AA in Windows mode?

[Guest Shawn McCaig]

I have what will probably seem like a pretty stupid question to those of you who are more computer hardware literate than I am. With my present setup, in order to maintain what "I" feel is an acceptable frame rate, I run FS9 in windowed mode at 1024x768x16 resolution. I am using a Geforce FX5200 PCI card. Running AA from within FS9 causes to great of a frame rate hit, and using 2xAA in fullscreen mode causes the obvious display problems everyone has been having. Today however, I accidently left my AA setting at 2x and then restarted FS9 in windowed mode and it "appears" as though the AA is working. It's a little hard to tell at this resolution and only 2x, but it sure does appear that way. Maybe I'm just getting old and forgetful, but didn't someone say in here that if you run in windowed mode you lose the AA settings that you use from within your cards settings? Thanks for any replies. Regards, and happy flying.

[Guest]

It seems that with the new drivers, the FX series cards, at least, do support AA in windowed mode as long as you force the mode in the display properties. Setting the display properties to "application" and turning on AA within Flightsim does NOT work in windowed mode.

[Guest Shawn McCaig]

Thanks for the reply...For a minute there I was beginning to think that I was starting to see things out of desperation. BTW, knowing this, I can now run FS9 in 2xAA (in windowed mode), and still maintain a very acceptable framerate of 20fps. The only compromises that I had to make were to turn down the autogen one notch from default. (This is with AI traffic set at 75%, and doesn't include the heavy T-storm theme where sometimes frames will dip down to around 11-12). I'm now a very happy camper and am off to see how badly downloaded aircraft will affect my frames. :-)