Turning on AA in FS2004

[Guest iflyskyhawks]

Like everyone else, I've working hard to tweak Flight Sim 2004 to get the best compromise between quality and performance. I've followed many of the helpful suggestions in this forum. Thanks!!With that said - and I know some of you may think I'm crazy - I seem to enjoy better performance (and great quality) by leaving AA turned ON in FS2004 (versus turning it off and using the ATI control panel to manually tweak things).My system is usually able to maintain 20 FPS with AA turned on in FS2004 and with bilinear filtering. I've gone back to my ATI control panel and put everything back to the defaults (most of which are "Application Preference")Here's my setup for those that are curious:Dell Dimension 8100P4 1.4ghz, 512mb PC800 RDRAMATI Radeon 9500 PROFS2004 with no tweaks (I recently let it rebuild my FS9.cfg file after deleting it).Anybody else experiencing a similar situation?????

[Cruachan 705]

Hi Justin,"using the ATI control panel to manually tweak things"I wonder whether you could elaborate a little on this one? My understanding is that setting an option to 'application preference' means just that. FS2004 will AA at x2, I believe. However, if you leave this unchecked in FS2k4 then you can apply whatever setting you like in the driver by tweaking in the ATI control Panel.Also why do you prefer bilinear filtering over trilinear? The latter is supposed to be superior in terms of the production of image quality? During my initial setup of the sim I went directly to trilinear without giving bilinear a work out. I'll try it now.What we must all keep in mind is that when many posters are grumbling about the hit on frame rates caused by clouds, they are in fact users of GeForce cards and that this is usually caused by the application of AA > x2. Often this fact is not mentioned, so we ATI users who are not experiencing this effect to any significant extent (with higher AA settings than x2) are left wondering what all the fuss is about!Both series of cards (nVidia and ATI) are worth owning and produce impressive results but, to my mind, the ATI Radeons produce the more refined imagery and don't suffer performance wise to the same extent as their nVidia counterparts when AA and AF are applied. That said, the GeForce3/4 cards are terrific in their own right and, providing you can accept the performance issues, you would need a compelling reason to change. Each to his own, I guess ;)In any event, Chris Willis of FSW is already providing solutions. God, what would we do without him?! See also my other post: "In defense of ATI Radeon cards..."Mike

[Cruachan 705]

Follow-up to previous post:Definition:"Trilinear filtering is a high quality bilinear filter which uses the four closest pixels in the second most suitable mip map to produce smoother transitions between mip map levels. Trilinear filtering samples eight pixels and interpolates them before rendering. Trilinear filtering always uses mip mapping. Trilinear filtering eliminates the banding effect that appears between adjacent mip map levels. Most modern 3D accelerated video cards can do trilinear filtering in hardware with no performance hit."I do note a difference between the two when you view ground textures at right angles, i.e. straight down. Trilinear is superior. However, on doing a little research I discovered that for Anisotropic (view from all angles) filtering and Trilinear filtering to work together on ATI Radeon 9700/9800 cards you do need to select the quality setting in the ATI Control Panel. Sadly this does not apply to the 8500 as apparently Anisotropic and Trilinear filtering won't work together. Mike

[Guest RichD]

You guys with the ATI cards are lucky, you can use AA without a big frame rate hit. I have a GF4 4200 and I just can't get FS9 to run smooth unless I turn AA off. I run 1600x1200 and by playing with the mipmap settings in the control panel I get a very good picture. Anyway its a great sim no matter what kind of card you have.Richard

[Cruachan 705]

"Anyway its a great sim no matter what kind of card you have"..agreed!Mike

[Guest iflyskyhawks]

>"using the ATI control panel to manually tweak things">>I wonder whether you could elaborate a little on this one? My>understanding is that setting an option to 'application>preference' means just that. FS2004 will AA at x2, I believe.>However, if you leave this unchecked in FS2k4 then you can>apply whatever setting you like in the driver by tweaking in>the ATI control Panel.The ATI Radeon 9500 PRO control panel default setup - at least on my machine - has all settings on "Application Preference". After reading the forums here, I followed the advice of many and unchecked "application preference" and manually chose the AA and filtering in the ATI control panel.Having done it both ways, however, it is starting to become obvious - on my setup - that letting FS2004 handle the AA and filtering options delivers better performance than manually selecting those settings in the ATI control panel.I'm perplexed because that is completely contrary to an almost overwhelming majority out there that reports the exact opposite!!Ah well! I'll continue to keep you informed. I'm not 100% satisfied with my setup, but I'm getting closer to getting the right settings finalized. A good thing, since I'm using FS2004 to get familiar with some of the instrument approaches in my area (I'm about 25% into my flight training for the instrument rating).I'm enjoying this sim!

[lmponte 0]

From what I have seen in my FS2004 with a GF4 Ti4200, FS2004 gave me 4x AA when turned on in the sim... But that may just be any teak I've done with RivaTuner before installing the new sim...http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/30195.jpg___________________________________________________ Lu