Also, ATi has a per-application profile system just like NV.

No they don't. You have to manually activate profiles in CCC, it will not automatically activate say 8X AA and 16AF when it detects FSX.exe. Nvidia's driver does do that, this is what nHancer is a front-end for.

The statement "they an application profile system" is correct regardless of the implementation.

Thank you!You using the same settings as I am do. But Adaptive AA is not working for me. Will try new Catalyst Hotfix...regards

No they don't. You have to manually activate profiles in CCC, it will not automatically activate say 8X AA and 16AF when it detects FSX.exe. Nvidia's driver does do that, this is what nHancer is a front-end for.

Nvidia has a per application profile where you can set settings for each game in Forceware. CCC does the same but its called Catalyst A.I. and its made to help performance. If the user likes, he can set a custom profile for any application he/she prefers in CCC for things such as color, Antialiasing, Anisotropic Filtering, etc. They may be implemented differently, but Catalyst A.I. does have a per application profile, which is controlled by Catalyst A.I. The only difference is it may not be as open as Forceware. If you want to test this, try renaming any game to UT3.exe and enabling AA in CCC. It most likely will not work because that is the name of the exe for Unreal Tournament 3, which uses the Unreal Engine. The Unreal Engine doesn't support AA, and ATI Catalyst A.I. recognizes this therefore, enabling AA changes nothing. That is why some people will recommend change the names of executables to get performance gains and other things. ATiTrayTools does the same thing as NHancer BTW and it detects when a certain game is running.

I think he's right, you can assign different settings in CCC and save a new icon to the desktop. I set up several for a particular flight situation, heavy weather, heavy iron etc. All using different profiles with different AA, AF etc. You can assign them to the same exe, you just need to name each profile something different.Larry Falcone

No they don't. You have to manually activate profiles in CCC, it will not automatically activate say 8X AA and 16AF when it detects FSX.exe. Nvidia's driver does do that, this is what nHancer is a front-end for.

Ryan,I am about to replace my GTX 260 192 card and I am looking at the 5870 and GTX285. You seem like you have quite a bit of experience with both cards. Which will give you the smoother, bug free FSX experience? I know the 285 is proven but do you think the ATI card will improve with drivers over time? I hate buying a card that is about to be phased out.djt01...I would like to see some screenshots of heavy cloud cover ASL and in the clouds. The major jab I keep hearing about the ATI card is the lack of performance in heavy cloud cover. I fly in the puget sound area quite a bit so I can't have a card that doesn't like clouds. :)

The 5970 does nothing for MSFS beyond what a 5850/5870 will do, due to it's dual-GPU architecture.

We don't know that yet. I believe that the drivers are the problem rather than the hardware.

McCrash:re: MSFS multi-GPU acceleration: You're partially right that it is the software and not the hardware that is at fault. However, if it were possible to obtain better performance from MSFS through the use of multiple GPUs we would have seen it done already, yet this is not the case. Dual-GPU cards like the 5970 will never be faster than their single GPU counterparts (using the same GPU) in MSFS. It's a limitation of MSFS itself.

McCrash:re: MSFS multi-GPU acceleration: You're partially right that it is the software and not the hardware that is at fault. However, if it were possible to obtain better performance from MSFS through the use of multiple GPUs we would have seen it done already, yet this is not the case. Dual-GPU cards like the 5970 will never be faster than their single GPU counterparts (using the same GPU) in MSFS. It's a limitation of MSFS itself.

It really depends whether FSX is bottlenecked at the CPU or the GPU: If you only use one or two monitors then likely your bottleneck is at the CPU, so a multi-GPU card would not help. If you have a large number of monitors (witness the 6 miniDisplayPort HD 5870 that was just released) your bottleneck might be at the GPU (especially considering the driver poor handling of clouds) in which case a dual GPU solution would help.Cheers,- jahman.

Even a 6 display Eyefinity setup doesn't need more than 1 GPU for MSFS. The Eyefinity 6 edition 5870 is still a single GPU card. They just increased the amount of VRAM to give the GPU enough resources to handle the potential increase in resolution.

Even a 6 display Eyefinity setup doesn't need more than 1 GPU for MSFS.

So you're saying I'll get the same FPS with an HD 5870 Eyefinity with a single 1280 x 1024 monitor vs. six 1900 x 1200 monitors, clouds included?Cheers, - jahman.

Not sure how you've arrived at that conclusion as I certainly never said that. You may experience a drop in FPS, but with a 2GB Eyefinity 6 card you won't have the same drop as a comparable 1GB card when using that many displays. The GPU is already capable of accelerating that many displays at once, especially for a CPU-limited game like MSFS. The difference maker is the extra RAM.

Let me rephrase, then:1. Is it possible that with 6 large displays the GPU will be the FPS bottlneck rather than the CPU?2. If so, is it possible a dual GPU solution will provide higher FPS?Cheers,- jahman.

You shift the bottleneck more towards the GPU when you run such high resolutions, but it is still not a graphics processing bottleneck which you incur, but rather a limitation of the video RAM. Dual GPUs will not provide higher FPS for MSFS because the primary method for accelerating a 3d scene with multiple GPUs cannot be used with MSFS.

I'm sure there is a simple answer to this, but given the two GPUs are Cross-Fired, wouldn't it be "a simple task" for CCC to render alternate frames or split frames on each GPU, regardless of how dated the FSX graphics engine is?Cheers,- jahman.