly every time you load a saved flight, I have found this to be a pretty dependable situation in terms of repeatable fps.On to the tweaks...RESOLUTIONWith such a powerful card, FS9 becomes CPU-limited, so you might as well crank up that resolution to 1600x1200. You'll probably only loose a few frames. On my test, I was getting 48fps at 1600x1200 and 50fps at 1024x768. Not much of a difference!FULL SCREEN OR WINDOW?Running full screen seems to be the choice for faster fps in my tests, with about a 20% improvement over windowed mode.ANTIALIASINGYou should definately run antialiasing through your Nvidia control center, rather than using the FS9 setting. At 1600x1200, I have found 2x FSAA to be the best balance of performance/looks. The penalty for 2xFSAA is negligible, but there is a hard hit at 4xFSAA with clouds. Without heavy clouds, 4xFSAA is great. You may want to decide what setting is appropriate for you based on whether or not you typically fly in real-world weather. I would not suggest using the "2xQ" setting, since it improves antialiasing somewhat at the cost of all-around blurrier textures.ANISOTROPIC FILTERINGI'd recommend at least 8x or even 16x. In my tests, there is a negligible performance difference between the AF settings, and the improvement in visual quality is pretty astounding. 8xAF or 16xAF might be a bit too sharp (and potentially shimmery) for some.DISPLAY SETTINGSYou can crank up most features, depending upon your flying style and locations. I keep scenery density and autogen at "very dense". I'd probably turn down scenery density to "dense" if I was flying around busy airports, since the added airport scenery can sometimes be a bit of a drain. For weather settings, I keep sight distance to 60 miles and cloud draw to 40. There is a big performance difference between a cloud draw of 40 and 50, but only a small difference betweeen 30 and 40. I keep cloud coverage at maximum, but you can adjust to taste if you aren't worried about having solid overcasts.On the hardware tab, definately check "Transform and Lighting". Disabling this costs 50% performance on my system! Set your target frame rate to your preference. Running at unlimited is certainly possible (And may speed up terrain texture loads), but in my experience this will often create a situation where the fps is very high but the actual display is somewhat stuttery (especially in turns). I keep mine at around 35fps.Set Global max texture size to "Massive". Your 6800 should have plenty of video memory.Your choice of whether to tick or untick the "Render to Texture" box may depend upon your choice of clouds (See below).CLOUD TEXTURESI use the "Highest Peformnce" (HiFPSv2) cloud textures from FSW (http://fsw.simflight.com/FSWdownload.html). This gives a rather signifigant boost in performance (20%) with clouds, with a somewhat reduced visual quality (the clouds loose a bit of definition). I am currently trying to sort out whether the 32-bit set or DXT3 set is the best choice for this video card. The choice seems to depend upon whether or not I check the "Render to Texture" box. IF I use the DXT3 set, unchecking this box gives around 50 fps in my tests, and checked it is only 38fps. The opposite is true with the 32-bit textures. If anyone has any insight into what the best choice is here, I'd love to hear it.That's it for now. I hope this has been helpful to someone.

The manual for AS 2004 recommends Chris willis 32-bit clouds because then you can disable render to texture box which kind of is the opposite of what you are finding?Kind of weird isn