Please donate to Omega's efforts, or at least click on the ad links at his site. He does all this for us at no charge.http://www.omegadrivers.net/Have fun,Greg

Mirror here:http://www.accesswave.ca/%7Esruxton/Greg

Ever since Service Pack 2 I have notices my graphics quality has dropped. More jagged edges on planes (even with AA at 4X). I have now installed the Omega 2.5.97 but wonder what are the best settings for my 9800 Pro. Any help appreciated.Mark.

I made the switch yesterday from ATi's to Omega, huge improvement for me.

No noticable improvements of either quality or performance. The advantage with Omega is that you get a nice control panel that combines all the features and options of Control Centre with the ease of use and performance of the old classic ATI control panel.

Hi Mark,These tweaked drivers are, as ever, a credit to Omega and are proving to be very stable on my setup.The only default driver setting I have changed is:Wait for Vertical Sync = Default On (I use a TFT LCD Monitor which refreshes at 60Hz) This setting eliminates any tearing in HL2 :)Otherwise, I leave the driver settings at their defaults for general use and use RadLinker to create a RadLink link to FSAutoStart with the following 3D settings when running FS9:Anti-Aliasing = 6xAnisotropic Filtering = 16x ForcedMikeP4 2.4GHz (400FSB), 1Gig PC2100 DDR Crucial, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Omega 2.5.97), SB Audigy (5.12.0001.0443), Hyundai ImageQuest Q17 17" TFT LCD 20ms Monitor (1280x1024x32), Gigabyte GA-8IRXP MoBo, Ultra-Quiet PSU 400W, WinXP Home (SP2), DirectX 9.0c, AGP Aperture = 128MB

One of the problems I seem to have is "shimmering" textures, particularly in the distance and cloud edges. I have the AA fixed now and changed Mip Mapping to High quality and AF to 8x quality.I guess the question is with the 9800 Pro, does moving AF to 16x change performance or does the card handle this without any issues.Mark.

I can't figure the shimmering problem out either - I didn't use to have this issue when I got the card late last year. I just rolled all the way back to the 4.1 driver to see if that would stop it, but the problem is still there - really puzzled with this.I'm wondering if it's AMD related - ATI had a bug in the 4.12 betas with HL2 that was causing flashing textures but ONLY on AMD CPUs - could this be similar? Anyone have a P4 system and experience bad shimmering with autogen and the terrain "crawling" effect? I'd really love to get to the bottom of this as it's annoying me to the point that I may just go get a 6800GT to stop it after Christmas.

Sounds strange...Autogen trees shimmer slightly especially with a Mipmap setting of anything above 4. That's because the cards use MSAA which does not AA the alpha textures. Never seen the actual terrain texture shimmer though. Do you have mipmap at 4 and Trilinear selected inside FS, and 8X Anisotropic filtering or more enabled?

Hi Mark,It's difficult to make any recommendations without knowing your system specs. Here are my current settings which haven't really altered much over the past 7 months since my session with FS-GS:In FS9.cfg:(TERRAIN)TERRAIN_ERROR_FACTOR=100.000000TERRAIN_MIN_DEM_AREA=10.000000TERRAIN_MAX_DEM_AREA=100.000000TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19 <-- this value is determined by where I intend to fly and the selection of the appropriate custom user profile via FSAutoStart.TERRAIN_TEXTURE_SIZE_EXP=8TERRAIN_AUTOGEN_DENSITY=5TERRAIN_USE_GRADIENT_MAP=1TERRAIN_EXTENDED_TEXTURES=1TERRAIN_DEFAULT_RADIUS=4.500000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_RADIUS=4.500000TERRAIN_EXTENDED_LEVELS=1And my in sim Display Settings:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/101158.jpgYou should be able to extrapolate as to what may be possible on your system by comparing with my system specs below my signature.As you will note, my system is far from being cutting edge, yet is still able to provide enough grunt to ensure smooth performance in a sim that over the past year or so has evolved way beyond its default installation. I won't pretend that this is maintained in all situations, but more than enough to keep me very happy :) Some 3rd party scenery and a/c designers seem to have the knack of producing products that are quite complex yet still manage to be frame rate friendly, whereas others.........you know the rest, I'm sure ;) The trick is to learn what you can and cannot do in a certain situation to maintain reasonable performance. This we all learn over time.At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, can I suggest you take a look in the Tips and Tricks and Hardware Discussion Forums. I've placed a couple of posts there the contents of which have served me very well for the past year or two. By following a few basic rules I have never found it necessary to reformat my HDs or reinstall FS9. FS9 runs as well, if not better than it did following the FS-GS experience in May 2004. Cheers!MikeP4 2.4GHz (400FSB), 1Gig PC2100 DDR Crucial, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB (Omega 2.5.97), SB Audigy (5.12.0001.0443), Hyundai ImageQuest Q17 17" TFT LCD 20ms Monitor (1280x1024x32), Gigabyte GA-8IRXP MoBo, Ultra-Quiet PSU 400W, WinXP Home (SP2), DirectX 9.0c, AGP Aperture = 128MB

Yup - mip at 4 and 16X AF. The closest I can come to making it go away is running 1600X1200 6X/16X, but that gets way too slow and plus my monitor can't do any more than 60Hz at that res, which is hard on the eyes, so I have to know it back to 1280.Cruachan,I did FS-GS a while back too and asked Mike about the shimmering I was seeing and he said it was all because of FS2004 not allowing the card to AA alpha textures, which I suppose makes sense, but I know for sure that I did not see this issue when I first built my system back when FS2004 came out...>Sounds strange...>Autogen trees shimmer slightly especially with a Mipmap>setting of anything above 4. That's because the cards use MSAA>which does not AA the alpha textures. Never seen the actual>terrain texture shimmer though. Do you have mipmap at 4 and>Trilinear selected inside FS, and 8X Anisotropic filtering or>more enabled?

The shimmering is actually the trees and 3D buildings, not the textures. My set up is actually running quite well other than that issue. Mike looking at your post the only difference between my set up and your is that you have all the terrain and scenery sliders the the right, I have them half way but you have the sight and draw distance full left while I have it in the middle. I will try your setup and see how it looks.My system is P4 2.8, 800FSB, ATI9800 Pro, 1 Gig DDR ram, Audigy 2 sound card. AGP Aperture is set at 64. Only thing I might want to do is upgrade my soundcard driver.Mark.

Well trees will always shimmer unless you're using the super-sampling/multi sampling mixed modes on a Geforce or you use an old card like Geforce2 or Voodoo5 (which support SSAA). Autogen buildings should not shimmer though.

>The shimmering is actually the trees and 3D buildings, not the>textures. >>My set up is actually running quite well other than that>issue.>My system is P4 2.8, 800FSB, ATI9800 Pro, 1 Gig DDR ram,>Audigy 2 sound card. AGP Aperture is set at 64. Only thing I>might want to do is upgrade my soundcard driver.Mark,Might want to set the AGP ap. to 128? I've finally got my rig running with minimal 'shimmering' @ ~30 FPS consistently. Shweeeet, as the saying goes .jbDell 8300 P4 3.2Ghz 800Mhz FSB HT enabled (I know, this goes against the grain here )1 GB Micron/Crucial DDR PC3200 (400 MHz) SDRAM 4x256ATI 9800 Pro 128MB, AGP ap. @ 128MB (CCC 4.12...tried the Omega's and liked 'em, but didn't see a difference really).6x AA, 8x AF17" IBM CRT @ 85Hz, Vsync locked, Refresh Rate override @ 85Hz, 1152x864x32Mipmap Detail Level in CCC @ Performance, @ 4 in FS 9.1 (any more and the shimmering really gets nuts).Best FS has ever run since they made it for the Mac .