So what's with mipmaps and fences, or corrugated tin sheds. For that matter, buildings with vertical lines that are meant to represent sidings of any kind or long fences.When I reduce the mipmap quality to 4 in FS9 and then set my ATI card to performance for the mipmap setting, (as opposed to quality), any movement of vertical lines subsides to a reasonable level. If I increase the mipmaps in either FS9 or CCC, vertical lines start to move. It's the barbershop pole effect on steroids! On some buildings it looks like the neon ceiling in downtown Las Vegas as it's washing from one image to another, or a wave passing over the exterior of the building.The funny thing is that I have absolutely no FPS degradation what so ever when mipmaps are set to the highest setting in both the CCC applet and the FS9 settings dialog. I just get those vertical lines moving around and things shimmering.So what's up with that?Mark

I haven't had an ATI card for a long time so I'm not sure if its the same settings...but Nvidia has a setting called Tranparency AA which you can set to either multisample or Supersample. Using super sample greatly improves (although does not completely remove) the effect you're talking about...i refer to it as shimmer. Ofcourse high settings of regular AA help too, but have a big impact on FPS. I see no difference either with mipmap settings.

Thanks Red...I do have a setting which works with the transparencies. It's called "Adaptive Anti-Aliasing" and I've got it set to it's maximum. I just can't figure how mipmaps and fences go hand in hand...always thought that they improved with higher settings and you just loose FPS. I can set everything to the max and still get 30-40 FPS with the shimmer of a lifetime :)Mark

What you are seeing is a moire interference pattern, and it isn't really anything to do with what your computer can handle in terms of graphics, but a visual affect caused by the clashing of two frequencies, in this case, the frequency resolution of your monitor (i.e the grid of pixels it has in order to display the image), and the frequency pattern of the fence or brick wall in FS.You can sometimes see the effect in real life too, for example if you drive past a military base or prison which has a double row of chain link fences and you look at the two fences as they pass by. Another time you will occasionally see it, is if you scan a printed image with a desktop scanner, if the scanner resolution clashes with the dot resolution of the printed image you are scanning.Here's a bit about moire patterns, which should explain the effect: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moir%C3%A9_patternAl

My ATI card is behaving at the moment, I updated the Catalyst but had problems and went back to an older version, my settings areSmoothvision (middle) SmoothvisionHD (High Quality @16X) Catalyst AI (Standard) MipMap (High Quality) Vert Refresh (Enable - Quality)Open GL (Triple Buffering ticked)I did have the same problems as you and found experimenting with settings was the only answer, also try altering MipMap from High Quality to High Performance and viceversa . Don't know why, but it seemed to work if you altered it whilst in FS9 by hitting the Windows key.

My ATI card is behaving at the moment, I updated the Catalyst but had problems and went back to an older version, my settings areSmoothvision (middle) SmoothvisionHD (High Quality @16X) Catalyst AI (Standard) MipMap (High Quality) Vert Refresh (Enable - Quality)Open GL (Triple Buffering ticked)I did have the same problems as you and found experimenting with settings was the only answer, also try altering MipMap from High Quality to High Performance and viceversa . Don't know why, but it seemed to work if you altered it whilst in FS9 by hitting the Windows key.

Had this same issue with my nividia cards, 8800GTX and GTX285. The only way to eliminate any "swimming" as we see with Nvidia cards was to crank my AA all the way to 16xs or 32xs. Then the IQ is perfect but you need to have a powerful machine/card to AA the entire FS screen at 16xs or 32xs. 32xs with clouds can cripple a machine...I fought this for ages until I just cranked my AA to the max, no other setting seemed to have any affect at all.-PaulPS, with Nvidia this seems to have gotten worse with the later driver releases... It is like a problem we had ages ago that seemed to dissappear for a while and is now back worse than ever...

Thanks Paul, Echo, and Alan...Alan that is the best description on the planet for what is happening. Slam dunk [1] on that one. Well, so far, I've found a couple of things that I can regale to the group on this issue.I found that my desktop refresh rate was different then the rate that CCC was allowing FS9 to operate under. The native refresh on my flat panel is 75hz and FS9 was running at 60hz. Also, I found that disabling Catalyst AI on my card helped too. Disabling Catalyst AI made another issue, (the kneeboard not displaying it's skin), go away. So I can increase the mipmap settings 1 tick, (quantum increase of 1), but anymore then that it's curtains...of interference patterns.The good news is that even with the reduced mipmap settings, the image quality has not suffered tremendously. It's still pretty darn good for a 6 year old app running on one of my older boxes. One more note, if you ever run into issues with your ATI card, you might try disabling Catalyst AI before you do anything else. I have a Radeon 4870X2 and it apparently has 2 GPUs in it. The rumor is that if you disable Catalyst AI, that card won't run in crossfire mode between it's 2 internal GPUs. But ever since I disabled Catalyst AI, my video is smoking. It might just be the desktop vs. application refresh rate issue improved the environment and disabling the Catalyst AI simply kicked the other setting into high gear. I'm not sure yet but if it's true that disabling Catalyst AI removes the crossfire ability of the card and then it preforms better, well that kind of math is easy, even I can count that high :)Mark[1] Slam Dunk

What you are seeing is a moire interference pattern, and it isn't really anything to do with what your computer can handle in terms of graphics, but a visual affect caused by the clashing of two frequenciesAl

Thanks for that Al, you always seem to contribute very interesting explanations.

Thanks for that Al, you always seem to contribute very interesting explanations.

Interferometric approachLet us consider now two transparent patterns with a contrast I that varies with a sinusoidal law: I_1(x) = I_0 \cdot \sin (2\pi \cdot k_1 \cdot x) I_2(x) = I_0 \cdot \sin (2\pi \cdot k_2 \cdot x)(the steps are respectively p1 = 1/k1 and p2 = 1/k2), when the patterns are superimposed, the resulting intensity (interference) is I(x) = I_0 \cdot ( \sin (2\pi \cdot k_1 \cdot x) + \sin (2\pi \cdot k_2 \cdot x) )with the Euler's formula: I(x) = I_0 \cdot 2 \cos \left ( 2\pi \frac{(k_1-k_2)}{2} \cdot x \right ) \cdot \sin \left ( 2\pi \frac{(k_1+k_2)}{2} \cdot x \right )We can see that the resulting intensity is made of a sinus law with a high "spatial frequency" (wave number) which is the average of the spatial frequencies of the two patterns, and of a sinus law with a low spatial frequency which is the half of the difference between the spatial frequencies of the two patterns. This second component is an "envelope" for the first sinus law. The wavelength λ of this component is the inverse of the spatial frequency \frac{1}{\lambda} = \frac{k_1 - k_2}{2} = \frac{1}{2} \cdot \left ( \frac{1}{p_1} - \frac{1}{p_2} \right )if we consider that's p1 = p and p2 = p+δp: \lambda = 2\frac{p_1 p_2}{p_2 - p_1} \approx 2\frac{p^2}{\delta p} .The distance between the zeros of this envelope is λ/2, and the maxima of amplitude are also spaced by λ/2; we thus obtain the same results as the geometrical approach, with a discrepancy of p/2 which is the uncertainty linked to the reference that is considered: pattern 1 or pattern 2. This discrepancy is negligible when δp << p.This phenomenon is similar to the stroboscopy.Well now it all makes perfect sense!!!! :( Not often I feel THAT stupid...In all seriousness, thanks Al, you can see this in some of the still shots so I guess when we move around the FS worlds it just enhances the pattern...Funny how many topics on shimmering/waviness/ AA are going on right now. I really feel like it has all gotten much worse with the more recent driver releases (at least with Nvidia)No worries Mark,-Paul

I really feel like it has all gotten much worse with the more recent driver releases (at least with Nvidia)No worries Mark,-Paul

I feel the same way, but since I get most of my 'shimmer' from complex add-ons...it can be related to the fact that I have been using more and more of those.