ATI 9700 problem w/FS2004

[brucek 38]

Hi Doug and Glenn,I have the ATI 9800 Pro (128) but not FS2004! I'll pick it up this weekend if it's available locally here in the Denver area. I'll report back here, but would alos appreciate any feedback when you're able.Thanks,Bruce.

[Guest]

FredI have heard talk about fastwrite and is avaiable in control panel on some versions of the ati releases. Just by the sound of it, it would seem it is a performance benefit. Just curious.BobB

[JimmiG 244]

Hopefully all this will be fixed in Cat 3.7 though it's strange that it isn't fixed in Cat 3.6 since ATI shuold have known about these problems. So the water uses EMBM? I thought it looked very good for being just multi-textured :-lolThose thinking of getting a Radeon cards should not worry. Issues like these are common with all videocards (not just ATI) and are 99% of the time fixed in the next driver release.

[W2DR 1,859]

Fred - Unfortunately, the Pro won't mod. It has to be the 128MB non-pro on the 9700 PCB. But for anyone that has one of those, the latest release of RivaTuner will do the driver hack. The mod will work on about 6 of every 10 cards. The lucky 60% end up with a 9700 Pro with no physical change to the board. What a deal :-) . The unlucky ones, like me, get to spend more money :-( .Doug

[W2DR 1,859]

Bruce and Glenn - The 9800 Pro (it's a 128) is installed and working like a champ. The only thing I see is a slight flicker when switching from windowed mode to full-screen. All of the problems I saw with the 9500 are gone. But that's after only 30 minutes of "playing" with it. If I see anything else I'll do another post.DougPS: 3.6 drivers and DX9a

[Guest SoarPics]

Anybody steer me toward a solution for using RivaTuner to tweak my 9700 Pro. When I call up the RivaTuner main page it tells me "there are no supported drivers for this display adapter" I've tried the 3.4's, 3.5's and now running the 3.6's.Thanks,

[W2DR 1,859]

Back again. I, too, have the problem with the Alt key when running full-screen. No big deal though, a driver update will fix that. All else looks great.Doug

[brucek 38]

Thanks Doug! Enjoy FS2004 and that new card!Bruce.

[brucek 38]

Hi Doug,Do you mind sharing your video settings with FS2004 and/or FS2002? I assume you have the control panel with the 3.6 drivers (card settings)- I'm unsure how to set my FS2002 video settings, and I have no idea on the FS'04 settings available.Thanks,Bruce.

[Guest cwra6]

Add me to the chorus. I have a 9700 Pro and am having terrible flickers as noted here, especially when using the alt key - it also does so when loading. Really headache and nausea forming. Otherwise, the "enhanced multiple monitor suppport" asside (what a pain in the butt), it looks like a great sim. Visually it really pops like 2002 never did. Colin

[W2DR 1,859]

'Morning Bruce - On both FS2002 and FS2004 I have reset the .cfg file graphics options back to the defaults. After fiddling with them for two years I finally decided it just wasn't worth the effort to keep changing stuff which seemed not to make a difference anyway :-) . In both versions, the display options sliders are all the way to the right except for the water detail which is off only 'cause I can't stand the way it looks. (The options available in FS2004 are very similar to those in FS2002.) Oops, one other exception. With FS2004 I keep the autogen scenery set to normal if I have Ultimate Traffic running. I've found the autogen in FS2004 to be THE framerate killer. It's much denser than FS2002 and if the slider is all the way to the right with UT running it can really start to bog things down (I never knew there were THAT many trees around). On the video card I've just maxxed it all out - 6xAA, 16xAF, Smoothvision set to Quality, and High Quality set on Texture Preference and MipMap Detail. The monitor resolution is set to 1280x960x32. And all you guys were right, I should have dumped the Ti4200 a long time ago.....DougNorthwood 2.2a at 2.72Ghz (Intel HSF)Abit TH7II-R512MB Samsung 40ns PC800ATI 9800 ProCat. 3,6's DX9a WinXP ProWD's 20GB, 20GB, 60GB, 120GB, 120GBInwin case / Enermax 431W PSU Edited 'cause I can't spel

[brucek 38]

Hi Doug,Thanks for the info on the 9800 Pro. "On the video card I've just maxxed it all out - 6xAA, 16xAF, Smoothvision set to Quality, and High Quality set on Texture Preference and MipMap Detail. "Do you have AA and/or bi-linear or tri-linear filtering set to on in FS2002/Display? I've often wondered about the interaction of those settings and those of the card. I'm also running my flatscreen in DVI mode from the 8500 Pro. It does limit resolution to 1280*1024, but appears to make transitions between objects smoother too.Thanks again,Bruce.

[Guest Bigshot]

I always run with Trilinear filtering checked in the display/settings. That setting seems to override the card menu settings as bilinear looks awful compared to Trilinear. I also see that there's a video card bandwidth setting in the aircraft config file affecting speed of textures. This could be interesting if anyone is seeing popup textures. See this thread and in the FAQ scroll down to where Texture bandwidth is discussed: http://www.flightsimnetwork.com/dcforum/DC...mID21/1048.html

[W2DR 1,859]

I turn off the AA in the sim and always force it through the drivers. Reason being that I never use fullscreen - I always run the sim windowed. I've always had the filtering set to tri-linear for two reasons - I can't see any difference and I don't know what it does anyway. I actually spent some time a while back trying to learn what the difference was between the two filter modes and how they interacted with the driver options. I never did find out anything meaningful. All I could find was a bunch of low-level gobbledegook that may make some sense to whomever wrote it but it made absolutely no sense to me. I finally gave up and stopped worring about it. Doug

[brucek 38]

Thanks, Doug and BigShot.Bruce.