How to Get Low Impact 3D Clouds...

[Guest jase439]

After a couple nights of dabbling, I discovered that the severe frame rate punishment you get from the 3D clouds is a byproduct of doing FSAA on them. I disabled FSAA in the driver and in the sim, and I've gone from running at 5 fps in full overcast with storms, to about 20.The anti-aliasing certainly helps with the scenery, but it's a performance killer when using it together with 3D clouds.J(FSAA 4x and No FSAA pix attached)

[Chris Willis 8]

Hi, Yes it been out for a while, using 2x AA is better than 4x, because the AA render all edge from each clouds.Go here for more Fs2004 tipshttp://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?...99ae3ff603c395eThanksChris Willis[link:fsw.simflight.com/FSWMenuFsSim.html]Clouds And Addons For MsFs

[Guest jase439]

Unforutunately, very bad things happen when I try 2x AA :( GeForce 4, Ti4400 w/ 44.67's. No FSAA and 4x appear to be the only viable options.Does anyone have a version of the Detonator driver that handles AA 2x correctly?

[Guest]

Here was my logic and I'm getting jaw-dropping results -1. FSAA and AF are working too hard2. FSAA, MIPMAP and AF creating a lot of shimmer etc3. 3D Clouds were crunching me down esp. in fogSo I know this isn't original, but it is stunning in results -I turned OFF ALL FSAA and AF via my (nvidia) driver console,I turned good old trilinear on internal to FS2004, and mostcritically I went to window mode after setting my resolutionat desktop to as high as it could go on my monitor (1600xsomething).When I did this, and went flying, I nearly fell off my chair -superb scenery, minimal shimmer, totally OK performance in complex 3D cloud/fog situations with all settings maxed outhope something here works for you too - I don't pretend to be an expert, and this is the 1000th configuration I've triedin the last 24 hours to get good cloud performance - it reallyworks on my system (2.4MH, FX5900, 512MB)I realise my recent FX5900 may be helping, but the logic ofraising resolution and dumping expensive filtering seems to create great results heregood flying,Dominic

[Guest jase439]

Yeah, I tried going to 1600x1200x32 last night instead (leaving FSAA completely off) and I got jaw-dropping results. I was still hitting 25-30 fps solid - even in overcast.